Slipperytoad Ratings

How did the cycling team win eight gold medals?
The explanation used by the cycling performance director, Dave Brailsford, was that it was achieved through the “aggregation of marginal gains”. By looking for a 1% gain at everything they do, from mechanics upwards, they pulled together a whole series of small gains that enabled their athletes to dominate their sport.

I have used the quote before in a previous blog posting when I recognised I needed to review all aspects of my betting to seek improvements and achieve consistency.

When handicapping a race, I currently utilse objective measures or benchmarks for pace and speed ratings to evaluate each horse. Some ratings I have developed myself (pace) some created by other sources. Although profitable my approach still lacks consistency and unfortunately takes time to evaluate each race.

It’s no secret that I utlise ratings from the Racing Post. Yes there are various forum’s that slag off their inaccuracies and tweaks (back fitting) to make the hot favourite top of their ratings but all in all for the price they are good value providing *cough* “consistent” ratings covering National Hunt and Flat Racing every day of the week. However you cant get around that fact that there’s always room for improvement so I have decided to take the matter into my own hands.

A rating is the evaluation or assessment of something, in terms of quality (as with a critic rating a novel), quantity (as with an athlete being rated by his or her statistics), or some combination of both.

I guess it was Mark Coton (“Value Betting”) and Clive Holt (“Be A Successful Punter”) who were the first to apply their own race ratings as the foundation of their betting in allocating a score against certain factors such as ground, distance, jockey, trainer form etc etc and when totaled create an objective assessment of each horse. Since those early days, ratings have developed into sophisticated computer algorithms by the best brains money can buy.

Although I have Software Engineering and Computer Science qualifications I am not about to attempt to create my own computer program. I don’t have the time or inclination so like most of my handicapping, my inspiration for my ratings comes from the Americans who like to establish objective measures or “par” standards for speed, class and pace ratings.

My rating par scores are established using statistical techniques. Then  each horse is matched against these standards to create a rating and subsequently a relative ranking between contestants.

I have stated to create ratings for All Weather racing and now I have a statistically significant data set, for races at Bath racecourse as well. So far the ratings are performing as per all ratings in that the top rated horse has a poor strike rate. However the top 4 rated horses are producing some amazing results!

Thursday July 22 2010 – Bath 17:10

Titus Gent 63
Bateleur 60
The Name Is Frank 59
Witchry 57
Mandhooma 57
Emiratesdotcom 49
Talamahana 48
Wooden King 46
Blushing Maid 44
Dynamo Dave 39
Like For Like 38

If the ratings are proven during their trail period, the strategy is to let the them sought out the wheat from the chaff in the initial phases of the process. This should allow me time to focus my handicapping on the main contenders and time to analyse more races,  identifying value and construct profitable bets such as exacta, trifecta, placepot perms and spread bets … … …  in theory!

To close I’ll modify one of Nick Mordins quotes

Ratings are like vampires, once you bring them out into the daylight they wither and die

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