My Advice

I thought I would set up a separate page for where I pass on my own thoughts and advice rather than clogging up my results blog pages. So the posts are here:

1. Creating Ratings
2. My Lays

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1: CREATING RATINGS

I've been asked how one sets about creating ratings. Well, it could niot be easier to create ratings...getting them acurate is the hard part!

So, creating ratings...here's an example. The Racing Post has a table for each runner in a race called POSTDATA. Unfortunately, it's part of their paid service, but it's only a few quid a week. That table consists of the following categories of data:

Trainer Form - Distance - Going - Course - Draw - Ability - Recent Form

For each horse for each category the good people at Racing Post apply one of the following symbols:

-  ? X 1 Tick 2 Ticks 3 Ticks

So a dash means there is no data, a ? means there is no reliable data or the horse is not proven, an X means the horse is "bad" at that category or has not performed in the past. The ticks are positives with 3 ticks being the most it can get.

Suppose, instead of those symbols you substitute a value; say X = -1, - and ? = 0, the ticks are 1,2,3. Adding up all the values would give a rating for each horse,

So, say there is a race, three horses and it looks like this:

 

And you substitute the Symbols for Values:

One step further...if you thiink that the betting market deserves some respect, you could, for example, deduct the price from the score:

Taking this another step further, say you rate Going as a bigger factor than Trainer Form, so instead of -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, you could make them -5, 0, 2, 4, 7.

Of course, this is a complete fabrication, but my money would be on the second favourite, or laying the fave :)

And there you have it.


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2: MY LAYS

Thanks for the tweets and emails while I was away. While I have replied to each of you it's probably worth me posting on here anyway. I get asked two main questions...that of staking and how do I pick my lays.

Staking is a moot point and something I will cover in more detail some other time.

How do I pick my lays? Well, watch any pundit on TV and they will, quite often, bang on about the "most important factor in racing". Some say the most important factor is going, some say distance, others class, others weight, etc. etc.

In truth its all of these...and more, to varying degrees...but that is my opinion. But, in my humble opinion, over the past 10 years or so, I have devised a system for "rating" horses by simply applying a score to a number of factors for each race such as distance, going, weight, class, jockey, trainer, ability, form, headgear, etc. I then just add up the numbers and get an idea of the chances of each horse in the race. Oh, and I only do handicap races.

All of this information is available online the night before racing. So I check out the tissue favourite and then see if there are a fair number of other horses with a similar or better chance of winning based on my ratings.

Then I load up a betting bot with my selections and go off to do something else.

That's it, in a nutshell.

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