Horse Racing Blogs

I will use a dice in an effort to explain value and how a book or market is created and re-balanced according to the fluctuations in betting patterns.

A standard dice obviously has six numbers so when you roll that dice there would be one chance of any one given number coming up to every five chances of it not which relates to the fact that 5-1 would be the equivalent of fair odds. Fair odds are where you will make no profit by backing all six numbers but lose no money ie if you say backed one pound on all six sides of the dice to come up as at the 5-1 on offer you would have bet six pounds and whichever number wins you would receive your one pound stake back on the winning number plus your five pounds profit meaning you would have neither won nor lost on the deal.

That was the simple part now we get to the tricky part fair odds are calculated to be a 100% market but a bookmaker contrary to popular belief does not care which number comes up as he or she will have formed his or her book or market at over 100% and assuming he can get his market to balance he will make a profit no matter which number comes up.

Hence using the example of six numbers at the fair odds of 5-1 each number has 16.666% chance of coming up which forms the market at 100% this is is simply done by dividing the percentage you are using by the number of options being bet upon ie in this instance 100 divided by 6.

The bookmaker however wants to form the market at about 110% which if he gets it right and balances his book will provide him with a 10% profit on each race or in this case each roll of the dice regardless of which number comes up.

To achieve this we now divide his target market of 110% by six giving us a 18.33% chance of each number coming up which equates to odds of 9-2 (4.5-1) for each number to come up to make things easier I have printed an odds to percentages comparison table which you can access by clicking the highlighted link where you would use the nearest price available to the percentage on offer. Now if you tried backing every number at the advertised odds of 9-2 you will lose and the bookmaker now makes his profit this may seem unfair but not really as his is a business and he takes all the liabilities involved which can be horrendous if he gets it wrong.

The reasoning behind this is that not everything is a simple as rolling the dice and not everyone bets the same amount on each horse or side of the dice. As an example of this supposing you were the bookmaker and the first four bets placed were £2 on number six and £1 on numbers 1, 2 and 3 this means your liabilities or losses would be higher on number 6 and lower on numbers 4 and 5. hence you would have to rebalance your book by adjusting the prices to try and attract more money to be placed on numbers 4 and 5 and less on number 6.

So let us start by leaving numbers 1,2 and 3 at 9-2 which as we know is 18.18% which we times by three to obtain 54.54% our target percentage is 110% minus 54.54% leaves us with 55.46% to use up between the remaining numbers. As we wish to avoid taking any further bets on number 6 we will shorten him to half the odds of numbers 1,2 and 3 which were 9-2 so we now have him priced up at 9-4 which by using the odds to percentages table works out at 30.77% deduct this percentage from the 55.46% we had left between the two remaining numbers of which neither have taken any bets leaves us with 12.345% for each number which again when you reference the aforementioned table works out at 7-1.

Hi
After recommending Frodon yesterday in the Beat The Lotto thread yesterday I was asked why I did not tip up more shorter priced fancied horses as opposed to my usual long shots and each way extra bets.
The simple answer is that I started this site to have some fun and show people that there are other ways to place bets by thinking outside the box and have some fun along the way. Hence topics such as the Cheltenham Countdown and the 100-1 shots threads which are linked into this blog will hopefully help to point out some of the fun options available to punters. The principle behind playing the odds in the ante post Cheltenham market and for backing the rag (the outsider in the field) is that the odds compilers (the people that form the markets) have a limited amount of time to compile odds and therefore are forced to concentrate on the runners at the head of the market, which leaves the possibility of some value to be found amongst the other runners.
I will now insert a table which I have used for the 3.45 at Punchestown today.

Now the obvious winner here is going to be Blackbow who was available at 1-3 on just before the second favourite Santa Rossa became a non runner. The question is would you have considered Blackbow at 1-3 to be the banker of the day. ? If so surely now with Santa Rossa being a non runner you would have to be thinking that as long as Blackbow stays on his feet (although now 1-5 on) he looks unbeatable especially in the eyes of the odds compilers and of course the old enemy (the bookmakers).

This is where I have a problem as although Blackbow is more than likely going to win this easily I cannot bring myself nor can I afford to take on those sort of odds. Now supposing you were hoping to make a small profit on the day of say two points this would now mean putting ten points on Blackbow to achieve your profit on the day. However if you now look at the extra markets you can either back without the favourite/s or could use the same ten points by backing five of the 100-1 plus selections at the each way extras prices. Now as long as any two of them get tenth or better you will have made a better profit than you would have backing the favourite and should only one of them get home you will have only have lost a point or two on the day. ?

In conclusion here are some of the options I would recommend having a look at in relation to playing todays markets. As for betting without the favourite the two horses that are the obvious stand outs for me are the  66-1 shots Bobby Boy and The Brogie Man which are now available at 25-1 betting without Blackbow. Then we get down to the tricky part which is trying to find an each way extra bet from the 100-1+ shots and this is speculative but I would suggest in this instance considering Hardy Man and Roses Queen.

I will now attempt to explain the basics of forming your own odds. I will use the 4.40 at Limerick on Sunday the 31st March 2019 as the example. This is a handicap chase with 13 runners declared and the idea would be to show you how to very basically form your own the odds for that, race. Now at present this race has no weights declared, no form guides, write ups or little else, so you have to work with what you have.
All we have are the runners names, the trainers details and their official ratings. The runners are at present listed alphabetically, but we form our first market by listing them by their official ratings and price them up accordingly.
Having then listed them, we now go to the bottom rated horse which is in this case Presenting Mahler and alter that runners official rating from 109 to (2), this has meant reducing it by 107. You must now reduce all the other ratings by 107 to obtain a new rating for the rest of the field ,which will give us a workable figure to calculate our first set of odds.

To obtain our first set of odds ,we now have to convert our new ratings into a % ,so by totalling all of our new ratings for the thirteen runners we get a total sum of 226. So, by dividing each new rating by 2.26 we will achieve a % rating for each runner. This will form a book (set of odds) to 100% .Unfortunately ,although this would be fair, the bookmakers have to build in a profit margin of usually about 10% ,but we will cover that in part two.
Finally ,we compare the % rating to this chart bet-calculator/odds-converter to obtain the odds for each runner. This is only part one of this thread , I will now wait for the handicapper to allot the weights for the race and that is hopefully where it all changes. You can usually work out what the weights would be from the official ratings but lets take it a step at a time.

As promised I will try and post some relatively informative articles which hopefully give some insight into how to spot some value without following the crowd. I will link this thread to any relevant threads and articles along the way such as my Speed Ratings blog and will then hopefully progress to linking these articles to the more complicated issues and future articles of forming your own markets.

The premise of this article will be to show you how I would go about looking for a value selection to follow later in the year and that may also be capable of springing a surprise or two along the way.

We will start with a sample Key Race which was a NHF race run on the 27th of April at Punchestown.

The result was as follows: Lone Wolf 1st, All For Joy 2nd and Fontley House 3rd the beauty of this race is that none of the three first past the post have gone on to run again so hopefully the old enemy (The Bookmaker) will not have taken a huge interest in the race to date.

However both the 4th horse home YouRaised Me Up and Boot Camp who came 5th both went on to win next time out and the 6th horse home Willing was pulled up but having be adjudged to having been clinically abnormal after the race can be excused the run. The 7th horse home was the beaten favourite and may well have attracted some attention so we will bypass this one for the time being. The 8th placed horse although not setting the world alight has done little wrong and the 10th horse home has gone on to win and be placed twice.

Now we get to fun part the 9th horse home was First Approach the 11th horse home was Aforementioned and the 12th horse home was Southern Nights the rest of the field was to all intents and purposes at no time really in contention. The three horses highlighted have several things in common they were all giving weight to most of their rivals they all hail from decent yards and are all  lightly raced five year olds. Two have winning or creditable PTP form and the last has already been placed over hurdles.

The hope now is that although obviously the first three home especially Lone Wolf (who won with what looked like a little in hand) will probably go on to win again I am hoping that the above mentioned selections (which I have posted in Rob’s Tracker thread) will run first before the game is up and there is still some value to be had. I believe it would be worth keeping a close eye on these three especially when going back over the hurdles or jumps. This idea of looking for Key Races is not new the odds compilers do it all the time but I hope the spin I have put on it will give you some food for thought along the way.

Speed Ratings.

Basically you need to work out how fast your horse is likely to travel carrying a set amount of weight over a set distance. In the case of horse racing underfoot conditions the jockey and the mood and fitness of the individual horse on the day are however variables. However for the purpose of the basics the following is the science part and although the equation used below is not perfect it is one we may all possibly remember from school and is a reasonable starting point for the purpose of this example.

Velocity = mass x acceleration (measured in feet per second)

To obtain an average or constant as a comparison we need to relate the science to the racehorse by using the following figures which obviously need to be converted into feet or seconds to make the equation viable.

An average racehorse is ten foot long
A two mile race is approximately 10560 feet in length
An average two mile race will be run in 4 minutes which is 240 seconds
Therefore 10560 feet divided by 240 seconds equals 44 foot per second divided by 10 foot means a horse running over two miles in distance will be travelling at approximately 4.4 lengths per second.

Now we have an average we need to work in some figures for the going conditions which will be  as per the chart below which is applicable for National Hunt racing. These are not industry standard figures and are my own work so feel free to use your own.
Good Ground                  = 100%
Good To Soft Ground = 103.5%
Soft Ground                     = 107%
Soft to Heavy                  = 111%
Heavy Ground                = 115%

Now we will attempt to put this altogether and include an allowance for the weight carried on the day using genuine form from a horse called Artifice Sivola which has run over a variety of conditions.
04/03/16 @ Newbury 2m on Good To Soft carrying a weight of 11-12.

The race was run in 4 minutes 17.80 seconds (the time the winner crossed the line) which is 257.8 seconds.  Artifice Sivola finished the race 6 lengths behind the winner so we add on at 4.4 lengths a second approximately 1.2 seconds giving you a  finishing time of 259 seconds for our runner.
Now divide our runners time of 259 seconds by the distance of the race which is 2m (but officially 16.5 furlongs) which leaves you with a finishing speed of 15.70 seconds a furlong.  The ground conditions that day were Good To Soft so you now divide the  15.70  by 103.5%  as per the above list and you achieve a figure of 15.17 seconds per furlong. You now have to make an allowance for the weight carried which was 11-12 which is 166 pound. Divide the 15.17 by the 166 and then times by 100 (to give you a workable figure) which in this case is 9.14.

Confused yet.. you should be because I still am as there are lots of ways to do your own figures but if you get a calculation that works for you it can be a money spinner when used in the right circumstances as although speed ratings are primarily used on the flat they are a cracking reference point over shorter trips especially in hurdle races and of course when used in NHF (National Hunt Flat) races.