17th April 2017
Hi ,
It's important to understand the classes in horse racing because once you understand how they work, you'll be able to use this knowledge to make a profit.
So today I want to look at how we can measure class differently and use this extra knowledge to gain an edge.
The secret ingredient to all profitable betting is... be different.
You have to look at a race in a different way to the majority of the betting public, otherwise you'll never be able to profit.
But we have some great news…
Most of the betting public don’t try very hard to find their selections and… that is why they lose!
What does this mean for us?
It means, that if we’re prepared to spend a little bit of time, then the results can be incredible.
You don’t always need to come up with crazily complex methods, sometimes the simplest concepts work wonders.
We know that the official class ratings of races are based on the official rating a horse has. This means that while we have a race class, it’s a very broad sweep of the brush.
The quality of the runners in one Class 3 race can be very different to another Class 3 race.
If we can identify the true class of the runners in the race, then we can determine if it is likely to be competitive or not and who the best runners are.
So... how do we identify the true class?
In order to do that, we need to first define what class actually is…
• Is it the quality of a horse’s breeding?
• Is it the the amount of money a horse has won?
• Is it how strongly it has raced?
These are just a few possible definitions and I'm sure that you can come up with many more.
There are many ways that class can be defined, and this means… there are many ways we can rate the class of a horse.
In fact, the more ways we can find to rate a race then the more ways we can find to make a profit.
Let’s take just one of the definitions above… the amount of money a horse has won.
If we keep track of the class of a horse by recording its winnings (win and place separately) over different race conditions, then we’ll start to build a good record of where horses perform well.
We could take this a stage further by making the most recent winnings worth more than the winnings it gained a year or more ago. After all, as a horse goes through its career it has high points and low points. It never stands still. The more recent results are far more relevant to how a horse will perform today than results from a long time ago.
To do this, we may decide that any winnings a horse won more than a year ago we only count 50% of, more than 2 years ago 25% of them etc…
Doing this you’re starting to get some useful figures. But, there’s still more we can do.
A horse that won a race by a nose is not as impressive as a horse that won the same race by 5 lengths. So…
…maybe we should also include a weighting on our class rating that allows for this difference.
After all, at the moment both runners would get the same prize money and we wouldn’t known that one was better than the other.
If we multiplied a horses winnings by the distance they won by or, in the case of a place, divided them by the distance behind the winner, then we’re now adjusting them to take account of how well the horse actually ran in each race in our class figure.
This is just one way of measuring the class of a race And it leaves us with a rating for each runner that looks at the class based on…
• How much a horse has earned
• Allowing for more recent races to be more important
• Taking into account how well a horse performed in each race
Now, you have a completely different way of monitoring the class of horses, compare these to the official classes and you will begin to see some different horses highlighted as being the best in a race.
Best Wishes,
Michael Wilding
