play~ & poly~ (poly silent on first round of targets)

I am not sure what is happening here. I have play~ inside a poly~ and it *almost* works correctly.

1. I set the playback speed.
2. I set the buffer and bang info~ for the duration
3. set the line for playback (forwards or back wards)
4. pack than in a line
5. set target number with counter

and send that all into the poly via (target $1, $2, $3, $4)

should work right?

I have the counter and poly set to 4 (so i can debug quicker will increase later).

but the first four events are silent.
Then it works fine.

If i set the counter to 16 and the poly to 16. Then the first 16 instances are
silent and then it works fine.

I tried using thispoly~ in the poly, i tried it without.
i tried prepend note & i tried using mute 0, 1 & mute 1, 0
i tried setting target manually
i tried putting thispoly~ on a sig

First round of events are silence. Then it works as expected.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I been banging my head against this all week and have tried everything i can think of. I am desperate to get this going so i can get on to the next thing, but i just do not see what is wrong with this patch.