When racing resumes there will be a focus, understandably, on two-year-olds, first season sires, trainers who perform well with horses off a layoff, and of course the Classic generation. Plenty of what happens in those spaces will be less predictable than normal due to the coronavirus-enforced later start. This article eschews those staples of the current content vista in favour of another hardy perennial, a horses to follow list.
Back yon - about eight or nine years ago, I think - I worked with a great guy called David Peat, who was mad about horse profiles. He had written books on the subject, he had a subscription service dedicated to the subject, and he and I ended up co-producing a product/service around the idea.
The concept was, and still is, simple: where everyone else is looking at what's new during spring time, horse profiling requires a body of work to exist in the form book already. Its currency is exposed horses, those who have run scores of times and have shown an affinity for a specific set of circumstances.
As well as highlighting five such horses which might pay their way in 2020, I'll also attempt to show how easy it is to create these for yourself. There are scores of these horses to find and, as an extra bonus, I'll include some further races - chock full of profile types - that I've yet to research: perhaps some of the more community-spirited readers will take up my challenge to add a comment with their findings for a given horse off the list. Right, let's get to it...
Dapper Man
Age: 6 Trainer: Roger Fell Career record: 10/52 Turf Record: 9/40 Turf Handicap Record: 9/37 Highest winning OR: 80 Current OR: 82 Win Profile:
10/10 6-12 runners
10/10 April to July
9/10 5f (all of last nine)
9/10 blinkers (other win in cheekpieces, 0/24 no headgear)
8/10 Good to Firm
Led in all of last six wins (3 of remaining 4 when racing prominently)
Notes
A great example to begin with, Dapper Man is a five furlong speedball. He likes to get out and stay out, and he's hard to catch when he does. Trainer Roger Fell has managed the gelding's form cycles brilliantly in the last two seasons: in 2018, Dapper Man won five times - beginning off a mark of 60 before achieving a high of 86 (top winning rating was 76); and in 2019, he won four times on the spin from marks between 72 and 80.
What is noteworthy is that in between those early summer winning sprees, Fell had got Dapper Man's mark back down from 86 to 72. After his final win last year, he was rated 89 and is now on 82. I suspect his trainer will want a few more pounds back before striking again, so expect to see the blinkers left off and a couple more runs on slower ground if he can. Once this lad gets back to around 75 he'll be dangerous.
Combining optimal conditions - handicaps of 12 or fewer runners, April to July, 5f, good to firm, and blinkers - Dapper Man is 7 from 10, 2 further places, and +28.41 at starting price. I'd be wary of the April to July element this term given the break in racing, but the other components look important.
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Waarif
Age: 7 Trainer: David O'Meara Career record: 8/41 Turf Record: 7/32 Turf Handicap Record: 7/30 Highest winning OR: 96 Current OR: 97 Win Profile:
8/8 Class 2-4
8/8 turning tracks (0/9 on straight tracks, though has run well)
7/8 1 mile
6/8 Good or Good to Firm (has also won on polytrack and heavy)
Last five wins off rating between 92 and 96
Notes:
Bought from Ireland after a Dundalk maiden win in October 2016, it was a year before Waarif made his debut for David O'Meara and not until June 2018 - 13 starts later - that he got off the mark for his new trainer. It was worth the wait, however, as victory came in the Carlisle Bell, a valuable handicap at the Cumbrian track. That seemingly opened the floodgates as he won a further three of his next five starts to end 2018 with four victories and a mark of 100.
2019 began in the Lincoln off that lofty perch but it wasn't until he'd dropped to 92 that he scored again, on his fifth run of the season. That was a steadily run ten furlong contest which probably rode more like a mile, and was his only non-mile victory. Further scores from marks of 96 and 95 followed. Although it may be nothing more than coincidence, Waarif has yet to win for O'Meara prior to his fifth start of the season.
5/8 Good to Soft (also won once each on on Good, Soft, and Good to Firm)
4/8 Cheekpieces (plus 2 further places)
Notes:
It's difficult to know whether this steadily progressive handicapper needs to drop a little in the weights. The gelding ran arguably his best race when second in a decent Ayr handicap last September, his final start of 2019. That moved him to a perch six pounds north of his highest winning mark but he was competitive off 88 that day.
In any case, Redarna has won second or third time off a layoff the past three seasons so it could be that his mark will drop at least a pound for his 2020 bow.
Seven furlongs ideally, or a mile, on the soft side of good; and both Ayr and Carlisle have been happy hunting grounds. I'm not convinced that cheekpieces are necessary though he's certainly run well in them (and previously without them).
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De Vegas Kid
Age: 6 Trainer: Tony Carroll Career record: 8/39 Turf Record: 7/24 Turf Handicap Record: 7/19 Highest winning OR: 79 Current OR: 82 Win Profile:
7/7 turf wins on Good or Good to Firm (also won on Wolverhampton's tapeta track)
5/7 turf wins when apprentice ridden
5/7 turf wins on left-handed tracks (also won left-handed at Wolverhampton)
4 of last 5 wins at Brighton (overall Brighton record: 4/7)
3/6 off 60+ day layoff
Notes:
Racehorses are funny creatures. Take De Vegas Kid: he was 0 from 21 going into a very modest seven furlong handicap in February 2018 off a basement mark of 51. Two years and eight wins later and he's now rated in the low 80's!
That confidence-boosting victory at Wolverhampton was his only all-weather win. Since then he's won seven times on the turf, including four at Brighton. There might be something about seaside air for De Vegas Kid, as he's also won at Goodwood and Yarmouth. His hold up style seems ideally suited to apprentices, who don't need to do much until the last part of a race, and he does seem especially effective on left-handed tracks (though the Brighton factor heavily influences that angle).
Four runs on the all-weather since his last Brighton triumph have reduced his rating from 85 to 82 but he may need to drop a few more before he's primed again. Sussex in late summer may again be a happy hunting ground.
10/11 Good or Good to Firm ground (also won on Newcastle's tapeta)
9/11 5f
9/11 ridden by PJ McDonald, Martin Dwyer or Danny Tudhope
6/11 Class 4
5/11 Musselburgh
Notes:
A slightly more left field entry to close, Royal Brave won none of his eleven starts last year and was only sixth of eight on his 2020 debut in early March. If that's the bad news, the good news is that he's now rated a stone below his last winning mark. Moreover, he has run almost exclusively on either all-weather (1/15 lifetime) or softer than good (0/10 lifetime) in that barren spell.
In fact, it is arguable that he only got his conditions twice last season, both at Musselburgh: in the Scottish Sprint Cup, where he was beaten six lengths off a mark of 91; and in a small field Class 3 handicap where he was doing his best work at the finish.
All of his last six wins have come from a rating higher than his current figure which makes Royal Brave dangerously well-handicapped when he gets fast ground and a bit of pace to run at over Musselburgh's five furlong piste.
And those are my five for the tracker.
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How to Find Profile Horses
It's an inexact science but in general terms what I am looking for are horses with a good amount of form to dissect, and which have shown a ready preference for a certain setup. All horses have an ability ceiling and tend to run in 'form cycles' up to that ceiling, then back down the weights, then up again. Spotting these cycles isn't difficult if you're looking for them; it's impossible if you're not!
Here's how to find profile horses...
Step 1: Get a list of possibles
There are a few ways to do this. One is to use Query Tool, though caution is advised because the 'sort by horse' function is likely to crash your browser as it tries to format a table with many thousand rows in it. To get around this:
- Select 'Last 2 Years'
- Select 'UK' (or 'Ireland' but not both)
- Select 'Flat Turf' (or whichever race code you want to investigate)
- Select age '5 to 7' (i.e. a horse age range appropriate for exposed form in your chosen discipline)
- Select 'Handicap' (or whatever, handicaps are best for this type of profiling)
That has brought back 14,272 qualifiers which is probably still too many.
We can whittle that down by choosing a distance range. Let's try 5f to 6f.
My sample is now 4,717 which is workable. So I'll be profiling sprint handicappers here, but I could have chosen seven-furlong specialists, milers, stayers or whatever.
Next I'll click the 'group by' radio button against 'Horse', and then sort by 'Wins'.
And bingo, I have a list of horses to potentially profile:
A second way is to start with a big field race you know will have been contested by numerous exposed handicappers. The Scottish Sprint Cup is a good example. (If you can't find a race, you can again use QT, by choosing e.g. 16+ runners, Class 3 or above, handicap).
Here is the result of the Scottish Sprint Cup with an instant list of 16 horses to dig into:
Step 2: Shortlist Horses to Profile
We now have a list of horses with which to work, but not all of them will have a consistent profile; and not all of them will have won enough races to demonstrate a profile. I look for at least half a dozen wins in a horse's career from which to try to discern patterns. It hopefully goes without saying that we're dealing with very small sample sizes here and all sorts of overlapping factors, so atom-splitters need not apply: this is broad brush stuff, and we will still need to apply judgement to our profile horses when they're entered in the future.
Let's have a look at Major Valentine and Highly Sprung, the top pair on our QT list.
Major Valentine has a few clear patterns, for example, 12 of his 14 career wins have been when ridden by apprentice jockeys. But he has a common problem when the most recent period has been used for search purposes: he is probably too high in the handicap. Having started 2019 off a mark of 64 he went on to win five races for jockey Kate Leahy and trainer John O'Shea. In his final 2019 start, he raced off a rating of 92. We could add Major Valentine to a tracker with his preferences appended, but the likelihood is he'll find winning difficult this year until he's dropped back down the weights.
A good way around this is to use a search period of, say, 2017 and 2018 (i.e. excluding the most recent year). That will bring back a group of multiple winners which may or may not have come down the handicap since their winning spree. From my five to follow list above, Royal Brave was found in this way.
Back to Highly Sprung, a son of Zebedee (of course) who is now seven. Looking at his Full Form page allows us to review his overall form by various subsets. The first thing to immediately stand out is that he is 0 from 12 on all-weather versus a very solid 10 from 50 on turf.
Checking the WINS filter allows us to see only the ten races Highly Sprung won, and to look for commonalities therein:
We can see he won five times for Mark Johnston before moving to Les Eyre who has also eked a quintet of victories from the horse. What else can we see?
All ten wins were over six furlongs. Eight of the ten were on good to firm ground, though not his most recent pair. Having won off as high as 83 (see the OR column) for Mark Johnston, he is now rated 81; that's a feasible mark but not a bargain: he might need to drop a few more.
Seven of his ten wins have been for either Joe Fanning or Silvestre de Sousa, and both jockeys have won on him for both of the horse's trainers. Six of his ten wins have come at Pontefract, from 15 starts at the track.
And as easily as that we now have a profile for Highly Sprung:
- 6f (he's 0/18, just three places, at other trips)
- ideally Good to Firm ground (though recent wins mean this is not a deal breaker)
- Extra point if racing at Ponte
- Extra point if ridden by Joe F or SdS
Step 3: Add to Tracker
Add your horse and all relevant notes to your Tracker. Users of Geegeez Gold tracker get an email the day before racing to alert them of the next day's runners (horses, trainers, jockeys, sires), so you should never miss a winner.
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A challenge?
It's lockdown, there is still no racing, and we all have a bit of time on our hands. So what about a challenge? I'd like you to share your profile horses in the comments below. Add a few details like the ones above - I've put an example in the comments below for you to use as a template - for a horse you've profiled.
Wouldn't it be awesome if collectively we could pull together a list of 20 or more horses and their optimal conditions? Hint: do try a different race distance and/or code. Below are links to the results of some of the big field handicaps at various distances from last summer, which might help:
00mattbisognohttps://devplatform.ggzssd.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/geegeez_banner_new_300x100.pngmattbisogno2020-04-28 13:52:392020-04-28 13:52:39Form Profiling: Five to Follow in 2020
In the first half of this two-part mini-course we looked at the basics of multi-race bets, as well as the key area of staking. In this concluding part the focus will be on strategy and tactics: what to consider when framing your bets, and how to manage your position once your tickets are 'live'.
You'll also find a video tutorial on my Ticket Builder, as well as a link to access it.
When to play: Value Considerations
Any day is a good day to play a multi-race bet from a fun perspective; bets such as the placepot or Win 6 promise to keep a player engaged in a race meeting for as many as six races, and for a smallish stake.
Everyday tote placepot pools have around £50,000 to £60,000 in liquidity, but they also have their share of sharp players. Because of the nature of multi-race place pools - where players typically have two, three or four chances to get a horse into the frame - a big dividend probably requires something unexpected (in market terms) to occur in more than one race.
So, in order to play placepots semi-seriously, I believe a player must have a contrarian view in at least two of the six races, ideally more. Using the previously discussed ABCX approach, it is possible not to over-stake or poorly stake a bet which recognises the likelihood of most races being 'chalky' (i.e. the fancied horses making the frame) while still allowing for a less anticipated result which can make the bet.
Here is an example of a Place 6 (Colossus Bets equivalent of the placepot) where the first race set things up. It was a small pot, a feature of much of my betting as it allows for the prospect of 'scooping the pool', that is, winning the lot.
The opening race on this Yarmouth card was a low grade 0-60 handicap with a couple of handicap debutants and the market heavily skewed towards a single runner. The unexposed three-year-old Herringswell won, at 10/1 on his first start in a handicap. He'd been third last time out over course and distance, beaten half a length, so was hardly impossible to find.
As you can see from the green bars bottom right in the image, this result lopped the remaining tickets from nearly 3,000 to little more than 250.
The next three legs all saw top of the market horses (favourite or second-favourite) placed, but in leg five - where I'd gone four horses deep - the two outsiders of six placed. That said, Merhoob - my placed pick - was only 5/1, behind 3/1 joint-favourites, a 7/2 and a 9/2 shot.
Less than ten units went forward to the final leg, in which the third-, fourth- and joint-fifth-ranked horses in the market filled the places.
That left just 3.54 units to share the payout, of which this syndicate ticket - which was a caveman play, incidentally - comprised all of them! We shared out over three thousand pounds. Again, I need to make the point that the winning odds - return vs stake - was 'only' 9/1.
Is SP or the exchange a better bet?
Before placing a multi-race bet - or indeed any pool bet - we need to consider whether the return might be greater via another market medium. Specifically, will the SP (especially if Best Odds Guaranteed can be leveraged) or exchange accumulator pay more?
We obviously cannot know the answer to this in advance but, generally, when playing win pools it is prudent to stay close to the top of the market. As an example, if a 20/1 shot wins any race in the sequence I will almost certainly not have that runner selected. The reason is that, when multiplying the odds of the other five winners in a six-leg bet by 21 (20/1), it is somewhere between quite and very likely that the pool dividend will pay less than an SP or exchange accumulator bet on the same six races.
The exception to this rule is when there is a large rollover or a highly liquid pool, such as the American pool for the Breeders' Cup Pick 6, or indeed many of their Pick 4/5/6 pools, which are often guaranteed to $500,000 and more.
For your average Redcar jackpot, however, we need to stay close to the head of the market, or bet another way, or pass the opportunity.
In the example below (5.00 to 7.30 races), there was a rollover and the jackpot pool swelled to £30,000 for a Wolverhampton evening card. The SP accumulator paid £19,305 compared to a tote jackpot dividend of £20,153.20. But the Betfair SP accumulator (at 2% commission, which you should all be getting - see this link) paid £33,798. And the biggest priced winner in this sequence was 8/1 !
The Betting Market
Market Rank vs Market Price
One of the features of multi-race pools, more so than single race win markets, is the heavy domination of the top of the market. This is largely a function of poor staking and/or poor bankroll management and/or insufficient bankroll, whereby players who take one or two per leg (see part 1) rarely go beyond the third or fourth in the betting lists.
Moreover, when they do, it's typically a 'Hail Mary' pick at big odds staked exactly the same as a short-priced runner. Clearly, this is heavily sub-optimal; and it is precisely what gives smarter punters their edge. Those longshots belong on a C ticket or in the bin, generally.
A good example of this was leg five in the above Yarmouth ticket. 83% of remaining units went out there even though a 5/1 shot was placed; he was 5/1 fifth-favourite of six, and it was his market rank rather than his odds which blew most remaining ticket holders out of the pool.
Don't deviate too far from the market
The market is generally right, or at least not far wrong. It is an excellent indicator of a horse's chance, so much so that there is strong linearity between the two. This chart shows win strike rate by odds. Ignoring the price of 18/5, which has very little data and is the big outlier, this chart very well illustrates the robust relationship between price and win chance.
And this time by market rank, 1 being favourite, 12 being the twelfth in odds rank:
In Britain in the last five years, the favourite has won a third of all races, the favourite and second-favourite have collectively won a bit more than half of all races, and the first three in the betting have won two-thirds of all races.
Thus, in a random sample of six races, we might expect four of them - two-thirds - to be won by the first three in the betting. The further implication is that we may need to be looking further along the lists for a couple of the legs in a six-leg wager.
What does this mean in practice? It means that, across A's, B's and - usually in multi-race win pools only - C's, you should have reasonable coverage of the top of the market; and, somewhere in the race sequence, you should be risking a few longer priced horses - but usually in addition to, not at the expense of, the top of the market.
Steamers and Drifters
This section should come with a wealth warning: drifters DO win!
In case you're not familiar with the terms, a 'steamer' is a horse being backed - usually showing with a blue background on odds comparison sites, while a 'drifter' is a horse which is weak in the market, usually with a pink background on odds checker sites.
As a general principle, in races where form is fairly well established, I will note the market but follow my own form study. The exception is in bigger field handicaps where horses priced between 8/1 and 16/1 (approximately, not hard and fast) have taken notable support.
I tend to look at the markets in the morning, and then again an hour or so before the first race, which is the time when I'm starting to frame my bets.
In the example above, where the second favourite is weak and the third favourite is strong (favourite not shown), assuming I could see a reason for this in their form, I would quite likely put both runners on B. If I couldn't understand the weakness of the 'pink' runner, I'd probably play it on A.
There is quite a bit of 'feel' associated with this. Players need to get to know trainers and owners, too. For example, horses owned by J P McManus are often put in at defensive prices: odds which reflect the fact they might become subject to a gamble rather than which indicate the horse's true form chance.
Horses owned by large or wealthy syndicates - for instance, Elite Racing Club, Owners Group, or Highclere Thoroughbreds - are often overbet; consideration of the support for such runners needs to approached mindful of who might be backing it.
Equally, horses doing something notably different - first time in a handicap, coming back off a layoff, stepping up/down markedly in trip, etc - merit at least a second glance. Does the trainer have 'previous' in such a scenario? Is the horse bred for this extra distance? And so on. Geegeez reports have plenty of assistance in this regard, and the inline snippets in the card are instructive.
Using Unnamed Favourite
This is a great tactic and heavily under-utilised. It can be deployed in a number of different scenarios, of which these are just a couple.
Doubling up on A
Plenty of races, especially non-handicaps, have a very short-priced favourite and an obvious second-choice. Sometimes these races can be 10/1+ bar the front two. Depending on how the rest of your ticket looks - mainly, in how many other races you've got B and/or C picks - and how much bankroll you have, it can be a smarter play to double the favourite on A, rather than place the jolly on A and the 'second in' on B.
In this example, the favourite was Karl Der Grosse. He was 8/15 favourite, with Silver Star 4/1, Sweet Flight 5/1 and it was 16/1 and bigger the rest.
This was the first leg of a big rollover pool and I wanted the best chance of managing a profitable situation in the latter part of the sequence. So, rather than play the favourite as a banker, or put Silver Star on a B (or C) ticket, I went three deep on A, covering Karl twice (once with his racecard number and once as 'Favourite', unnamed favourite) and Silver Star once.
As can be seen, Karl Der Grosse won, which doubled the number of units the syndicate had running on to all subsequent legs. It cost three times as much as banking on the favourite, for two-thirds of the running-on equity (2/3 winning picks rather than 1/1 if just selecting Karl), but was the right play in the circumstances.
Extra pick on B (or C)
A tactic I sometimes use - and, to be brutally honest, I'm not certain that the maths support it - is to play unnamed favourite on B or C. I do this in one of two situations, as follows:
Weaker favourite that I like
Let's say the favourite is around 2/1 or 5/2. Mathematically, and assuming a) the market is correct and b) they bet to a 100% overround [they don't but go with it!], this horse has a circa 30% (28.57% to 33.33% if you like) chance of winning. If I think he's value - that is, he should be a little shorter - without necessarily feeling he's a very likely winner a la Karl Der Grosse above, I can play his racecard number on A and 'unnamed favourite' on B along with (an)other contender(s).
Inscrutable handicap with multiple favourite contenders
I will quite often include FAV when I go five, six or seven deep in an impossible-looking handicap: it's a degree of insurance against wide coverage being scuppered by a winning jolly. What I really want is for one of my longer-priced picks - more correctly, one of the least-covered horses in the pool - to win. But if the horse that the market ultimately sent off shortest wins, I will have all tickets containing that horse's racecard number as well as any ticket containing FAV for that race.
There were two races where I played variations of this tactic in an example I published in Part 1 of this mini-course, replicated below.
You can see the use of FAV in races 3 and 4. In race 3, I'd nominated the expected favourite on A, but I wanted to amplify him a little so added FAV to B; and in race 4, where I had far less certainty about which horse would be sent off favourite, I didn't want to lose my C investment because the jolly prevailed.
As it turned out, the favourite won race 3 and a C horse - not the favourite - won race 4.
Syndicates, Consolations and Cash Out
If you play at Colossus Bets, they have three features which make varying degrees of appeal.
Syndicates
The ability to create a syndicate ticket means one's bankroll goes further because, essentially, we are sharing the financial outlay - as well, of course, as any return - with other people. Alongside my own bets, I create a lot of syndicates on Colossus and we've had some fantastic paydays, the pick of which is shown towards the bottom of this post.
I started out taking only 10% of my syndicate tickets, the minimum a 'captain' must take, but these days I am usually invested for 50%, the maximum allowed. It is my understanding, and great hope, that the new team at tote are working on similar functionality. It will be a game changer for them in terms of liquidity, I believe.
Cash Out
Many of you will be familiar with the concept of 'cash out', which apparently was first offered by Colossus. Regardless, the simple maths are that it rarely makes financial sense to cash out, or even partially cash out, a ticket if there are other 'insurance' options available. I'll talk about those in the Insurance section.
I have very occasionally cashed out my stake on a ticket where there isn't really a smart or cost-effective way to hedge the bet, but I know I'm getting a rum deal when I do.
Consolations
Conso's are a curate's egg: good in places. On the up side, players in a six-leg win pool will receive a dividend for getting five out of six, and even four out of six. These can often cover the cost of what, in tote jackpot terms, would be a losing bet. They are good for cashflow and confidence, but...
The downside is that half of the ticket cost goes into the consolation pool, which means the base bet is twice as expensive as if there was no consolation pool.
On balance, I like the added aggression I feel I can play win pools with as a result of having that safety net. Even if I get the first race wrong, I've still got a chance of making a small profit, getting my money back, or getting something back. That keeps players in the game and it's a lot better for the soul than getting short-headed in the only race you didn't have!
It always needs bearing in mind that one needs to halve the dividend for a £2 stake when comparing with a £1 accumulator (naturally).
Insurance
Insurance is a term for managing a position between the start and end of a multi-race bet in order to mitigate for the chance of a losing outcome. In other words, it's a way of covering more eventualities than you have on your ticket, albeit at fractionally greater expense. As I've said, it is generally better to control the level of insurance you take rather than be dictated to by the cash out value.
There are a good number of insurance options, some of which are below:
Place lay
When betting a multi-race place pool, banking on the shortest priced horse in the sequence is normally a good strategy - unless you plain don't like it. Even then, it makes sense to try to overcome any prejudices you might have associated with the horse or its connections. Assuming you have banked on that runner to make the frame, you can then lay it for a place on an exchange.
An even money favourite would be around 1.2 (give or take) to lay on Betfair. If your placepot stake is £50, you can insure the bet for £10 or so. That makes your overall commitment £60 and needs to be factored into your P&L. I will usually place lay for less than my stake: if I think the horse is very likely to get placed I don't want to spend what amounts to 20% of the ticket price buying insurance on one leg. But at the same time, I don't want to lose my entire stake. So I might place lay to get half my money back for example.
Last leg options
If you've been smart and/or lucky enough to get to the final leg, you will have some options. Depending on the type of race, and whether it's a win or place pool, the first option is to lay or place lay your pick. I would do that if I was on a short-priced runner as a banker.
Exacta
If you have, for instance, the top three in the betting in a six runner race, you can place exacta bets on the remaining trio. As with the actual multi-race bet itself, we should not be placing a combination exacta (three picks equals six bets), as that is not a smart way to stake. Supposing the unsupported runners were 6/1, 8/1 and 20/1, we might legitimately place a reverse exacta to the same stake on the first two; but our stake should be smaller on each of the shorter pair beating the outsider, and smaller still on the outsider beating either of the other two. We're not looking for a 'lucky' payoff, we're just covering our existing bet.
Calculating the insurance stake
To calculate how much insurance to take, work out the worst possible outcome in terms of a winning ticket.
Placepot / Place pool
That involves adding the selection a player has with the most amount of pool tickets on it, alongside in a place pool the other best-supported runners up to the number of places available, as well as the unnamed favourite.
Adding the number of tickets on each of those together and dividing by the net pool (see Part 1 for gross and net) will produce the 'worst case dividend'. This is the figure, multiplied by the number of lines you have, against which you should hedge/insure.
In this placepot example, the net pool is 73% of the gross pool.
Let's say we have horses 1, 2 and 4 in this six horse race and we currently have 80p lines running on to each of them.
Our worst winning result - two places in a six-horse race - would be:
46F (the two horses with most units remaining, plus unnamed favourite)
= 83 + 31 +12.5 = 126.5 winning units
The worst winning dividend would then be:
41062.5/126.5 = £324.60
of which we would have 80p for our one placed horse, #4.
We staked £100.
So our worst case dividend would be £259.68 in this example. That number, less our £100 stake, is what we would use to work out how much to hedge/insure for. Or we could just insure for our £100 stake.
Win pool
In a win pool, it often doesn't make sense to lay selected runners, mainly due to the cash needed. In that case, it is better to back unsupported runners assuming there aren't hordes of them!
Using our example race from above, where we have coverage of horses 1, 2, and 4, let's say the net win pool is £100,000 and we have those same 80p lines running into the final leg, from a stake of £100.
The worst case winning (for us) dividend is if the favourite, #4, wins. That leaves 95.5 units and a dividend of
100,000 / 95.5 = £1,047.12
We'd have 0.8 x £1,047.12 = £837.70 representing a profit of £737.70 (less £100 stake).
Suppose the Betfair odds on the other runners are 3 - 22.0, 5 - 150.0, 6 - 7.4
So we might back
#6 for £80 @ 7.4 returns £592 (commission to deduct also)
#3 for £20 @ 22.0 returns £440 (ditto)
#5 for £2.50 @ 150.0 returns £375 (ditto)
We are now guaranteed at least £837.70 back if one of our three Win 6 selections wins; and a sliding scale, based on likelihood, of returns if one of our insurance bets wins.
If the 150.0 outsider won, it would be a tough break, but at least we'd collect
£375 - £100 (losing insurance bets) - £100 Win 6 stake = £175 profit. On a 'losing' bet.
A final word on insurance
I am absolutely confident that I've made the art of hedging/insurance sound infinitely more complex in the above than it actually is. The key is to track your position and to know roughly where you are in terms of potential payout and how much of that you're booked for. Pretty much all pool operators have 'will pay' pages on their website to show how much is running on to the next leg, and on which horses.
Often we'll be in a losing position and insurance doesn't really make sense. Occasionally we'll be in a losing position and insurance will limit losses.
You'll soon get the hang of working out where you are but only if you get into the habit of tracking the remaining units in the pool.
Be Brave, There's Always Tomorrow
Multi-race bets, especially win varietals, are not for the faint-hearted. They can involve excruciating close calls where the difference between a nose victory or defeat runs to thousands of pounds. The flip side of that is obvious: they can involve halcyon close calls when the verdict goes your way for a vast sum. That's exciting!
The consolations offered by Colossus, albeit at the expense of a £2 ticket, are good value in terms of sanity, and they allow a player to display the one attribute above all others that is required to win in the multi-race jungle: bravery.
Over-staking is an affliction suffered by most placepot / win sequence punters: the fear of not 'having it' overrides the rationality of not diluting the value of the bet. As well as over-staking there is bad staking - placing the same faith in every pick on a ticket regardless of whether it's 4/6 or 14/1.
If you can learn to overcome those two near-ubiquitous staking errors, you have a far better than average chance of catching big fish in these pools.
Being brave also means acknowledging that, no matter how juicy the rollover or how tempting the guarantee today, there is always tomorrow.
A VERY Good Day
In closing, I want to share a ticket from what was a very good day. It was a syndicate play so plenty of others shared in this whopper of a dividend, which brought together a number of factors discussed in this second part. They include ABCX - this is the winning ticket, there were a bunch of losing/ consolation tickets as well; doubling the favourite; and insuring my personal position in the last leg (not shown here, but amounted to about £150).
Appendix: The Ticket Builder
Throughout this two-part series, I've referred to ABCX methodology, and to a mechanical means of computing the part-permutations. The ticket builder, which is a little 'rough and ready' but is free for all to use, can be accessed here. Please do watch the video below before trying to use it!
There are lots of ways to bet on horses. Win, place and each way are just the beginning: such bets involve a reliance on one horse winning or nearly winning, the outcome of which provides players with a (usually) known return.
I've long mixed up my 'singles' betting with more elaborate plays. Known as exotics in the States, such wagers tend to involve predicting a sequence of events: either the first two (or three or four) home in a race, or the winner (or a placed horse) in each of a number of consecutive races.
Incidentally, although this article will not explicitly cover bets such as fourfolds and accumulators with traditional fixed odds bookmakers, the principles can be applied and, where readers are able, best odds guarantees leveraged.
In this previous post - written ten years ago now - I outlined how to play, and win, the tote placepot. The principles outlined in that post remain true now and, of course, they extend to Colossus Bets place pools, Irish Tote placepots and indeed any multi-race place pool bet. Let's recap.
What are pool bets, and why are they of interest?
Pool bets involve all players' stakes being invested into a pot, from which winning players are paid a dividend after the pool owners have taken their commission. That means the objective is not only to find 'the right answer' but also for that correct answer to be less obvious than most players expect. It generally is.
Multi-race pool bets can offer an interest throughout the afternoon for a single ticket; and, if a few fancied runners under-perform, they can pay handsomely in relation to fixed odds equivalent wagers.
Let's consider an example of such a bet, in this case a placepot from Thursday's card at the 2020 Cheltenham Festival. The gross pool - that is, the total bet into the pool - was £823,150.20. After takeout, the pool operator's advertised commission from which all costs are paid, of 27% the net pool was £600,881.40.
That pot would be divided between the number of remaining - and therefore winning - tickets after leg six, with the dividend declared to a £1 stake. Players can bet in multiples from 5p upwards.
In the first race that day, the favourite, Faugheen, ran third, with 4/1 Samcro winning. 361,390.13 units went forward to leg two.
In the second race, all four placed horses were towards the top of the market, including the unnamed favourite. 146,064.28 units went to leg three.
The third race, the Ryanair Chase, saw 2/1 second favourite Min beat 16/1 Saint Calvados with the 7/4 favourite in third. Most of the remaining pool money prior to the race, 114,468.48 units' worth of it, went forward to leg four, the Stayers' Hurdle.
In that fourth race, around 83,000 units (nearly three-quarters of the remaining pool) were invested in Paisley Park, who ran a clunker and was unplaced. This race was the kingmaker on the day, just 2,198.41 units (less than 2% of the running-on total) successfully predicting any of 50/1 Lisnagar Oscar, 20/1 Ronald Pump, or 33/1 Bacardys.
As the warm favourite won leg five, 854.56 units contested the final leg, the Mares' Novices' Hurdle. Here, the very well-backed second choice of the market, Concertista, beat stable mate and 9/1 chance Dolcita, with a 100/1 shot back in third.
From a total of 823,150 tickets, and a net pool of 600,881.40, there were just 235.01 left standing after the six races. Thus the dividend paid
600,881.4 / 235.01 = £2,556.83
Because of something called 'breakage', see TIF's explanation here if you're interested, the dividend is rounded down to the nearest 10p, meaning every winning £1 ticket was worth £2,556.80. A 5p winning line would be worth 5% of that amount, or £127.84.
Let's talk about the takeout
The commission a pool operator levies for hosting the pool is usually referred to as the 'takeout'. In multi-race bets, some people consider that the takeout - 27% in the example above - is too high. But it needs to be considered in the context of the number of legs in the bet, and the perceived difficulty of landing the bet. The first part is more easily quantified.
For example, if the place pool for a single race has a 20% deduction - which it currently does in UK (ouch!) - then a six race accumulator in the place pools would result in 73.8% of stakes being 'taken out'. Double, triple and even sextuple ouch!
The actual per leg takeout on the tote placepot is around 5.1%, or 0.051, compounded six times; which leaves a 'live stake' of [1.00 - 0.051=] 0.9496 which equals 0.73 (1.00-0.73 = 0.27, 27% takeout).
Takeout takeaway: You don't need to understand the maths, you just need to know that there is relative value in the placepot compared with single leg win or place pool bets.
How can this be value?
Pool bets are another market, along with fixed odds and exchanges, framed around the same product, horse racing. Thus, they do not always offer the best value.
If you want to back the favourite, doing it on the tote is probably not the best option (though UK tote are currently offering an SP guarantee match, which locks in some insurance for the majority of times when the tote dividend on a winning favourite will pay less than SP). Still, you'll generally get better value on an exchange than either the tote or a fixed odds bookmaker can offer.
But if you want to bet a longer-priced horse, it will normally be the case that exchanges or the tote offer better value than fixed odds bookies.
And if you want to play a sequence of win or place bets - let's call them a placepot or Win 6 - you may get better value with a pool operator.
If you only like fancied runners in the sequence, you will have no edge in a pool and are better off betting either a fixed odds multiple or parlaying your winnings in exchange markets.
But if you have an eye for an interesting outsider - and, as a Gold subscriber, you are farbetter placed to see such horses than the vast majority of bettors - then multi-race sequences are for you!
Remember, the objective is not just to be right; but to be right when the vast majority of others are at least partially wrong.
Basic Staking: how players get it wrong
The nature of multi-race betting means that optimal staking is almost as important as picking the right horses. Again, I've written about this before but it's plenty important enough to reiterate here.
Smart pickers of horses often confound their own attempts to take down big pots by either under- or over-staking. A six-leg sequence involves the player selecting one or more horses per leg, the total number of 'bets' on the ticket being a multiple of the number of picks per leg.
Thus, a player picking one horse per race will have 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 = 1 bet. He or she will also have a very small chance of correctly predicting the required outcome unless he or she is either very lucky or most of the fancied horses make the frame/win. The former is not what this mini-course is about, the latter is generally self-defeating in the long-term.
This, then, is not an optimal way to bet such sequences.
'Caveman' Permutations
A very common approach is to select two horses per race in a permutation (or perm for short). Twice as much coverage per race gives a better chance of finding the right answer, but it also invites the user to invest far more cash in a somewhat arbitrary manner. We can write the calculation for the number of bets by using 'to the power of six' (representing the six legs in the wager). Thus:
2 horses per leg = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 26 = 64
3 horses per leg = 36 = 729
4 horses per leg = 46 = 4096
and so on.
As you can see, this quickly becomes expensive. Moreover, it is deeply sub-optimal. We won't necessarily feel we need the same amount of coverage in an eight horse race with an odds on favourite as we will with a twenty-runner sprint handicap, so staking them the same doesn't make a lot of sense. Again, such players are aiming to get lucky rather than playing smart.
Bankers
A way to whittle the number of perms in one's bet is by deploying 'bankers', horses which must do whatever is required - win, or place - as a solo selection. Adding a 'single', as they're known in America, to a six-leg sequence can make a lot of difference to the number of bets. Such an entry makes a 'to the power of six' bet a 'to the power of five' one, as follows:
2 horses per leg with one banker = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 1 = 25 = 32 bets
3 horses per leg with one banker = 35 = 243 bets
4 horses per leg with one banker = 45 = 1024 bets
and so on.
Using two bankers ratchets up the risk of a losing play but also dramatically further reduces the numbers of units staked:
2 horses per leg with two bankers = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 1 x 1 = 24 = 16 bets
3 horses per leg with two bankers = 34 = 81 bets
4 horses per leg with two bankers = 44 = 256 bets
and so on.
So, for instance, a ticket with two bankers and four selections in the other four legs would amount to 256 bets, whereas four horses per leg through a six-leg sequence would be 4096 bets. At 10p a line, that's the difference between £25.60 and £409.60!
Any single ticket perm, where all selections are staked to the same value (e.g. 10p's in the example above), is known in the trade as a 'caveman' ticket. This is because it still doesn't properly reflect, in staking terms, how we feel about our selected horses and can be considered unsophisticated or a blunt instrument.
Advanced Staking: How to get it right
So if those approaches are varying degrees of how not to stake multi-race bets, how should we do it?
The answer is a strategy known as 'ABCX' which has long been used but was first expounded in print - to my knowledge at least - in a book by Steve Crist, the US writer and punter, called 'Exotic Betting'. It's quite hard to get hold of nowadays, especially this side of the pond, but is well worth about £25 if you'd like to get seriously into multi-race (or multi-horse in a race, i.e. exacta, trifecta, etc) bets. Crist writes fluidly and with familiarity, so it's an easy read in the main, though some sections are necessarily a little on the technical side.
The ABCX approach requires players to assign a wagering value to each horse in each race, like so:
A Horses: Top level contenders, likely winners, or horses which you think are significantly over-priced while retaining a decent win/place chance. In this latter group, a 50/1 shot you think should be 20/1 need not apply; but a 20/1 shot you make 5/1 is fair game (notwithstanding that such a disparity normally means you've made a mistake).
B Horses: Solid options, most likely to take advantage of any slip ups by the A brigade. Generally implying less ability and/or betting value than A's.
C Horses: Outside chances, horses who probably won't win but retain some sort of merit. Often it is a better play to allow these horses to beat you, or to bet them as win singles for small change to cover stakes.
X Horses: Horses that either lack the ability, or the race setup, to win (or place if playing a place wager), and which are thus excluded from consideration.
This approach works a lot better for multi-race win bets than for placepots and the like. In the latter bet types, it is usually sensible to focus solely on A's and B's, with C picks going in to the same discard pile as X's. The exception to that rule of thumb would be days like the Cheltenham Festival where the pools and the field sizes are huge: the only sensibly staked way to catch one of the placers in the Stayers' Hurdle would be on a C ticket!
Once this hierarchy has been established, a means of framing the selections into a bet - or bets - is required. I have used multiple tickets to optimize my staking for more than a decade and if you are not doing likewise, you are losing money, simple as that.
The good news is that, while the mechanics I'm about to share are somewhat convoluted, I had a tool built to do all the grunt work - which you can access for free in Part 2 of this two-part report. 🙂
Staking multiple tickets using ABCX
As I say, the heavy lifting will be done by a tool, details of which I'll share in the concluding part. But it is instructive to be aware of the maths of ABCX. The way I almost always use my A, B and C picks is as follows:
- All A's: 4x unit stake
- All A's except for one B pick: 2x unit stake
- Mostly A's with two B picks: 1x unit stake
- All A's except for one C pick: 1x unit stake
Let's take a recent example from a Win 6 - predict all six winners - at Clonmel. This was actually a rare occasion when I went 3x on the 'All A' ticket as I didn't feel strongly I was playing with value in my corner. In truth, given it was the last day of racing in UK or Ireland for most of four weeks at least, I wanted the action... ahem.
My ABCX (the X's not shown) looked like this:
As you can see, I had two A's in leg 1, three A's in leg 2, nine horses spread across A, B and C in leg three (as well as unnamed favourite), three on A and three on C (plus unnamed fav) in leg 4, a banker A in leg 5, and five A's with two B's in leg 6.
In terms of the actual picks, I moved the 279F group in leg 4 from B to C to reduce stakes, and I took a contrarian view in the last race where 7/11 were the first two in the betting: I didn't especially like them but I didn't want to let them beat me completely either. The 136810 group of A's represented the next five in the market. That was a bold play which paid off this time.
In leg five, #3 was the 4/6 favourite in a short field of chasers, the smart horse Bachasson.
The image above shows my picks in the ticket builder tool. What it doesn't show is the part-permutation tickets the tool created for me, or the associated stake values. So let's introduce those now.
At the top of this image, there is a series of check boxes where a user may decide which combinations of selections he/she wants to play. In this case, and indeed most cases, I have selected all of those possible options.
Beneath each ticket is a further trio of check boxes where users may amplify stakes. As you can see, ticket 1 has a 3x amplification (would normally be 4x for me), tickets 2 and 3 are 2x unit stake, and tickets 4-6 are 1x normal stakes.
The total amount wagered across these tickets was £214.80.
Ignoring the absolute cost and its relation to your own level of staking, consider that cost against a full perm 'caveman ticket' of
2 x 3 x 10 x 7 x 1 x 7 = 2940 bets, at 10p = £294.00
But it is not the £80 (approximately 25%) saving in absolute cost that is the smartest component here. Rather, it is the fact that my stronger fancies - and the more likely sequences of winners - are amplified to more than 10p.
We'll cover the use of unnamed favourites later. For now, suffice it to say that this is a means of a) keeping more tickets alive, and b) playing up the merit of the favourite. I use this tactic a lot in multi-race tickets and will discuss it in more detail anon.
It takes less than three minutes for me to place six tickets as per the above. Sometimes, I have as many as 20-25 tickets and it takes 12-15 minutes. That, clearly, is more time than it takes to place a single caveman ticket; but my extra effort is frequently repaid in the return.
The winning sequence at Clonmel looked like this:
Leg 1: #3, 6/4 favourite, an A selection
Leg 2: #13, 7/1 (drifted from 7/2), an A selection
Leg 3: #6, 9/4 favourite, an A and a B (FAV) selection
Leg 4: #7, 9/1, a C selection
Leg 5: #3, 4/6 favourite, an A banker
Leg 6: #1, 15/2, an A selection
There were three shortish winning favourites in the six-race sequence, and the winner of leg 2 was a strange price, given it had been strong in the market all morning at around 3/1, 7/2. It bolted up by 17 lengths!
The dividend, to a £2 stake, paid £10,710.85. My 5% unit was worth £620.21 including consolations for four- and five-out-of-six.
You can hopefully make out in the above that there was only 0.05 winning units. That, of course, was my ticket shown above, which means there will be a £10,000 or so rollover to the next Irish race meeting, whenever that may be.
The six tickets paid out as follows:
Ticket 1: £80.43 consolations
Ticket 2: £57.42 consolations
Ticket 3: £3.80 consolations
Ticket 4: £3.81 consolations
Ticket 5: £620.21 winning ticket, plus consolations
Ticket 6: £1.90 consolations
===========================
Total payout: £767.57
Total profit: £552.77
Approximate odds: 5/2
===========================
There is an important note in the totals above. The approximate payout on this bet was 5/2. Not 100/1 or 1000/1 or another big number.
With the safety net of consolation dividends, I am happy to stake more, relatively, in search of a bigger absolute (i.e. monetary) return.
This is another subject to which I'll return in Part 2, along with when to play, using unnamed favourites, taking insurance, the value of the early markets, syndicates/cash out features and, of course, the ticket builder. That second part can be read here.
In this bonus module, Part 3b, you'll learn about something I call 'mark up' angles. These are snippets of information which are not necessarily worthy of a bet in their own right, but will help me to form a view on a horse in the context of a race.
Again, if you've not seen the previous episodes, I urge you to start here.
In this bonus recording, we'll look at mark up angles for:
- Sires
- Wind surgery runners
And we'll also look at horse profiling within Query Tool. Adding a few of these to your Tracker for the upcoming flat season will be a VERY good use of an hour or two during this downtime!
Here's the video - I hope you like it.
Matt
p.s. If anybody has any questions, I will be happy to record a QT Q&A session to help you get you out of the blocks as quickly as possible.
00mattbisognohttps://devplatform.ggzssd.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/geegeez_banner_new_300x100.pngmattbisogno2020-04-02 19:34:002020-04-02 19:34:00Horse Racing Betting Angles: Part 3b, Bonus Module
This series of articles and videos has been designed to help inquisitive racing fans to understand more about the sport they love. Whether for betting or another, perhaps breeding research, purpose, there is much intelligence to be gained from looking beyond headline numbers; and Query Tool is a feature of Geegeez Gold which facilitates just such digging.
In the first part of this third part - part 3a - it is time to get into some examples. The angles highlighted have been selected in such a way that they provide a small amount of statistical 'nutrition' in and of themselves; but I hope their real value is in leading the viewer to conduct his or her own research along similar - or very different - lines.
I very much hope you enjoy it.
Matt
p.s. I strongly encourage you to take a look at the first two parts before diving into this one.
p.p.s. the subtitles took a very long time to add, but that doesn't mean they're useful. Please do leave a comment and let me know if they enhanced your enjoyment or were irrelevant. I'll not be offended - far from it, if I don't have to spend another nearly six hours of my life doing that again, I'll be delighted!
Full video transcript
So before you start pressing or clicking any buttons in anger the first thing to think about is a scenario.
What we essentially want to do is test hypotheses or theories or ideas that we have.
Using the Query Tool
So what kind of scenarios can you see?
A few examples would be trainers in certain situations like maybe early season trainer form or trainers.
Maybe trainers by jockey, maybe big trainers
Not their number one.
What about the impacts of wind surgery? We can look at that, we can look at first time after a wind op.
Any number of times after wind op. We could look into the sires or jockeys or racecourses from a draw pace perspective. There really are any number of possible scenarios to dig into.
In the remainder of this video what I'd like to do is highlight some
examples of a given scenario. So for instance,
I will evidence one trainer and we'll find a jockey to go with that.
But you of course you go away and look at...
With trainers there are any number of UK and Irish trainers who have had
400-500 runners per year so they have big sample sizes to work with and you won't always find
valuable angles. Sometimes, very often, you'll come up dry but the whole point is if you if they were all profitable then everybody would be at it and the fact that we have to work a little bit harder not a lot as you'll see but a little bit harder represents a barrier to entry for a lot of people as well of course as not having
ccess to a tool like Query Tool
Ok.
One other thing that I want to say before I start I've been asked a couple of times about parameters how should I set things up Matt? What sort of win strike rate should I look for? Where should I be with A/E and IV? What kind of return on investment should I be looking for?
The answer to this question is it's up to.
The key thing to think about win and to a lesser degree place strike rate they basically tell you how long you'll
go between drinks. A lower strike rate will mean you need a bigger bank and more discipline: if you can't handle losing runs you need a high strike rate to keep you
in the game as it were, and so there's no point researching an angle with a 10% hit rate because you could very easily go 35
qualifiers without a winner, and that's not going to work for you.If you normally bet quite short and you need lots of winners to keep you engaged then you're going to be looking you need to be.
The win percentage maybe 25 or 33%, you need to set it high
to suit your tastes.
Likewise if you want something that wins often you can use IV and say one and a half on IV and that's going to give you certainly relative to the peer group it'll give you
those qualifiers who win
one-and-a-half times or more than average. The point I'm trying to make, and it is a really important point,
worth taking time with upfront, is that
the angles that I show you,
and the angles that you research,
they might be exciting in terms of their profit or their ROI...
But if they don't fundamentally suit the way you bet,
you're going to give up on them.
This applies to any system or service you might be interested in trying as well: if the fundamental metrics of that
angle or system or service are not aligned with the way you see the betting world, with how you want to...
you appetite for risk,
the number of bets you want to place, another one is your tolerance for losing runs.
If the metrics don't match up against
those things which are personal to you
the angle is going to fail for you. Not necessarily because it's a bad angle or a bad system or service, but because it doesn't meet your personal requirements.
I hope that makes sense. It's a really, really important point and, actually, if you take nothing else away from this video, please take that away because that will stand you in good stead going forward. You need to find something that suits you. Not everything will.
Ok good right now let's crack on the first thing I want to look at then I'm recording this on the last day of March we are in a lockdown this year 2020 you might be in 3 years time content will remain valid in its conceptual form the data will obviously move on I hope I hope we have some racing in the next few years so for the 31st of March is traditionally,
in any normal year we would have just had
Doncaster and the Lincoln.
And we'd be started in the flat turf season.
I'm going to kind of pretend that the flat turf season has started and I want to look at early season trainer form.
So to do that I'm going to
MONTH and I'm going to choose March, April, May.
That's my early season.
I'm going to go to the RACE
box, just going to look at UK for now but obviously we could do this in Ireland as well.
RACE CODE, Flat Turf and Flat AW.
That kind of gives us a look at those trainers who in the month of March have been in good form on the all-weather which
gives us hope that they will take that early season form into the turf, but it also doesn't preclude those who don't bother with AW and go straight to the grass. So that's that, race code, so I'm going to change it two years as well.
I'll just click GENERATE REPORT and see where we're at.
And we've got 27,000 runners there.
Just a reminder of the filters so far we got lost two years March April May flat races in the UK.
Ok.
Now look at this data by
Trainer. I'm going to now look at RUNNER
I'll click the
TRAINER radio button, now this is the order by button. I'm sure I referenced it in part 2 but just as a reminder: the left-hand radio grey disc, if you select one of those in this case, TRAINER
And then hit GENERATE REPORT which I'll do in a second.
Summary box instead of just having this overview row
will have a breakdown by whatever you chosen to order by: in this case trainer. But it could be jockey, gender, it could be headgear, whatever, so let's hit the Generate
Report button and see what happens. It might take a few seconds to come back.
Because it's quite a big dataset.
And there we are.
All sorts of guys and girls in this list sorted alphabetically by surname we've got these with, like,.
two runs and three runs and they're not really any use to us so I'm going to apply some filters in this.
Anyway, these boxes here. Hopefully my cursor
is making a nice yellow circle where I'm clicking.
I'm going to say.
At least 20 runs, although that feels like not enough probably.
I'm going to set my win percentage at 15 which is roughly 1-in 7 and again you know that might be to low for some people; I'll set my each way to 33%.
And I'm going to do 1.25.for
A/E and IV which will all be familiar now because you checked out the information from parts 1 and 2 in this three-parter.
Ok so I'm going to click update and as you remember this is a list alphabetically ordered and it's alternate row shaded. When I click update it's simply going to
hide those rows of data that don't match my parameters here. It's not going to look as pretty as it's not re-ordering, it's just hiding them so I'll click update.
And you can see that we've now got a much
smaller subset of data
for the last 2 years.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to
extend that out maybe to the
last five years
And obviously this is
150 percent
bigger data set than the previous one. We've got a few more entries in here, now what I like to do as a starting point is I sort
Actual over
Expected, high-to-low, like this.
I can see something else that I haven't done.
Oh I have, yes, Paul Nicholls has had a few runs on the flat.
Hmm, interesting.
I am interested in
Karen McLintock.
I'm not sure Garry Moss is training anymore, his sample size is much smaller as well.
Philip Hide not training any more.
I think we'll just go with those for the minute.
I'd better make these 1, I'm not sure I got enough data in the set.
Obviously what I'm doing here is I'm
mucking about with the parameters
to get a bigger, slightly more to look at in the first instance.
I'm kind of interested in
most of those. I'll just stick with these top...
He's definitely not training any more, I don't think he is.
These are quite small sample sizes.
I'm going to leave it at that just with those three there.
What I'm going to do if I just go back to TRAINER on RUNNER and if I open this box up,
by clicking not on the radio, not this side just clicking anywhere in here.
You will see that
those +'s that I selected
have... those trainers have appeared
within the trainer selection box. So if I now click generate report it's just going to bring back those three rows.
It's really important to remember to clear these because all of a sudden you will be wondering where the data is and it is there but it's hidden because it's not satisfying these parameters at the top.
I've done that now.
So I've got 3 trainers that I'm
potentially interested in early season.
Now I'm looking at Paul Henderson,
it's a smaller sample, just 22 runners.
And there's basically no profit there.
For all that the A/E is strong, it's just not going to give enough action I don't think.
So I'll remove him and you can see that the tick's gone there and Generate Report to get rid, so I've got two trainers of interest and just to remind us of our filters.
We got the last 5 years.
UK flat races March, April and May.
And you could actually just set that up
as as an angle as is.
And when Karen McLintock and Adrian Keatley have runners in the UK on the flat
in the early part of the season you would get notified on your...
within the race cards and on the report, that's actually something else I wanted to touch on so let's quickly do that. In the previous video I told you about
how to check your QT
Angles qualifiers.
And I told you about the report.
Which I now can't find, of course.
I didn't mention and I wanted to touch on here.
Is how they show up in the race card. As you remember there's no racing at the moment, so I can't show you how they show up in the race card but this is what happens.
You will see something like.
You would see a number that isn't 0 in the blue number column.
In this case it's a 1.
When you click on that, it will show you the angle in question.
and the Profit/Loss. Basically the data/metrics from that angle.
Now if you can't remember what the parameters were for the angle, if you just hover over it as I am now.
This will happen:
It will bring up your parameters.
Just over it and it will show you, in this case I did the last five years up to 24th July 2018.
5 Furlong flat handicaps.
With these five sires. So I quite like sprint sires.
Obviously the title 'Turf Sprint Sires' is very helpful. I could have put 'Turf Sprint Handicap Sires' or whatever, but this is a little angle that I have saved.
I wouldn't necessarily be backing this horse; it would just be another piece of data that I would throw into the mix when I was looking at this race.
So that's something that I wanted to bring out: the QT Angles
displays on the race card with the
blue numbers. Clicking on them shows the angle in question, hovering over the angle shows the parameters that you set up for that angle.
OK, good.
Right, let's go back to it.
So what I'm going to do I'm actually just going to save that as it is. Now, some people...
Good discipline really is to say right that's my...
That is my five year data...
But why don't we have a look at that, before we save it, let me have a look at it by year.
And make sure that, for instance,
all of the winners didn't come in one season.
You just quickly...
I've selected year here.
Clicked Generate Report and I'm going to sort it by year.
And we can see that...
2015.
Very few qualifiers.
In the full years 2016 through 2019 we can see that there was an approximately, well, there was a 20 plus percent win strike rate.
The each way strike rate was promising as well.
The win P/L has been a bit variable and last year was lower.
Quite a bit lower.
This year.
Two of them have placed so it's in the same bracket.
On a meaningless sample size of four.
It's too early this season obviously we lost the racing now.
I wouldn't be worrying about this year.
So I'm interested in this but I can see a
general degradation of the profit and the A/E figure reflects that as well.
I would be happy to save this Angle and as I say use it advisedly rather than backing these horses blind: it would just be an aide memoire to me that McLintock and Keatley
are trainers to keep on side in the early part of the season.
So then I'd add that to
my QT Angles.
"Early Season Trainers", Add Angle,
And then that's done.
And, of course, like everything else they're all zeros, but that is one angle and you could have an early National Hunt season trainers one, a summer jumps trainers one.
You could have a
sa Summer jumps by track angle. So there are lots of different... this is one example, but there are lots of different other ways that you could cut this data.
So that's the first one. Right let's look at trainers and jockeys now so I'm going to hit my reset.
I'm actually going to refresh the page entirely.
Now this time I'm
going to look at
two years of data
I'm going to go to.
Ireland, just for fun, just to change things up a bit.
I'm going to sort by trainer.
Just do that because I want to see who's got the most
runners.
There probably is some merit in looking at trainers who maybe only have 30 or 50 runners a year.
But really I think the value is looking at the big
Big datasets.
And looking at things that
are maybe less obvious
to the man or woman
in the street.
I'm just going to change this to FLAT (TURF/AW) again
And now we've got a small subset, well, we've got a large number of trainers but a small subset of
essentially volume trainers.
The trainers I'm going to be interested in
I want 100+ wins
And that's going to quickly sort things out.
And then I'm going to sort
High to low.
And let's have a look at Aiden O'Brien. Let's select Aiden.
Generate Report, and that's going to bring just him up. I've got to remember to clear
my filters data here.
Now, I'm gping to say, show me Aiden O'Brien's runners in the last 2 years on the flat.
Sorry Aidan O'Brien Irish runners in the last 2 years on the flat
by jockey.
Click the JOCKEY radio button, click generate reports and then in my summary box.
I got all the different jockeys that Aiden has used in the last two years. Now again we've got these ones and bits and pieces, they're not really meaningful so let's sort by
wins and we'll say, "right well we're just get rid of
anybody with
less than
20 runs", let's say.
Small subset here, again sort by A/E.
And we've got.
Messrs Hussey, Moore Donnacha O'Brien,
Emmet McNamara, Seamie Heffernan,
Paidraig Beggy,
and Wayne Lordan.
Wayne Lordan
is an immediate chuck out and if you're a layer that might be interesting: an A/E of 0.53.
on 150ish.
runners is terrible.
In fairness to him, he's almost always on a second, third or fourth string but nevertheless...
And again you'd need to check
Betfair SP because he might be riding some massive priced horses, but on the face of it these are eminently avoidable.
19 out of 20 get beaten.
5 out of 6 are not even in the frame.
These are not horses to go to war with generally.
At the other end Ryan Moore is quite interesting: 34% strike rate and a small profit, in fact a reasonable profit
at SP. So we'll have a look at Ryan.
Let's take Ryan Moore and Hussey and O'Brien is now training so he's stopped; we'll have McNamara and Seamie Heffernan as well.
The reason I've done that is I've got them here now so what I can do is I can look at them individually and I still got these names here to come back to. I'm going to have a look at
Ryan Moore first.
I want to look at
a bigger data period.
So I'm going to go back 5 years.
And I'm going to sort by year.
And order this by group.
You can see here...
that essentially
what happened
in the last 2 years.
Is not replicated in any of the previous three.
This is kind of precarious territory now because we're not seeing
a replication of the Actual
over Expected, we're not seeing a replication of the profit and loss.
We are seeing that in the last couple of years Ryan's IV has risen.
Now, our job as researchers
is, if you remember the point from part 1, of logic logic logic...
If we can come up with a reason
for this, if we can explain why
in 2017
It was not good, and in 2018 it was good,.
then we've got a bit of a chance.
And there is one credible reason, and it is this.
If I go back to RUNNER
and JOCKEY. And I'm just going to look for
this guy, Joseph O'Brien.
So if I do that and then sort by
JOCKEY
Right now what I want to do is I'm ging to go to my dates and sort that by year.
And what we can see is that
Joseph stopped riding in 2015.
So that would partially explain
these data here. So 2015
Joseph had
plenty of the good Aiden horses.
It doesn't explain 2016 and 2017.
Notwithstanding that the A/E figures for those years are kind of more acceptable than
this one here.
When Ryan was competing in Ireland with
Joseph for the Aiden
rides (apologies for
first name terms).
So where do I get to with this? And again these are the kind of situations that you'll find yourself in when you're doing this.
You've got some kind of make value judgements.
Actually I should have cleared that I don't think it's going to make and difference.
I should have cleared that before.
So we've got a situation here where recent history is promising.
Longer-term history less so.
We've got kind of a partial explanation.
We've got a full explanation for the year 2015.
You can see that as Joseph stopped riding - in 2015 Ryan Moore only rode 27 of Aiden's horses in Ireland.
And in subsequent years he's ridden more, as you can see; and that is probably a factor in these numbers I think on balance it's definitely something worth
keeping in mind because it's the kind of thing...
It's one of these 'Hidden in Plain Sight' angles, it's the sort of thing that everybody thinks must be overexposed.
And it's potentially not.
Now what you might do this in the last 2 years there's kind of 200 runners there you might look at whether it's 2 year olds or Group races only you might look at
which particular
race types
O'Brien and Ryan Moore have combined with for the most success.
And that might be your angle.
This is a trainer / jockey combination and, you know, who would have thunk that
O'Brien, the best trainer in the world or certainly in Britain and Ireland, and Ryan Moore, the best jockey in Britain and Ireland, I think both of them have only got one peer and they're a partnership as well.
Gosden nd Dettori
Who would have thought that those highest of high-profile trainers and jockeys would be
borderline profitable to follow blind.
It really is quite remarkable and it's and it's worth knowing.
Saving it to your angles if that's something that you want.
Let's.
Let's do a slightly less obvious one.
This time I'm going to look at
UK trainers on the flat.
The last 2 years here, you see that there.
And from my RACE conditions I'm going to say UK.
Race code.FLAT (TURF/AW)
And then I'm going to look by trainer.
This is quite big dataset, so it will take a minute for the data to filter in. The query is complete and then it takes a second for your browser to order the data my browser is being told what to do.
And it's got to create this very big table.
And that takes a minute or a few seconds to do.
Right again we've got very small numbers in here so I'm going to sort by number of winners.
So I can see where a sensible cut-off point is.
And 150 wins
gives us plenty
to go at.
Sort by win strike right, now we can see that we've got David Evans who has
volume but low strike rate. I don't really want these
super low strike rate trainers so I'm going to put 10% in.
which actually doesn't get rid of many.
I just leave it like that I think.
So we've got quite a bit of data to go at.
Some trainers,
like Mark Johnson uses Joe Fanning and Franny Norton
extensively and there actually aren't that many left around that. Other trainers like John Gosden will.
use Frankie and Rab Havlin for the vast majority of his. Let's have a look at Johnny G actually.
And Karl Burke
And maybe Roger Varian
So what we've got here are
three trainers who all perform better than average, one of them is a standout and that is Gosden.
We're going to look at Gosden first and again if you remember we can just deselect the other trainers.
That's Johnny G's - again forgive familiarity - that's his overall 2-year
record on the flat. I want to look by jockey.
Select the JOCKEY radio button and generate report and here are the data.
Robert Havlin has had the most rides and winners in the last two years Frankie is quite selective.
Let's sort by A/E.
And again we want to get rid of the small sample sizes.
Let's say at least 15 wins,
Now we've got a much smaller
more meaningful dataset. The first thing to look at is Frankie (Dettori).
See he wins 30% of the time
Slightly.
So let's have a look at that actually overl the last 5 years, I think it might be a profit over the last five.
Break-even, but at exchange prices that will be a profit. We'll go back to two years.
So we got Oisin Murphy, Jim Crowley, Frankie Dettori, Rab Havlin, Nicky Mackay and Kieran O'Neill.
The strike rate for Nicky and Kieran is 20% or lower which in the context of the group
is not really at the level I would like to be, so we'll look at just these four guys.
So we've got four here now.
What we can do is
Rob Havlin.
It's going to be hard, I mean there might be some situations where he's
profitable to follow.
Potentially when he's on a second string so when
he's riding
a horse at
a bigger price to Frankie.
That might be something worth looking at, you can do that with odds by selecting him but I'm going to
deselect him for now.
Generate report and I've got three in here.
I want to look at these guys over the longer term, we could just quickly look at Frankie but I want to look at.
Oisin and Jim as well.
And we can see that
Oisin Murphy
When he rides for John Gosden
I mean 40%.is ridiculous...
It is a small sample size.
And these 30% numbers
certainly Frankie's, on
a bigger sample size are remarkable.
If you're betting in a race where Gosden
has got one of these jockeys up and you're not betting it
You've only got 70% of the winners to go at. Now that might be absolutely fine.
It's kind of a meaningless or misleading start in and of itself but you need to know that these guys are winning a lot of the time. Whether they're profitable or not is another question: in the case of Oisin Murphy who is
the retained jockey for Qatar Racing and it may very well be the case that
a lot of those 50 horses that he's ridden for Gosden in the last five years were for his retained owner.
That's by the by, what we need to know is that this is a guy worth following. So you might save this angle as...
Gosden and Oisin.
And add it to your setup and then when they have a qualifier you get your Gosden and Oisin...
You get your blue number here and it will tell you the numbers and you'll be able to factor that into your overall consideration of that race. It might be you might want to bet those blind or you might want to bet them more selectively as I do. But either way you have that data right in the card there and also on the QT Angles Report.
So those are jockeys and trainers. Maybe we'll just look at one more. Let's go back to
RUNNER and we'll look at the trainers.Let's have a look at Karl Burke
So I've selected TRAINER Karl Burke and I've still got this by JOCKEY.
I want to look at Burke's
rider selections in the last 2 years.
.
Again I'm going to sort it. I want to get rid of the small numbers so let's
cut that off at 50, that's fine.
Sort by A/E.
Ben Curtis is the guy that kind of immediately
jumps off the page.
Let's have a look at Ben.
Now what I want to do is I want to look I want to look by year.
How's things.
Let's go 5 years and extend it out a bit.
That year actually if we look at
the win strike rate in recent years,
2017 and onwards, you can see that the strike rate is around
16%-plus.
But last year was down.
This is one, again it's another value judgement, you've got to kind of say,
"Right, obviously if I got a year like
2017 or 2018 I'd be thrilled to be following these but if I got a year like 2019 where the strike rate was down
and I might be in the hole a fair bit at some.point,
would I be able to stomach that?"
The answer for most people is NO
Only you know the answer for you.
I'd be absolutely fine with this because, again, I'm not backing them religiously anyway. I'm missing winners but I'm missing plenty of losers as well by being selective.
What I want to do with Karl and Ben.
is I want to
look by MONTH...
I want to see, because most trainers have seasonal ups and downs, and looking at trainers by month is a valid thing to do, and often it is
quite instructive.
So I've selected order by MONTH and Generate Report. .
Now we've got some interesting
.
Remember our filters, specifically Karl Burke when Ben Curtis is riding
On the flat in Britain in the last 5 years.
See that there are some ups and downs here and the easiest way to
visualise this is with the CHART.
This is something else I wanted to show you: when you've got a...
When you've got a number of
variables in your parameter, so I've got 'by month' here and I've obviously got 12 months - 12 variables in my parameter.
Or 12 parameters in my variable, I'm not even sure which of those is right! Anyway,
what our charting software does is it takes half the dataset, or sometimes a smaller percentage. But if you click .
in the top chart,
it will show you everything. Now sometimes, if you've got like a 1000 trainers in here that's going to be not going to be able to make sense of this so what you can also do is if you click and drag
you can select
a section.
of the chart to look at in more detail. And when you've got 1000 in here that selection I've made there which is, what?, about a quarter, that's still going to be 250-odd so I might actually be only wanting to
look at a smaller subset like that.
A single click and you'll get the full dataset. Right, so here we've got Burke and Curtis.
It's sorted by Win PL I'm going to sort it by A/E, which is a good friend of mine and again clicking in the chart [to view all data].
What we need to note here.
1.0 is the line of interest in A/E (and to a lesser degree IV).
And what we can see here.
In the early part of the year.
Certainly January-February March.
And the late part of the year - October November December - this is a period that obviously aligns with the all-weather.
Karl Burke and Ben Curtis have had a good time of it.
In the summer months,
less so and particularly less so between
July, August
and September
I mean that's perfectly legitimate in my opinion.
To accept that seasonality I mean if you look at strike rate.
The average for the year, you can see this at the bottom, it's 16% overall.
And in July it's 10% or 9% in August it's 5%.
And in September it's
12%. It's much lower
than the overall averages in
April May are much lower as well so I wouldn't be including June and excluding April and May.
I'd be either including April and May as well as June, or excluding April through June, if you see what I mean. You've got to put logic behind the theory: now in this case the logic is probably these guys are
mustard on the all-weather and we can very easily check that. If we just
select the ON button here it's going to put all the months on I'm going to take out
May to September.
Is a little bit convenient maybe.
I'm going to do that, and then life looks more rosy obviously but what I want to do now.
Is I want to look at
by RACE CODE
There actually isn't a huge amount of difference.
So the theory about
most of their winners being on the all-weather is debunked.
They look absolutely fine on the flat turf as well so that's interesting that's good. One other thing that I might look at is by handicap or non-handicap.
And again.
Much better in handicap so might though it is profitable in
win profit and loss
terms in non-handicaps but if you look at the A/E that would give you cause for a slight reservation. Certainly
all of the metrics are better in handicaps.
I might change that to handicap and I might revisit my dates and see if that makes
any difference in the summer months.
And actually what it does
is it kind of reinforces
the previous date range
that we selected, which
was October through to April.
So if we delselect the summer months
We've now got...
We've essentially combined the two scenarios we've looked at so far which are kind of a sub-season.
It's sub-season trainer form with trainer by jockey.
Generate the report and we've got a nice little angle here which has been extremely profitable. It's worth looking at by year.
And we can see again that there was a
losing year in 2016.
So, again, are you comfortable with that? The answer might be no.
Generally speaking this is an approach that in the last few years has been a really
good one to have onside, so I'd always be mindful of Burke and Curtis
teaming up in handicaps in in the trainer's good times, which are October through to April.
That's an angle that I think it's worth saving.
So that's saved to my Angles now..
I want to show you one more. I am conscious of the length of this video and I might break it up into two recordings.
I will do that so I'll do this last one on trainers.
Actually I have got one more on trainers, so I'll do that in a part
3b if you like, and some people will obviously have got the general idea by now and choose not to look at
the angles highlighted in Part 3b, others will want to look at those as well.
I mean I would encourage you to look because I think,
not so much for the specific angle, but there are some more scenarios I'm going to highlight which might give you ideas to go and research on your own.
And I think there's plenty of value in that.
Let's go we're going to do another trainer jockey combo.
I do loves me a trainer jockey combo as long term
subscribers will know.
This time we're going to look at Red Raif, as I
somewhat unflatteringly call him.
Mr Beckett, who is an excellent trainer.
And a passionate man.
Somewhat political and not fully aligned with my own view of
the world. But that doesn't make him right or wrong, it just makes us different.
Anyway it is his ability to condition horses that we're interested in here so let's retain focus on that.
Beckett as you can see has a 16% strike rate in the
last two years. If we extend that out to five years, we can see he retains a very consistent strike rate.
And if we look by year,
we can see that he's...
...ignore this part year which is unrepresentative, as you can see by the number of runs, but in the main he
is consistently around 14% to
20%, average 16.5%, very solid overall figures from which to work. So what I want to do is I want to look at...
As you can see down the bottom here we've got two and a half thousand runs
So we've got a bit of data to work with..
So let's see if there are some sensible subsets within that.
We might look at
RACE CODE for flat turf and flat all-weather.
We can see that his strike rate again is consistent.
Nothing really
of interest there.
Distance.
Is he better with sprinters or middle distance horses? He doesn't have a huge amount of runners
at sprint trips.
The ones he does are largely
consistent in strike rate terms, so
nothing really going on there.
Handicap or non-handicap?
Hmm, now that's interesting.
The strike rate is not
massively different, but it is notably different, kind of 10%.
16 + 10% of 1.6 - 17.6 and it is 17.43, let's call it 9% better in handicaps.
And we've got a bit of a chance looking at the A/E figures here and Win PL on a big sample size so I'm going to look at
'Red Raif' in handicaps.
And then we've got this summary number. Now let's look by
RACE CODE
That's interesting.
Distance.
Longer-distance races look
potentially more interesting.
But what I really want to look at is by jockey.
So let's open up the JOCKEY radio button.
Generate report
And get rid of some of these meaningless .
samples, so let's say we want.
we'll start with 20+ and work up from there.
Sort by Actual / Expected
And we've actually got some really interesting players here.
Now Fran Berry has retired and he and Pat Dobbs used to ride a lot for Ralph Beckett, as did
Richard Kingscote as you can see. They had the least good data in terms
of A/E and indeed
in terms of Impact Value which is a reference to strike rate as well so they are easily excluded.
Higher up the list we've got
the likes of Sylvestre De Sousa, Josephine Gordon
I think if we put a
win strike rate of at least 15%
Get rid of some of these so we can focus more clearly and an each-way strikerate of 33%.
Now we're getting to the juice of it. And a problem with Sylvestre is that he's a fantastic jockey - that's not a problem - the problem is that everybody knows he's a fantastic jockey.
Even in this loaded situation, Beckett in handicaps, where
he places his horses very well clearly.
The strike rate is high but we're never going to be able to get rich with this guy.
I think I'm going to look at the other four
You could do more with this but really, it might be worth looking at gender - Beckett is extremely good with training fillies and mares. He's won the Oaks a number of times.
There's not really much difference.
Male horses tend to win more often the female horses.
That's just a function of
genetics I suppose; age is worth having a look.
I just want to sort this by group, so I can get a feel for the linearity of it, if you like.
Rather than cherry-picking
based on A/E
or profit.
Most of his runners are in the 2 to 4 year old age group, it might be worth focusing only on the the younger horses: 2 and 3 year olds.
I think that's probably a legitimate thing to do.
In this example I'm going to leave them all in but you might choose to focus only on those that small group you can see that they're the sort of 5, 6 and 7 year olds have very few runners. They've had 34 runs between them whereas 2-year olds alone in handicaps have had 45 runners in the period so I'm just going to leave it as is and
I think we've got a nice little trainer jockey angle here so Ralph Beckett in flat handicaps.
When he uses Oisin Murphy, Rob Hornby, Louis Steward or Harry Bentley. Now this is a five year view and again it's definitely worth looking at the year by year breakdown.
We can see that there's a
gorgeous consistency here that is an angle researcher's dream such is its
annual profit and its strike rate of
20+% (again, ignore this year because.that's
a small number of runs in the year so far). I mean that's really quite interesting.
We might look by month as well just to see if he has any seasonality to his form.
The easiest way to do this in a chart.
The 1.0 line is here and we see
again in June and July
High summer when trainers are running horses left, right and centre,
firing a lot of bullets,
it's quite difficult to retain
the higher strike rate.
And that has an impact on profitability and therefore A/E.
You might choose to leave
June and July out; I'm not seeing enough there to justify it for me so I'm going
to leave them all in.
Notwithstanding that June and July are
slightly less appealing.
I think it's a really solid angle and I'm going to save it to my QT Angles.
Added.
Alright and that's another angle.
And that is enough for this video I think. I hope
you've seen some interesting angles there. More importantly, I hope you see
some of the considerations that we need to work within when we're considering what might be an approach that suits us and when we're considering
the legitimacy of
data in terms of
it's long-term or future profitability potential.
And I hope this may have inspired you or encouraged you to maybe have a crack at researching some angles yourself. If it has and you've watched this video from the blog...
Please do leave a comment with anything that you'd be happy to share. You might want to keep some of them for yourself, and that's fine, but if you're happy to share that would be fantastic as well. Even if it's
a generic approach.
So, again, like a scenario that people could go away and look at their own
"sub-scenarios".
OK, enough already, this is Matt Bisogno saying thank you very much for watching this part 3a
of the Query Tool series. I hope you got some value from it, I'll be back the part 3b very soon.
But, for this one, byee for now.
00mattbisognohttps://devplatform.ggzssd.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/geegeez_banner_new_300x100.pngmattbisogno2020-03-31 19:08:012020-03-31 19:08:01Horse Racing Betting Angles: Part 3a, Query Tool Examples
In Part 1 of this three-part series looking at horse racing betting angles, I talked about research principles: about knowing what works for you, about the importance of logic and a lot more besides. It's a foundation piece for the next two parts and, if you've not read it yet, I'd strongly encourage you to do that first. Here's the link: Horse Racing Betting Angles Part 1
Parts two and three are video-based for now, though I will endeavour to get transcripts at some point. The middle piece, then, is below, and it provides an introduction to Query Tool, Geegeez Gold's main research module. It can be used to drill down on courses, horses, trainers, jockeys, sires, damsires, and plenty of other things besides.
In this video, you'll discover what Query Tool (QT) is, where it lives, and how it works. You'll see how to visualise your analysis, display qualifiers and, best of all, save your research so that it is recalled when relevant, i.e. when there are qualifiers in the day's racing. Click the play button to watch Part 2.
In Part 3, which you can look at here, we'll look at some examples of angle research, produced with Query Tool. Each example is one element of a group of entities which can be researched. As such, there is ample opportunity for curious readers/listeners to try things out for themselves. Look out for that in the next couple of days.
Matt
00mattbisognohttps://devplatform.ggzssd.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/geegeez_banner_new_300x100.pngmattbisogno2020-03-28 11:12:122020-03-28 11:12:12Horse Racing Betting Angles: Part 2, Query Tool Intro
To win at betting on horses, or indeed anything, one needs either to be lucky or to be smart. Ideally, one needs to be both. The best tactic of all is to use smarts to make your own luck, and that is how we'll proceed in this three part series. In this first episode we'll consider the cardinal principles, without which anything that follows will be precarious as a basis for betting decisions.
What is a betting angle?
Let's start at the start, and define what exactly is meant by a betting angle. For me it's a deliberately vague term because I don't want to be reduced to mechanistic wagers spat out by my computer's 'brain', even if whatever comes out is a direct result of what I fed in. I'd rather be advised or reminded of a nugget of information when I'm previewing a particular race.
Put another way, if my research tells me Trainer X has a great record with Jockey Y that will generally not be enough in itself for me to place a bet. But it will encourage me to look more closely at the overall profile of the runner around which Trainer X and Jockey Y are combining.
In other words, I want as many extra pieces of information - snippets which will generally be unknown to the vast majority of punters - as possible when I'm weighing up a race. What I don't want to do is simply back a list of horses generated from my angles.
That is system betting, and it works for a lot of people. If that's you, you will find plenty of utility in this series, but my main focus is on micro-angles which will add a point or two to the case for a given runner without necessarily commending it as a bet.
Betting angles then are snippets of information which can help decipher a race and potentially identify a dollop of otherwise unseen value.
No system or angle is God
Horse races are loose forms of organised chaos. An average of ten large animals, steered by small animals, with each other and/or obstacles in their way: there is plenty of scope for things to go wrong. Unsurprisingly, things frequently do go wrong. Thus the best horse often does not win. Rather, the best suited horse to conditions, or the best placed horse from the break, or the horse that makes the fewest mistakes, usually wins.
These kind of 'chaos variables' are generally not factored in to the price of horses at the top of the market, meaning such horses can not normally be considered value bets. Their chances are well advertised by the good judges in the racing media and the weight of money from lazy punters ensures their followers will eventually suffer death by a thousand poor value betting slip paper cuts. Or something like that.
My point is that we need to build in enough latitude to account for what used to be known in my software development project management days as OSINTOT's ("Oh Sh!t I Never Thought Of That"). Stuff happens, regularly in horse races, and our wagering approach must be sufficiently resilient to handle it.
No system is perfect, no angle immune to the bettors' scourge, variance: again, as I like to say, "after a good run expect a bad run; after a bad run expect a good run". Such is the nature of the beast.
For ultra-contrarians, the best time to get involved with a proven tipster or a solid-looking betting system is in the howling teeth of a downturn; after a bad run expect a good run. But only if you firmly believe in the underlying merit of the approach behind it.
Designer babies
We all want to be beautiful/handsome. And we all want to back big-priced winners on a regular basis. But, sadly, we have to play the hand we're dealt. You might have smouldering Dean Martin looks, but I get reminded more often than I'd like about my better than passing resemblance to Mister Bean. Such is life.
And so it is with betting systems. We hanker after the golden goose, the method that gets all the girls. But that's not what we need. What we need is a steady little portfolio of pointers that keep us honest, content and on the right side of both the bottom line and sanity. That is achievable, sustainable, and far more nourishing than a golden goose. How B-O-R-I-N-G would life be then?
This game is about little fish tasting sweet. It is about the thrill of the chase, about engagement and fun: solving the puzzle lower down the lists where others have fallen into its top of the market traps.
There is no such thing as a golden goose system, thank the deities. But there are myriad in's that offer slivers of value, shards of profitable light, to those who care to seek them out.
This series is for you.
A bit about you
On that point, then, let's talk about you.
One of the best pieces of business advice I ever received was to create customer avatars. A customer avatar is a very specific definition of the core client of a business.
Understanding this has helped geegeez.co.uk to stop focusing on 'all horse racing bettors' and home in on 'horse racing bettors who know they want more information than is available for free elsewhere, and don't mind getting their hands dirty in the quest to find their own value picks'.
That's less catchy, and is a very (VERY!) small subset of 'all horse racing bettors', but I can talk to almost every single one of these guys - you guys - as an equal, and expect that what I say will largely resonate with your own general outlook on the racing and betting game.
Back to you and, specifically, your betting approach. If you've read this far, you almost certainly are interested in finding your own betting angles - the good Lord Sugar knows this introduction has been long enough to disqualify those who are not!
But a betting angle that works for you will not necessarily be the same as one that works for me, or that works for the next reader. Some examples will help.
Betting Angle A has a 3% ROI on more than 10,000 selections. That's 300 points profit. Nice right? Well, maybe.
What if Angle A identifies 40 bets per day? What if the average odds of winners are 25/1?
The downswings with an approach like that could run to many hundreds of points. To operate it profitably would require a very large bank, very small unit stakes (in percentage terms), and titanium sphericals. The profit is attractive to all; the modus operandi suitable for very few.
Let's try another.
Betting Angle B has a 9% ROI. It finds roughly 40 bets a year and has been profitable in four of the last five years. In the other year, it lost 28 points. Could you handle that loss and still retain belief in the angle? You probably could if you were being selective when playing it, and if the 40 bets were in a particular context - for example, early season trainer form.
Whether you could or you couldn't, the key here is that while we may all be similar in terms of our general aspirations from the game, we are all different in how we can scratch that itch.
We have different bankrolls, different appetites to risk, different styles of betting, different amounts of time to invest in finding our bets, and so on.
That diversity is to be celebrated: it ultimately means we'll land on different horses and back winners on different days. It won't stop any of us from being profitable or from enjoying our betting as long as we recognise our own terms of reference before getting stuck in.
It is very well worth taking a few minutes to think about your approach, and how optimal that approach is for you. If you use our Bet Tracker tool, you'll have a better insight than most into the way you bet, what works and what needs more thought.
What to look for in a good system/angle
The first thing to say here is to refer back to the previous section: make sure any angle you identify looks sustainable in terms of the way you play. If you need a winner every third qualifier there is little point in deploying an angle with a 10% strike rate; you'll give up on it after a few losers which, almost inevitably, means before you've made any profit.
If you only want to place one of two bets a day, there is little point in identifying a great angle with an average of six bets a day. You'll immediately feel uncomfortable with the different staking and wagering regimen, and that is not a position of strength from which to enjoy the sport.
Any research you undertake needs to be mindful of how you bet: how often, how risky, and so on.
A good system, then, will speak to you personally in terms of its numbers. It will fit your appetite for risk, volume and available time. If it doesn't, it's only a matter of time before you pull the plug, profitable edge or not.
Aside from the personal elements, there are generic precursors to good angles, too.
LOGIC LOGIC LOGIC
The first, and most crucial, component of angle research is logic. An angle should be explainable in a shortish sentence and, if you were explaining it to a fellow punter, she should not spit out her beer in disgust at the case you make.
It is never enough to reason, "well it's profitable". If you can't explain why it is profitable the approach is very likely built on foundations of sand.
It might be fine to have an angle based around big trainers' performance in Saturday handicaps. But it would never make sense to create an angle around performance on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, for instance. There's simply no underlying logic.
Likewise, trainer angles where there are gaps in the months which qualify make no sense; conversely, however, plenty of trainers have certain parts of the year/season when they're in bloom. As long as there is a consecutive nature to the period, that may well be predicated on the schedule of the yard's year.
Just think 'why' for every variable within your angles. If you can't explain it, you should probably bin it.
Less is (usually) more
The always compelling Tony Keenan wrote about focus for optimal betting decisions in this excellent article. In it, he refers to neuroscientist Daniel Levitin's contention that we should unburden the brain by placing information in the physical world. Keenan talks about 'to do' lists as an example but it is equally true of betting angles: we should move these from our cluttered crania to, well, to a query tool or other aide memoire.
He goes on to reference Levitin's work on something called optimal complexity theory. Here's Tony:
...the idea that too little information is no good but so is too much. This applies with any decision we make, like buying a house or car say. Having too many parameters to consider leads to confusion in decision-making, with humans apparently unable to process more than ten variables for any choice, the optimal number being closer to five.
Betting angles should be simple in the main, predicated on sound logic, and often 'hiding in plain sight'. The more convoluted they are, the more likely the creator has added an extra variable or two to filter out some inconvenient truth. This is a subjective area and one where common sense is our greatest ally. Less is usually more.
Be wary of small sample sizes
The nature of looking at horse racing statistically, which is essentially what angle research boils down to, is that we are invited to make inferences on insignificant sample sizes. The conundrum is thus: too large a sample and the angle is well known and profit gone, too small a sample and the angle is unreliable and may be a fluke.
So what to do? Two things...
1 Seek a happy medium
Somewhere in between those two unsatisfactory sample size groups is a reasonable amount of data and the chance of profit continuing in the short- to medium-term. Where possible, look for as big a sample as you can. An angle with eight winners from ten runners looks fantastic, but how sustainable is that? It's impossible to know on such limited evidence.
One thing we can do in such situations is to widen out the search. For example, if Sire Z's progeny have had eight all-weather sprint winners from ten runners, how does that compare with his turf sprint winners? Or with his all-weather runners overall? We're looking for greater assurance in larger numbers. Chances are we'll still be dealing with relatively small samples, but we'll have a better feel for the sustainability of the micro-micro-sample of ten runs.
2 Proceed with caution
Wise men say only fools rush in
But I can't help falling in love with you
So sung the immortal Elvis Presley, and he wasn't wrong. Once you've satisfied yourself that there at least might be merit in an angle, go forward carefully. Do not rush in. Only fools rush in.
Such angles are prime contenders to be considered in the context of the race overall rather than bet blind. For instance, a trainer with an excellent record with handicap debutants from a tiny sample: is there anything else about this runner to corroborate its chance? Has it been off for more than a month? Is it stepping up in trip, or down in class? Is there a notable jockey change? Has there been money for the horse?
It doesn't take long in most cases to see whether the qualifier should be a 'proper' bet, an 'action' bet, or a watch and squirm job. (For me, there is no such thing as the last named. I'm either betting to win a few quid, or I'm betting to win a cup of tea and a sticky bun, or I'm not betting and I won't cry if the horse wins).
Profit is not the best measure
Most angle researchers have an unhealthy obsession with the Profit/Loss column. Of course we are trying to secure a positive return, but there are any number of traps for the greedy punter whose alpha and omega is pee and ell.
Harking back to what suits a particular bettor, and mindful of the small sample sizes that often manifest, it may be prudent to focus on each way percentage, percentage of rivals beaten (PRB) or percentage of rivals beaten squared (PRB^2). The last named pair, especially PRB^2, are very interesting metrics that will make their way into Geegeez Gold later in 2020 and I will cover them in greater depth at that time. For now, though, Gold users might look to each way percentage as a way of - somewhat artificially but perfectly legitimately - extending the sample size in question.
In terms of profitability, A/E (Actual vs Expected, more information here) is a solid barometer of ongoing value. It's a simple enough concept, where an A/E of greater than 1.00 is considered a positive, an A/E of less than 1.00 is considered a negative, and the further away from 1.00 the number, the better or worse is the expected merit. The A/E column can be found within Geegeez Gold's Query Tool, a tool that will form the cornerstone of parts two and three in this series.
Review, and Realise
Once you've found your angle(s), stored them, and started to bet them, there are two important 'maintenance' jobs to take on. The first is one of review. No matter how large or small the research sample was, every qualifier thereafter swells the knowledge base. Returning to your set of angles on a regular - maybe quarterly, but it depends how much action an angle throws up - basis is excellent discipline. Don't get too hung up on profit and loss from quarter to quarter, but rather focus on whether the horses looked likely beforehand, took a degree of support, and ran well even if in defeat.
Through this review process we start to realise - make real - the angle. A trainer becomes someone whose methods we get to know; likewise a sire, or a course profile, or whatever. We must make friends with these entities, ask questions of them, become more familiar than the market. This is a lot easier than it might sound, particularly in terms of the early markets, which are heavily focused on 'top down' information such as basic recent form, newspaper tipsters and fashionable trainers and jockeys.
'Bottom up' intel - first start in a handicap, favourable draw/pace, no name trainer with his job jockey, and the like - is factored into the market later. This late intelligence is generally underpinned by people close to yards who want to bet, and they can't get a meaningful bet on until nearer the off time. As angle punters we have to second guess them: we'll generally not nick their price, but can nab a few quid at 'ignorant odds' before the smart money arrives.
More often than this, though, are the occasions when we realise that the first flush of love was misguided; that we rushed in as fools, or maybe merely flirted dangerously with a dataset which failed to substantiate itself for the application of further evidence. Reviewing and rejecting these false dawns (no offence, Dawn, if you're reading!) is as valuable - arguably more valuable - than finding a great angle: the first job is to try not to lose money, the second job is to try to win money.
Nothing Lasts Forever
The final point to make in this overture to Angle Research is that nothing lasts forever. You will know you have found a great angle if the strike rate remains largely the same over time while the profit diminishes to a loss. That is simply a function of market awareness and is the lot of any and all statistical edges.
The game, of course, is to continually reinvent our portfolio.
Every week, month or year, there are new trainers waxing and old trainers waning. Likewise sires and, to a lesser extent, jockeys. Tracks change their drainage and, in so doing, reverse their draw biases. Surfaces get relaid and the front-running bias is mitigated as the kickback to later runners becomes less severe.
It's the circle of life, and all the joy within: there is always something else to learn, to discover, to deploy.
Evolve or die: this is the angle punter's mantra.
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In part two of this series, which you can review here, I'll introduce you to Query Tool: what it is, where it lives, what it does and how it does it. And in part three, we'll work through a series of examples: micro angles which can be deployed as they are but, importantly, which are singular examples from rich seams whose nuggets are waiting to be extracted by the inquisitive Gold miner! 😉
00mattbisognohttps://devplatform.ggzssd.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/geegeez_banner_new_300x100.pngmattbisogno2020-03-26 13:42:082020-03-26 13:42:08Horse Racing Betting Angles: Part 1, Research Principles
