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Betting Strategy: Know your own ratings, trust your own ratings
Betting Strategy 
/ Simon Rowlands / 20 July 2010 / 7 Comments Free £25 Bet View Market
According to Simon's ratings Cape Blanco is a lay in the place market at [2.0] for this Saturday's Betfair King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes
Simon Rowlands rounds off his series of pieces about creating your own ratings and uses Saturday's big race, The Betfair King George VI, to illustrate his findings...
"Ratings based on form and times are a very good way of establishing what a horse has already achieved, but in order for them to be useful they need to play their part in predicting what will happen in the future."
In the last two weeks I have given a simplified account of how race standardisation works in races in which we know little or nothing about the horses and in races in which we know a great deal about the horses (but in which standardisation is still a better guide than guessing at which horse to "rate the race around").This week I will look at races which exist somewhere between the two extremes.
It is still good practice to calculate race standards (where they exist) as in week one in such instances. Some races do repeatedly attract the same sorts of horses for reasons that should be fairly obvious.
The Derby may not be quite the race it was, but it is still a valuable mile-and-a-half contest for three-year-olds in early-June, and it regularly attracts many of the horses best qualified for such a test, rather than the same stables' second- or third-raters. A horse's performance in such a race often defines it better than anything it has done before.
Nonetheless, the runners in The Derby, and a multitude of similar and dissimilar races, have an individual history, and it would be foolish to ignore that history. One way of taking it into account is to calculate standards based on the horses' ratings going into a race and to adjust according to the degree to which the horses are exposed and the type of race they are contesting.
What you do is take the prior ratings of the principals (the first five home will be used in this illustration) and use that information to convert the race into a handicap. You then treat that "handicap" along lines similar to those explained in week two of this series.
An example could be the Irish Derby at the Curragh at the end of last month. Prior ratings of 122 Cape Blanco, 117 Midas Touch, 123 Jan Vermeer, 117 Monterosso and 120 At First Sight point to a handicap "mark" of 119.8 (the average of those ratings for the first five home), given that all horses ran off the same weights and are of the same age.
As mentioned previously with handicaps, winners tend to exceed their marks, placed horses tend to exceed or get close to exceeding their marks, and unplaced horses may well have run below their marks (through misfortune, lack of ability or a number of other reasons).
Taking the "difference at the weights" as being 0, 1, 3, 5 and 10, and using the same standards as for handicaps last week, the winner Cape Blanco could be expected to have exceeded his "mark" by 5.5, which is 125.3; the second Midas Touch could be expected to have exceeded his "mark" by 2.5, which is 122.3, in which case Cape Blanco ran to 123.3; the third Jan Vermeer ran to 119.8-0.5=119.3 (making Cape Blanco 122.3); the fourth Monterosso ran to 119.8-3.5=116.3 (Cape Blanco 121.3); and the fifth At First Sight ran to 119.8-6.5=113.3 (Cape Blanco 123.3).
Figures of 125.3, 123.3, 122.3, 121.3 and 123.3 for Cape Blanco result in a standard assessment of 123.8 by the weighting process explained previously. Relatively small adjustments for race type and a few other factors need to be made on top of this.
That is an example of a race in which neither weight carried nor weight-for-age was an issue, but it is straightforward to apply the same method to races in which horses carry differential weights and/or are of different ages.
If you believe some in the media, form handicapping is purely down to individual judgement, with no rules or guidelines in place. Opinions, intuition and judgement can still have their place in assessing racehorse performance, of course. But it does not need to be quite so subjective or so clueless as some would have us believe.
Hopefully this short (and necessarily simplified) series will have got that message across if nothing else.
.....
Ratings based on form and times are a very good way of establishing what a horse has already achieved, but in order for them to be useful they need to play their part in predicting what will happen in the future.
It is possible to convert ratings into odds in a number of different ways. My own method, which I hope to expand on at a later stage, has the following odds line as a starting point for Saturday's big race, The Betfair King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes: [2.24] Workforce, [4.1] Harbinger, [11.5] Dar Re Mi, [13.0] Cape Blanco, [15.5] Youmzain, [20.0] Daryakana, [44.0] At First Sight, [110.0] Confront.
Given the odds on offer, I may end up backing Dar Re Mi (18) and possibly At First Sight (300), and I may well look to lay Cape Blanco in the place market ([9.6] to win and just [2.0] to place).
The Buzz King | 23 July 2010
Interesting. So would you say that you bet mainly on form or inside info, Simon?
Simon Rowlands | 25 July 2010
Hello, TBK.
I am not privy to much/any inside information, other than that which is expressed in the market, and which I try to figure out like the next person.
It is clear that I did not get the right information on the above (Dar Re Mi and At First Sight withdrawn soon after I wrote this!) but form study did end up with me siding with Harbinger, who touched over 6.0 shortly before the off, as well as place-laying Cape Blanco.
I believe that market reading (which may reflect much of the information you do not know yourself) can be a very important part of successful betting.
But you need to have a sound grasp of what the participants have achieved and are likely to achieve before factoring this in.
I hope to write about converting ratings into odds, and of the need for an appreciation of markets on top of that, in coming weeks.
Simon
pcle | 27 July 2010
I have been following racing since 1967. My impression is that Timeform 2yo ratings are lower over last say 20 years than in 1960-80 period.
Were early ratings done using this standardization methodology, (seems like there'd be a calibration issue). For instance, Windy City at 141 - was that a timefigure rating or form-driven?
Simon Rowlands | 28 July 2010
pcle.
You are correct in your impression that Timeform 2-y-o ratings are lower now than they once were. My view is that this came about in the mid-1980s (which happens to be around the time I started at Timeform), as it became clear that horses who excelled as 2-y-os were not carrying their form through as 3-y-os in quite the way they once were.
I reckon this was down to changes in training approaches and alterations in the programme for both 2-y-os and older horses.
Where once the top 2-y-o might have been rated something like 133, and confirmed that in their classic year, they were frequently dropping below that level in their second season from the mid-1980s onwards.
Horses like Huntingdale, rated 132 after winning the 1985 Dewhurst but only 124 the following year, caused the standards of leading 2-y-o races to come under scrutiny and to be revised downwards.
Unfortunately, while I am old, I am nowhere near old enough to remember Windy City! My impression is that early Timeform ratings were heavily influenced by time analysis (and by Phil Bull), whereas time is an important but smaller component now.
It is possible that race standardisation at Timeform originated as late as the 1970s, possibly through the influence of the mathematician John Whitley. But it was certainly very well-established when I arrived there in 1986.
Simon
pcle | 30 July 2010
Thanks, very interesting. It was my father's collection of "Best Racehorses" from the 1940s that got me interested in the statistical side of racing.
I hope someone will do a history of Timeform post-Phil Bull (I have the biography of Phil Bull)
Frank H | 05 August 2010
Really enjoying your articles Simon and especially keen to see your take on converting ratings to odds.
I've been producing speed/time figures and converting to odds for some time. However, it's something I'm constantly needing to analyse, update and improve. Had help from someone who gave advice regarding how to use post-race ratings and then working out standard deviations in order to produce 'tissues' for future races but I'm very interested in what you've got to say about the issue.
Hopefully you'll get a chance to post soon.
Simon Rowlands | 06 August 2010
Many thanks, Frank H: I really appreciate that.
The couple of pieces about ratings to odds are elsewhere on this site: http://betting.betfair.com/horse-racing/bloggers/simon-rowlands/post-222-040810.html
I would welcome any suggestions you might have on the subject. There are plenty of ways of tackling it, and the article is meant to give an indication of a starting point similar to one that I recently discovered has been around for some time.
Simon