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10th August 2015

Hi ,

Recently I’ve been looking at odds line creation and how it works.

Today I want to look at a more advanced technique to creating odds lines using what is known as fuzzy logic to help you find the best horses to bet in the race.

Although this is not strictly an odds line creation technique but it can be very powerful and is a good place to start when you are interested in developing your own odds lines.

Fuzzy logic is called fuzzy because we rather than using specific numbers we use words such as Strong Contender and Unlikely To Contend.

This means that when we look at the results for a race we see at a glance how each runner is likely to perform without having to go and then interpret the numbers that we are getting.

This makes it much easier to get started.

However don’t be fooled into thinking that because it is using fuzzy logic it isn’t as powerful as using raw numbers, in fact if used correctly it can be a very powerful technique.

First of all we need to start by creating our fuzzy levels such as…

• Strong Contender
• Contender
• Weak Contender
• Non-Contender

You can of course use whatever and however many you want but I will stick with these four through the rest of this example.

Next we need to choose what factors we want to use to measure the performance of our horses. As an example I’m going to use…

• Recent Form
• Speed
• Preference For Going
• Class Level

Now we need to decide which of these factors is most important in our assessment of how a horse is likely to run.

We do this by assigning what is known as a weight to each of the factors. This weight is a numerical value and we multiply each factors rating for a horse by its weight.

For example if you think Recent Form is most important then you may assign a weight of 100 to this factors ratings, if Speed was the next most important then you may assign a weight of 62 to this factors ratings.

If you are unsure of how much weight to give then you should give the most important factor a weight of 100 and then multiply this by 0.62 for the next most important factor, this would be 62, then multiply this by 0.62 for the next most important factor, this would be 38 etc…

Finally we need to assign a level to each of our fuzzy logic rules. We give the most important rating the lowest number so we would get…

• Strong Contender = 1
• Contender = 2
• Weak Contender = 3
• Non-Contender = 4

For each horse we now rate them from 1-4 based on how strong a contender we believe they are for each factor.

Below you can see an example for four horses.

If we multiply each horses ranking by the weight for the factor this will look like…

I have also added up the total for each horse as you can see in the far right column. The next step is to add up the total of all our weights…

100 + 62 + 38 + 24 = 224

We divide each horses total rating by this amount, 224.

We can now convert our final ratings back into our fuzzy logic levels. Remember that…

• Strong Contender = 1
• Contender = 2
• Weak Contender = 3
• Non-Contender = 4

So we would get…

As you can now see, at a quick glance we can now see the horses that have a chance of contending in this race. This is a very powerful technique to analyse races.

Back next Monday.

Michael Wilding