To ward off the attentions of a werewolf use a silver bullet.
From the Hammer Horror films of my childhood, garlic, holy water or a cross almost did the trick against Christopher Lee; however nothing beats a stake through the heart for those close encounters with a vampire!
To fend off the curse of a legitimate favourite I shall deploy two counter measures in my approach:
- By default include the favourite in my short list; once I have evaluated the other contenders classify the favourite as legitimate, vulnerable or false.
- If the favourite is legitimate consider a place bet.
The first countermeasure if self explanatory, basically respect the favourite until proven other wise.
The second countermeasure has been proven to be profitable (Dr Z’s Beat the Racetrack – Ziemba and Hausch) and is summarised as follows.
The public undebets favourites and low odds horses even more to place and show than to win. By monitoring the pools, we can occasionally find overlays because much of the crowd are casual fans and generally overbets longshots in the place/show slots, leading to overlays on the favourites.
Barry Meadows – Money Secrets at the Racetrack
The problem is how do you calculate fair place odds for each horse?
One approach is to use the bookmakers’ method in dividing the win odds by 1/4 or 1/5th depending on the race type (handicapping or non-handicap). Unfortunately this method has been proven to be inaccurate and crude.
With the advent of Betfair you can use the various API’s to calculate place odds using win odds and the differing amounts of money on each horse in the place pool. This approach requires programming skills (and time) which I am not interesting in developing even though I am a Software Engineer by training.
Scientifically you could use the approach advocated by Lo and Bacon-Shone (2007)
Apparently some bookmakers and Tefal heads on betfair use this formula in arriving at odds for the place pool.
I have adopted a simple approach that uses win odds and statistics which is easy to implement in an Excel spreadsheet.
Armed with my own assessment of fair odds to make the frame, for any favourite I cannot oppose I can now determine if there is value betting the market leader(s) to place.
Related Posts
Tags: Tissue