Some All Weather Racing Statistics

I am sorry that I haven’t been writing as many articles recently. I have been so busy I just haven’t had time to think but my aim is to write at least two articles for the RaceAdvisor every week. I have left it quite late this week so expect another one over the next couple of days! Today I thought it would be interesting to take a look at All Weather Racing and some of the statistics that can help us to find profitable bets.

Currently there are AW race tracks at Great Leighs, Kempton, Lingfield, Southwell and Wolverhampton. We shall look at the top 3 OR (Official Rating) horses from. If we break these down by number of runners in race we get:

The first thing we notice is that we are getting a fairly linear strike rate. As we are betting on the first three we don’t want to take into account any race less than six. For now we shall stick with using races with six or more runners in though. We can see that in races with six runners we have 2962 runners. Since we are betting three horses in every race this is 987.33 runners in each race approximately. The reason that we have a decimal point is because we will sometimes be betting more than three horses. In races where there are joint first, second or third top rated horses we shall be betting on all of them. For the sake of analysis though we shall just be using three as our calculation figure, so in order to get an idea of our real strike rate we need to multiply the answer above by three. Let’s narrow our searching down to races with 12 runners as this provides the largest amount of runners. The strike rate is 10.65 but we are betting three runners in each race so we multiply it by three to get 31.95, a much better figure. What else is it important to notice in this type of statistic? The P/L figure is following the same trend as the number horses bet, obviously if we are betting more horses we are likely to lose more money and so this is not a useful figure. Much more useful is the ROI figure which does not follow a linear pattern at all. A linear pattern is one that flows from a high number to a low number or vice-versa, the ROI numbers jump about all over the place which suggests the factor we are using isn’t very good. We know that it isn’t and we certainly aren’t about to go and bet on the top three OR rated horses in every race with twelve runners. So now we have focussed our research on a very specific field maybe we can find some factors that are important and that can be found in any newspaper or site each day.

Rather than use the standard information you find by just browsing a paper maybe if we start with a piece of data that requires a little bit of work we are more likely to find an angle that could be profitable. I am going to look at pace. There is very little way of calculating the likely pace of a horse without sectional timings and unfortunately these are not generally available in the UK. If somebody arranged for them to be taken privately then they would find a huge amount of value in betting purely on pace lines. Even without this information though we can make a general assessment as to whether the horse is likely to lead, be prominent or get held up in a race based on its previous runs. Just by looking at the in-running comments of previous ratings you will be able to make a good judgement call on this.

You can see immediately from the table above that horses who get held up in these races make a huge loss in comparison to the ones who lead and are prominent. In fact we make a profit just betting the horses that lead over the two years of the sample data. It is unlikely that this would carry on each year but it shows that there is value to be had in these horses. We only had 295 bets, which is around 148 each year and our strike rate was 47.79%. Don’t forget we are betting on three horses per race and so we need to multiply our strike rate by three.

Maybe if we focus on horses that lead in AW races with twelve runners then we might be able to find ourselves an even higher level of return.

By looking at the Days Since the horse Last Raced we begin to see a pattern. For those of you who are mathematicians we have a shape similar to a bell curve (with a couple of anomalies). For those of you who aren’t mathematicians you can see by looking at the P/L column how we come up to a peak at 22 days before slowly coming down again. The chances are that if we broke down 15-21 days in to smaller segments we would see a slower rise rather than the apparent quick jump up to a profit of 60.75. The strike rate follows a similar pattern as well which is also promising. It is logical as well that these horses would need a period of time off in order to recover but not too long because we don’t want them to forget how to race! Let us narrow down even more then to only look at those horses which have races between 22 and 56 days. We can no longer multiply by three on the strike rate because we are removing some of our initial top three ranked from being contenders.

Over the 2 years that this was analysed betting on these horses would have produced profits of:

Only a few selections but a great profit! This is almost certainly back fitted and I wouldn’t suggest betting on these horses. What I wanted to show is some of the factors that affect AW racing for when you are creating your own systems or handicapping a race. In this article we have looked at just a few factors and have already discovered that two very important things to take into consideration in AW racing is the pace and the number of days since a horse last raced. When you are handicapping AW racing in the future I would suggest that a good starting point is to find the horses that you think are going to lead or be prominent, any that aren’t you may want to remove from your contenders list.

If you would like to ask us a question and have an article written about then please contact us by clicking here.

Tags: analysis, asian handicap, assess, assessment, bet, betting, data, draw, follow, Football, game, half time, handicap, handicapping, horse, horses, match, money, odds, one, profit, racing, rate, rating, ratings, roi, selections, soccer, strike, system, teams, tip, win