Read all sorts of commentaries and tips across a range of racing disciplines on the most popular horse racing blog in Britain, from staff and guest writers.
This is the second in a short series of articles connected with betting on horse races in running, writes Dave Renham. In the first piece, which you can read here, I discussed the idea of DOBBING, which essentially means ‘double or bust’: you either double your money or lose your stake. Just to recap, here is a worked example:
Imagine you back a horse at 6.0 for £10; in order to create a potential DOB you try and lay the horse at half the odds for double the stake – so you set a lay at 3.0 (half of 6.0) for £20 (double £10). If the horse hits 3.0 or lower in running, your lay bet will be matched and regardless of the result you will win £10 (less commission). If required, there is a little more detail in the first article.
This second article will dig into the numbers in an attempt to see whether we can improve our chances of finding DOBBERS. I will look at 20 months’ worth of recent UK flat data, which equates to over 12,000 races, covering over 100,000 runners. So let’s get cracking!
Dobbing Percentages by Distance
My first port of call is the distance of the race. In terms of dobbing percentage there is a clear pattern when it comes to distance:
As we can see, the longer the race, the better the chance a horse has of DOBBING. In the first article I had alluded to the fact that this might be the case, and it is always good to see the numbers support the theory. The minimum distance of 5 furlongs gives us the lowest overall percentage (38.8%), whereas the longer distances of 13 to 16 furlongs have seen horses DOB over 44% of the time, while 17f+ races hit 45.2%.
I can think of three logical reasons why there is such a discrepancy when we compare 5f races to races of 17f or more.
Firstly, 5f sprints only take around a minute; races of 17f or more take three or four times as long. These longer races give more time for traders to spot horses that are making eye-catching progress / travelling well.
Secondly, we know that 5f events really disadvantage horses that take up a position near, or at, the rear of the field early. Hence a good proportion of slow starters / held up runners in sprints are not going to get close enough to the action at the front in time. So the chances of these horses DOBBING is relatively low. In contrast, horses that start slowly or are held up in 17f+ races have plenty of time to recover and get into a more competitive position.
And thirdly, keeping on the run style theme, front runners win around 2.5 times as often over 5f as they do over 17f+. It is easy to imagine that, in races where horses that make most or all the running over 5f, very few other runners get in a dangerous enough position to shorten markedly in price and hence DOB.
In fact, having checked that last theory, and although I only looked at 30 5f races where the winner led from start to finish, only 25% of runners dobbed in these races. That’s well below the 38.8% overall percentage for 5f races. I would not expect that 25% DOBBING figure to change too much even if I back-checked 300 races rather than 30. Unfortunately it is not something I can research quickly, therefore the modest sample.
Dobbing Percentages by Market Rank
Moving on to the position the horse holds in the betting market, and as a reminder, odds on runners have been ignored in the figures as they cannot DOB (see first article for full explanation).
Favourites DOB the most; close to 45% of the time – this is probably because a good proportion of market leaders win and, of those who don’t, most run well. I am slightly surprised to see the other market ranks relatively uniform and not sliding downwards left to right. I thought that would be the case, but there is no clear cut pattern.
Dobbing Percentages by Course
In the first article I mused on whether course configurations can make a difference to DOB percentages. Camera angles are different at certain tracks, for example, and as we know courses in this country vary massively in terms of layout. If we look at Chester’s tight bullring track…
…we can see the course is roughly a mile in circumference with short straights. Compare this now to York’s expansive gallopers’ paradise:
The circumference of the track at York is roughly double that of Chester and the finishing straight is nearly five furlongs in length.
Every track in the UK is unique – some are undulating, some have downhill stretches, uphill stretches, long or short straights, sharp bends, etc. Therefore, I would expect to see some variance across the different courses in terms of DOB%. To begin with, let’s look at the DOBBING percentages for each course.
There is a 7% differential in terms of percentages of runners successfully dobbing between Sandown at the top (46.3%) and Newcastle at the bottom (39.2%). It is interesting to note that three of the four lowest DOBBING courses are all-weather ones (Chelmsford, Wolves and Newcastle). Indeed, the other three all-weather courses also reside in the bottom half of the table. Is this down to the level of competition on the all-weather being slightly below that of the turf? Possibly.
Now we know from earlier findings that the distance of races makes a difference DOBBING wise, so maybe courses that have a lower percentage of sprint races enjoy better DOBBING percentages. Likewise do courses with a higher percentage of sprint races have poorer DOBBING percentages?
To try and test out this theory, I ordered all courses in the previous table from 1 to 37 starting with Newcastle who had the lowest DOB%. Hence I put Newcastle in position 1, Wolves in position 2 and so on up to Sandown in position 37. I wanted to use these ‘positions’ to help make the comparison.
I then calculated the percentage of sprint races (6f or shorter) held at each course during the same time frame, ordering the courses from 1 to 37, thus:
Bath top the list with over 50% of all their races being sprints, while Epsom has the lowest figure with just 15.3% of their races being at trips no further than 6f.
Having given the tracks a rank in terms of percentage of races at the course that were sprints, I could compare this with their DOB% rank. For the course DOB% to be strongly affected by race distance then the course ranks for the two variables should be similar.
In some cases they were – Thirsk for example was in position 3 in both: the North Yorkshire track had the third lowest DOB% matching perfectly with the third highest percentage of races that were sprints. In other cases, though, they didn’t match. Wolverhampton, for instance, was in position 2 for DOB%, but position 25 for percentage of sprint races. To try and show the comparison for all the courses I have created line graphs comparing their ranks. I have split it into two so that it fits on the screen:
For perfect correlation we would need to see the blue and orange lines almost follow the same path. That has not happened here taking all the courses as a whole, so we need to look to see how many courses have their orange and blue dots close to each other. 15 of the 37 courses have their two ranks varying by five or less. Meanwhile, nine of the 37 courses have their two ranks varying by 15 or more.
Thus the jury is still out in terms of saying that the course DOB percentages are affected by distance considerations. My guess is that it is a factor at some courses, but there are other factors also making a difference.
Dobbing Percentages by Run Style
To conclude this second article I want to look at possibly my most favoured area of analysis: run style. It should be noted for the run style research for this piece, I have not been able to use such a big data set, due to the time-consuming nature of this type of research. However, I have been able to analyse 4000 runners looking at how run style impacts the chances of DOBBING.
I mentioned in the first article that horses that lead for the majority of the race, or are leading at the furlong pole while looking like a potential winner, are occasions when the leader’s price is likely to shorten considerably. Obviously, if the price drops enough then the horse will DOB. Hence it would logically follow that front runners should have the highest DOB percentage. This is indeed the case as the chart below clearly illustrates. I have used the run style categories on geegeez.co.uk, and the following stats are pulled from all flat race distances from 5f to 2m 6f:
Clearly run style is important from a DOBBING perspective. Front runners DOB over 60% of the time across the test sample, and the chart clearly shows the downward trend from front of the field early to back of the field early. 4000 runners across all distances should be a big enough sample for these figures to be accurate. If I was able to look at 100,000 runners, I would be surprised if the percentages for each group changed by more than two or three percentage points. Moreover, I personally researched run style DOBBING percentages back around 2011/2012 and the percentage splits then correlate well with this newer sample.
It should be noted, however, that the distance of the race will cause slight changes to the run style DOB figures. 5-6f races will see the DOB% for ‘Led’ increase slightly to around the 64-65% mark; conversely the DOB% for ‘Held Up’ drops to under the 30% mark. In longer races of 1m4f or more the reverse happens, with the DOB% for ‘Led’ dropping to 55-56% while the ‘Held Up’ DOB% increases to 38-39%. This makes perfect sense as front runners win such a high percentage of sprint races compared to longer races and, as we know, winners will DOB except for that very small proportion that are priced under 2.02.
-----
That’s the end of this review of flat race DOBBING. The Run Style figures should give readers who may be thinking about employing a DOBBING strategy a possible way in. Next time, I’ll perform a similar analysis of National Hunt racing. Until then…
DR
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/telecaster_toodarnhot_Dante_830x320.jpg320830Dave Renhamhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngDave Renham2023-09-19 13:06:462023-09-19 13:06:46Introduction to Dobbing: Part 2
If you enjoy perfection, as I am certain it’s something for which the British Horseracing Authority’s handicappers strive for every day, then the St Leger was something of a disappointment, writes Tony Stafford. It will have been doubly so I’m sure for Mr Michael Harris, the gentleman responsible for flat races over 11 furlongs and above.
The ratings for the nine runners (four from the redoubtable O’Brien team) were, in finishing order, Conspicuous 115, Arrest 114, Desert Hero 110, Tower Of London 109, Gregory 111, Chesspiece 109, Middle Earth 102, pacemaker Denmark 102, and Alexandropolis 101.
What was wrong with him? On his rating, surely Gregory should have been third, but maybe a clue to why he wasn’t: John Gosden came over to Aidan before the race and told him he thought the Golden Horns do not like soft ground. It seemed Gregory didn’t.
Obviously, it was a major triumph for Mr Harris, who no doubt will push up the winner into the 120’s and therefore offer hope that he can go to the Arc in a fortnight’s time with a chance of emulating the trainer’s so far only two wins (Dylan Thomas 2007) and Found (2016) in the great French race at ParisLongchamp – see I remembered!
That has been the immediate target for the last four Coolmore St Leger winners but to no avail. The best candidate in 2023 of course would probably have been Auguste Rodin, dual Derby and Irish Champion Stakes hero who, as Ryan reminded me emphatically after yesterday’s win, is firmly online for the Breeders’ Cup Turf.
O’Brien has won 16 races at that late autumn extravaganza, and he is sure to have another formidable team to represent himself and his owners who have kept him supplied with high-class material in the entirety of his career. But it’s what you do with raw material.
The numbers are even more mind-boggling for the five Classic races on either side of the Irish Sea. Saturday’s triumph put him on 43 Classic wins in the UK over the 26 seasons since King Of Kings, 1998 2000 Guineas and Shahtoush (Oaks) gave him a double right at the start of his time as master of Ballydoyle.
He got going a year earlier at home, where he has 50 domestic Classic wins so far with 15 in the Irish Derby leading the way. Here it’s seven in the 1000 Guineas, 10 in the 2000 Guineas, nine in the Derby, ten in the Oaks and seven in the St Leger. The relative home scores are 10, 12, 15, seven and six.
It seems O’Brien has more respect for the status of the Doncaster version, a race that has survived many questions as to three considerations; that it should remain the province of three-year-olds, that they should be only entire colts or fillies; and that it should remain at the one mile, six furlongs and 115 yards of yore. The Irish race has kept its trip of one mile six, but has long been open to geldings and older horses.
Continuous was an appropriate name for a Coolmore winner and there was also much delight, especially from Christy Grassick, in the immediate aftermath. He was doubly delighted, as he celebrated a second Japanese-bred winner this year after Auguste Rodin, while glorying in the identity of the maternal grand-sire, you guessed it, that late but unquestionably very great Galileo.
That champion’s victory in the 2001 Derby was Aidan’s first at Epsom and also marked the arrival on the Ballydoyle scene of Michael Tabor. Start as you intend to go on might well be his mantra. John Magnier and his formidable back-up team – son M V was busily shopping at Keeneland September last week with sire sensation Into Mischief the latest to attract his attention – have no mind to ease off.
Their perennial search is to identify and secure from the major racing and breeding establishments around the world suitable outcross stallions to prolong the potency of the Northern Dancer/ Sadler’s Wells/ Galileo legend. I don’t think they will go far wrong if history is anything to go by.
Continuous in a way exemplified the manner of O’Brien’s training, one of continuous improvement. The son of Heart’s Cry (Sunday Silence) did win his only two races at two, including a Group 3, but when third to The Foxes in the Dante at York and eighth in the Prix du Jockey Club, his limitations seemed there for all to see.
Next though, in finishing a four-length Royal Ascot runner-up to Epsom Derby second King Of Speed he moved up a notch in the hierarchy in Tipperary. An easy success in that most informative of all St Leger trials, York’s Great Voltigeur, should have been enough to convince the sceptics, as it established him as an obvious candidate.
He needed to nudge ahead of the filly Savethelastdance, but when the Epsom runner-up and Irish Oaks winner was beaten into third behind emerging stable-companion Warm Heart in the Yorkshire Oaks on fast ground, her challenge lost some of its impetus. Warm Heart’s victory in the Prix Vermeille last weekend only solidified Savethelastdance’s credentials.
Ironically, had she turned up on Saturday, she would have had the ground to her liking and been worthy of her place in the field against the colts. With the chance of easy ground for her remaining potential targets, she should be fine and O’Brien should be able to find another big target for her before the end of the year.
Continuous had one ingredient that the other eight runners on Town Moor lacked, an instant turn of speed which should make him a threat at 12 furlongs in Paris. No doubt the major Japanese studs, especially Shadai Farm, will be having their eyes on at least a shared stallion deal if not an outright buy. It would take many, many millions of yen to secure him at 183 yen to the £.
It was nice to feel close to the action on Saturday. We had lunch in a room next door to the Royal Box, which unusually for Doncaster had two attendees (the King and Queen) giving veracity to its title. The snag was the corridors were thronged with security people at every turn.
We left the room before they did, but without an escort, I got sidetracked, neither getting into the paddock until the horses had left for the start, and didn’t see them either, unlike most of the crowd who enjoyed their presence and the performance of his horse Desert Hero, trained by William Haggas for a creditable third behind Frankie Dettori on runner-up Arrest.
At least, going to watch by the winning line, it was easy to enjoy Ryan’s clockwork ride from ground level and then to be involved in the post-race photo upon Aidan’s “Come on Tony” exhortation.
So we were left to marvel at the skill of the man with 93 UK and Irish Classic winners to his credit and yet still only in his mid-50’s. To gauge what it means in modern terms, the late Sir Henry Cecil managed 25, saving the best for last with Galileo’s son Frankel in the 2000 Guineas. Sir Michael Stoute has 16 to his credit and John Gosden (with or without Thady) a round dozen. In statistical terms, of the 260 Classic races in that time, he has won getting on for 40% of them and of the UK, just about 35%.
All that was left was to wonder whether Howard Wright was there? My former colleague at the Daily Telegraph had indeed trekked up from Surrey to his birth town and while I neglected to poke my nose in the press room, he was in attendance.
“Yes, I missed the first three,” said Howard yesterday, “But this was my 75th anniversary, so I’ve seen the last 76.” As I said, I should have called in, but greed got the better of me. A few yards from the far end of the main car park is a fantastic fish and chip shop. I can’t manage chips yet, but as my neuralgia seems to be responding to treatment, the famed scampi was fine.
I always used to say that I could make a portion of this delicious concoction last me all the way down to Grantham. I called for the larger (ten) option, but it barely got me to Bawtry. On second thoughts, I must have been a double-ten portion man. Figures! I love the St Leger, almost as much as Aidan, Ryan and the Coolmore boys.
DOBBING is a word I came across around ten years ago in connection with in play/in running betting, writes Dave Renham. DOBBING is usually shortened to ‘DOB’ which means ‘double or bust’. Essentially it is an in play trading strategy. If the trade/DOB is successful, we double our original stake, if the trade/DOB is unsuccessful we ‘bust’ or lose our stake.
What is DOBBING?
For people who have not heard of DOBBING before I will give you a worked example which hopefully will help:
Let us imagine you back a horse at 10.0 for £10; in order to create a potential DOB you try and lay the horse at half the odds for double the stake – so you set a lay at 5.0 for £20. If the horse hits 5.0 or lower in running, your lay bet will be matched and regardless of the result you will win £10 (less commission).
Here are the basic mathematics behind the two potential winning outcomes:
- If the horse goes onto win the race, you get £90 returned from the ‘back’ part of the bet while you lose £80 on the ‘lay’ part of the bet. This gives you a £10 profit.
- If the horse does not go onto win but reaches 5.0 or lower in running, then you lose your £10 stake from the ‘back’ bet, but gain £20 from the lay part of wager – again giving a £10 profit.
- If the lay part of the bet is not matched with a horse that does not win the race, you lose your original £10 stake.
The table below is another way to look at it, showing the three possible outcomes:
For dobbing to be profitable long term, we are probably looking to have a success rate of around 54% or more. This figure has to be a bit higher than a 50.1% baseline as we need to take commission into account.
As Russell Clarke mentioned in the first of his excellent in running articles (which you can read here), only about 20% of all money traded on a horse race occurs in running. Hence, there are far fewer people that trade in running compared with those that don’t. I am sure there are plenty of you out there who have thought about betting in running, but have decided against as it is not for you. There will be some of you who trade and are very successful. Personally, I do dabble in running from time to time, but despite using the market leading trading software, I know I am up against seasoned trading pros. I might be able to produce pre-race plans that are as good as most, but my decision making / speed under pressure is definitely not at the expert level.
An advantage of using this dobbing idea for some punters/traders is that you can place both parts of the bet/trade before the race starts. Therefore there is no need for trading software and you do not have to make quick decisions in running because you have made them already. Hence if you are like me, this is potentially a big plus. However, as the saying goes ‘for every positive there is a negative’. I find I say this phrase regularly in my life away from racing.
I tutor maths and chess online, and my chess students regularly hear this positive/negative quote pertaining to certain moves they make. It is the same here: let us imagine you set your ‘DOB’ pre-race and leave it to run its course. What happens if say you back it at 10.0 and set the lay at 5.0, but by the time the race starts the horse has drifted 15.5? OK the horse might still hit 5.0 in running, but this is going to happen far less often than it would if the starting price was 10.0. Of course the horse could shorten before the off as well, but as a general rule more horses drift than shorten. I know this because I have written about this before, and I have double checked recent data too. As an example, if we look at opening show prices compared to SP in 2023 (UK flat racing), we get the following figures:
Some pretty strong evidence to back up the general rule I mentioned above.
Of course there are ways round this potential issue by placing your back bet as late as possible; literally as the last horse loads in the stalls. The later you place it, the closer the price will be to its eventual Betfair Starting Price. That will mean however, that you will have to calculate and place the lay part of the bet immediately afterwards, and if you have literally placed your bet at the last second, you will be setting your lay after the race has got underway. Having said that, you should be able to put the lay price and stake in the Betfair machine before the horses have reached the end of the first furlong. This manual approach, though, clearly requires you to be around at the start of every race.
An alternative to avoid either the price fluctuating or needing to be tied to your trading screen at the start of each race, is to use some trading software. It is not too complicated to automate the software to back a horse at Betfair SP and once the Betfair SP is established, a lay at half those odds will be automatically placed. The lay will be calculated immediately the Betfair SP has been established (a few seconds after the off) to create the potential ‘DOB’.
DOB Examples
It is time to look at some races to see what can happen to Betfair prices in running. How many horses tend to DOB in a race, how many do not? Initially let me look at four races run on the same day (August 29th 2023). They are all 10 runner events – I chose those races simply to make the ‘dobbing calculation’ easy to understand.
Race 1 – 2.15 Ripon 1m2f handicap (4yo+)
The result is shown below with the Betfair SPs (BSP) and the lowest price matched in running (IP LOW). The penultimate column (BSP/IPL) is the result of dividing the BSP by the IP LOW. For a successful DOB the BSP needs to have at least halved in price; hence showing a figure of 2 or more. Successful DOBBERS are highlighted in green:
In this example, despite nine of the ten horses shortening in price, only two (Bollin Margaret and Cedar Rapids) DOBBED. There was one near miss (Tele Red 1.90). If you watch the race back, or even just look at the in running comments, you will probably understand why there were so few DOBBERS. The early leader, King Titan, led for less than two furlongs and hence was never going to shorten in price enough leading for less than a fifth of the race, especially when the lead was a narrow one.
Cedar Rapids took up the running after 2f leading for the next six furlongs and, considering his starting price of 83.06 and that he was still leading 2f from home, it is fairly easy to appreciate why he shortened to 22 and hence DOBBED. Bollin Margaret then took over the lead having just passed the 2f pole and led to the finish. Hence, as a winner at a BSP of 13.36, Bollin Margaret was always going to DOB.
In addition, once Bollin Margaret took over, the nearest challengers never really looked like getting to her. We could have found that out by watching the race replay or by looking at the in running comments. The comments for Bollin Margaret were ‘took keen hold, prominent, switched right over 2f out, ridden to lead over 1f out, kept on well final 110yds, always doing enough’. Hence with none of her closest pursuers really looking like winning this helps explains why they did not DOB.
Obviously each race is different and the number of horses that DOB will not be the same proportion of runners in each race (as we will see).
IMPORTANT NOTE: Before moving onto the second race, it should be noted that race winners do not always DOB, because the BSP has to be at least 2.02 for a horse to halve in decimal price (to 1.01, the lowest value on Betfair). Hence odds on winners cannot DOB.
Race 2 – 4.00 Ripon 6f handicap (3yo+)
Onto a sprint handicap a bit later on the same card:
This time, three of the ten runners DOBBED, one more than the first race. In this race three horses led at various points: the winner Twelfth Knight, as well as Abate and Russco. Twelfth Knight and Russco both DOBBED, while Abate was a very near miss with a BSP to IP LOW ratio of 1.98. Horses that lead at some point in the race are usually going to shorten in price, sometimes considerably so. That is the type of pattern I would generally expect to see, and the first two races have conformed to that pattern.
Race 3 – 4.15 Newbury 1m 4f handicap (3yo only)
Over to Newbury now for a handicap over 12 furlongs:
This time we see over half the field (six of the ten runners) DOBBING, despite only two horses leading during the race. The high number of DOBBERS is almost certainly due to the fact that the winner Graham, who had been clear 4f out, started to experience that lead steadily eroding. Hence, many in play traders observing the pack close on the leader would have thought / hoped / expected that one or more of those challengers would potentially win. This almost certainly explains why two horses traded so low; Medieval Gold (2nd) traded at 1.5, and Gordon Grey (4th) traded at 2.06.
Race 4 – 6.30 Musselburgh 5f handicap (3yo+)
Here are the facts and figures for this Musselburgh sprint:
An even split here with five horses DOBBING and five not. Three different horses led, of which two DOBBED (Sixcor, the winner, and the runner up, The Grey Lass). Two of the other three that DOBBED come as no real surprise if you watch the race back. Beneficiary made good headway mid race and as he was a big price, he would have caught the eye of enough traders to see his price contract sufficiently to DOB. Favourite Aconcagua Mountain travelled strongly and a furlong out looked the most likely winner. He faded in the final furlong but not before trading as low as 1.56.
What these four races tell us is that every race is going to be different from a DOBBING perspective. Just like every race is different if you are simply backing a horse or indeed laying one.
DOB Anomalies
Readers should note, that there are occasions when only the winner DOBS. An example was the two-mile Goodwood Cup this year run on 1st August. In this race, Quickthorn was well clear of the field after four furlongs, and a mile later with just half a mile to go he was still 20 lengths clear. The opposition assumed that Tom Marquand, the jockey of Quickthorn, had gone out too quick but they were sadly mistaken, and no other horse really stood a chance. Knowing how the race panned out explains why it was no surprise that no horse was really that close to halving in price in running.
Here is the result with the accompanying in running data:
This scenario of a single DOBBER in a race will occur from time to time especially in very one-sided events. However, it is extremely unusual for every horse in a race to DOB. In previous research from 2018 I had a dim recollection that there was a race at Nottingham where all the runners DOBBED. After doing some digging I found the race in question. It was the 7.25 on 7th August 2018. It was a 10f handicap with six runners. Here is the result:
Not only did all six DOB, but they all DOBBED fairly comfortably. One reason for this may be that four of the six led the race at some point, while the two who didn’t, were close to the lead making headway at different points.
DOB Success Rates
Going back to the four 10-runner races I shared earlier, of the 40 runners, 16 DOBBED. This equates to 40% of the runners. Previous flat racing DOBBING research I have done, over different time frames, showed the overall DOBBING percentage average out at around this 40% mark. Considering we need a success rate of roughly 14% higher than this, there is clearly a job on to make DOBBING profitable. So, how can we improve upon this base figure of 40%? Here are some thoughts / questions, which I will aim to expand upon in subsequent articles:
How does run style affect DOB success? I have already discussed the fact that horses that take the lead at some point in a race are likely to shorten in price. Horses that lead for the majority of the race, or are leading at the furlong pole while looking like a potential winner, are both occasions when the leader’s price is likely to shorten considerably. Obviously if the price drops enough then the horse will DOB. Front runners, especially in sprints, are horses that are likely to have real potential to DOB; and, of course, the longer they lead the more chance of this happening. Hold up horses are not screaming out DOBBERS, unless they get into a much more forward position at the business end of the race.
You often hear commentators say that a horse is ‘travelling well’. Horses that are ‘on the bridle’ tend to shorten in price as they are not under any pressure, or so it seems. This is a potentially time consuming idea to test, but I want to put it out there.
Does race distance make a difference? Longer races mean greater elapsed time, and logic dictates that there will be more price fluctuation as a result of this. Hence, the chance of DOBBING may increase.
Do courses make a difference?Certain courses, Bath for example, have difficult camera angles in the final couple of furlongs. I remember trying to trade in running in a Bath sprint around ten years ago; never again! It was so difficult to monitor all the horses from a front on angle. Other course considerations I guess that may have a positive bearing on DOBBING percentages, such as those with uphill finishes, or with long home straights.
What effect does the price of a horse have? One sensible argument would be that shorter priced runners may DOB more often than longer prices, simply because the market suggests they will be more competitive: they are more likely to be mounting a serious challenge at some point in the race. An alternative argument would be that horses starting a long odds do not have to go ‘low’ in running to DOB. An 80.0 BSP shot only needs to reach 40.0 to DOB. Whereas a 4.0 (3/1) shot needs to hit 2.0 (even money).
My questions and thoughts don’t stop there, but it is time to wind up this introduction to DOBBING. As you can see we have a fair bit of digging and number crunching to do – or at least I do! And, at this stage I have only really discussed flat racing; I have not even mentioned National Hunt racing as yet...
- DR
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Coronet_PrixJeanRomanet_830x320.jpg320830Dave Renhamhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngDave Renham2023-09-12 08:39:102023-09-12 08:40:34An Introduction to ‘Dobbing’
Whatever happened to Trials Day? For many years, three weeks before the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe the French conveniently staged a trio of perfectly-framed races principally for the home defence to flex their muscles in preparation for their upcoming day of destiny at (Paris)Longchamp on the first Sunday in October, writes Tony Stafford. It also attracted some of our best candidates to reveal their talents.
One, the Prix Niel, was for three-year-olds; another, for four and upwards was the Prix Foy, these two both at Group 2 level. The third, the Group 1 Prix Vermeille, was and remains for three and up fillies and mares. All three are run over the full Arc distance of 2400 metres (1m4f).
They staged it yesterday as usual, but it was totally over-shadowed by the second day of Irish Champions Weekend, run at the Curragh – no longer it seems with the requirement of the definite article, viz “The” to go before the track name. I find it as incongruous as I do to precede Longchamp with the name of the country’s capital making it most unnecessarily unwieldy.
Why not LondonEpsom? I shouldn’t be irritated but I just can’t help it. In one other regular piece of work I do every day, I even referred to the Matron Stakes as being run at The Curragh. Silly me.
While the two Group 2 races have £65k to the winner, this was seemingly not enough inducement for a challenger from the UK. There were just a couple of Aidan O’Brien pages to accompany his Vermeille contender Warm Heart, winner last time of the Yorkshire Oaks. There, with a mixture of speed and determination under James Doyle, she held off the Frankie Dettori-ridden Free Wind, with Coolmore first string Savethelastdance third.
Warm Heart recovered well enough from her York exertions to join William Haggas’ Sea Silk Road and Joseph O’Brien’s Above The Curve in challenging for the French Group 1 and she came out on top again in another tight finish.
She had a neck in hand of home runner Melo Melo with Sea Silk Road an excellent third at 31/1. This race carried £303k to the winner and brought Aidan O’Brien a 4,000th career victory. He had a few also at the two days at Leopardstown and Curragh, although racegoers (and me) hoping to see the colt I think could be the best juvenile we’ve seen in recent years, City Of Troy, were disappointed as he was withdrawn from the National Stakes owing to the unsuitably slow ground.
Of course, you don’t get to 4,000 winners without making provision for such frustrations, and in what was left as a four-runner race, his colt Henry Longfellow got the Ryan Moore touch as a narrow favourite in the market.
Henry Longfellow, by Dubawi out of Minding, if you please, had won quite impressively on debut, but it was only just enough to convince the bookmakers who considered Bucanero Fuerte, easy winner of the Group 1 Phoenix Stakes last time and an Amo Racing colt trained by Adrian Murray, to be his near equal on the boards.
The team evidently formulated a plan to try to thwart City Of Troy had he been there – and stayed with it to handle the substitute. The trouble was, both pacemaker Cuban Thunder and Bucanero Fuerte went off fast, leaving Ryan to sit behind them as though going out for a Sunday ride on his hack in the park. When he asked for an effort, either the effect was instantaneous, or the other pair were already knackered, but a five length win from the fourth runner Islandsinthestream, a two-length runner-up to Henry last time, and running on for second again, gives the form a solid look.
Elsewhere yesterday, Kyprios’ return to action in the Irish St Leger provided a disappointment. Last year’s champion stayer, held up in rear in another four-runner affair, never quite managed to challenge Roger Varian’s 2022 Doncaster St Leger winner Eldar Eldarov, who was always travelling best. You can expect a major improvement from Kyprios next time and it will be interesting to see the outcome if they reconvene at Ascot next month on our Champions Day.
I went to Ian Williams’ Owners’ Day yesterday and enjoyed some delicious food – yes, the neuralgia has been behaving itself as long as I do likewise. While queueing, I met a man who works for Arena Racing and he was looking forward to Wednesday’s final day of the Racing League, moved from Thursday so the jockeys that have been assigned to the various teams, would not be excluded by having to ride on the normal opening day of this year’s St Leger meeting at Doncaster.
The big race on Saturday is sure to benefit from the non-clash with the Leopardstown segment of last weekend’s Irish spectacular and, with pots of money to be doled out to owners, teams and jockeys, that can only be a good thing.
Some trainers who had been very much against the idea have been virtually forced to go along with it, as quite a few of the regular races in the Calendar have been lost to accommodate the 50-odd heats in the competition.
It’s easy to see why 39 have been entered for the final race on Wednesday as this open-ended affair (top-rated 107) over 1m4f carries a £51k first prize, which compares very well with the two French Group 2 races yesterday. The slight snag is that to get a run, you must convince your team’s manager – in the case of Williams, it’s Jamie Osborne for Wales and the West – that your horse merits inclusion. Late decisions have inevitably caused trainers to miss other equally suitable if less remunerative alternatives.
For those left on the shelf – and it has happened more lately after some less than inspiring early entry figures – there’s always the option of running instead for instance at Bath. The seven races on the same day carry a total win money of £31,000. The Arc/Sky led series was a small step in the right direction, and as my fellow buffet-queuer said, “At least it might bring some younger people in to enjoy racing. There are not many youngsters here, are there?”
Thereby the conundrum. To own a horse takes a lot of money and the profile of owners with Williams is generally of people who either now have or have had their own businesses, made their money, and can afford the expense and can put up with the poor prizemoney.
True, they deserve to be looked after when they go racing, but the younger people that are so eagerly sought to become enthusiasts and regular racegoers are confronted by high entrance fees, even with some junior concessions, and very expensive catering. There are many countries which stage high-class horse racing where costs for the pubic are nowhere near as forbidding.
It was good to see Auguste Rodin add the Irish Champion Stakes to his Derby and Irish Derby wins, never mind his two lapses in the 2,000 Guineas and King George. If he had won the first Classic, instead of running at Leopardstwn on Saturday, he could have been trying to go one better than Camelot, aiming to be the first Triple Crown winner since Nijinsky in 1970, the stated aim for him at the start of the year.
For a short time yesterday, seeing that Doncaster doesn’t begin until Thursday, I wondered why it was only going to be a three-day meeting instead as the usual four.
Checking with the BHA site, though, I saw that, as with the first meeting every year on Town Moor, it will now extend to Sunday, a welcome injection of high-class racing on that day after some pitifully drab two-meeting Sundays in the UK in recent weeks.
The Group 3 Sceptre Stakes for fillies and mares and the Listed Scarbrough Stakes are joined by some lesser quality but competitive handicaps. But what represents a master stroke by the race planners (just a one-week reprieve for you I’m afraid, BHA) is that the Legends’ race for former great jockeys can have a fabulous weekend television and on-the-spot audience. Well done! Credit where it’s due.
- TS
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/WarmHeart_PrixVermeille_Longchamp2023.png319830Tony Staffordhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngTony Stafford2023-09-11 06:11:532023-09-11 06:11:53Monday Musings: Of Champions and Challengers
In recent articles I have looked at a very simple ratings method for all-age handicap races which, on initial testing, seems to have shown more positives than negatives, writes Dave Renham. I hope and expect to write further about these ratings at a later date, but need more time to do some further detailed research. This will take several weeks, probably a couple of months.
In this somewhat related article, I would like to share with you the process I went through when trying to create ratings for two-year-old (2yo) races. My plan was to stick to a similar methodology which in essence was:
a) find what I thought were key factors/variables;
b) use PRB (Percentage of Rivals Beaten) data once more as my metric;
c) combine the PRB figures in the same way as the all-age handicap ratings by simply adding up the relevant scores.
There are a number of different types of 2yo races such as maidens, novice events, Group/Listed races (which are all non-handicaps) and nurseries (handicaps). My idea was to try to rate the maiden and novice races. To me these are quite similar types of race and hence I hoped that one cap could be worn by both. Of course that would not necessarily be the case, but even if the ratings worked well for one of the two then I would have achieved something.
To begin with, let me discuss factors I considered for use. Here was my ‘longlist’:
Trainer record – in 2yo maidens/novices
Sire stats – in 2yo maidens/novices
Debut course
Horse Sex – colt, gelding or filly
Horse purchase price
Most Recent form – Last time out (LTO) finishing position
Recent market data – LTO price
Fitness – days since last race
Draw
The eagle eyed among regular readers will note that the last four factors are ones I used in my original ratings for all-age handicaps.
From this starting point I felt I needed to trim the list down, for two reasons. Firstly, as I mentioned in my very first ratings article, when creating ratings I prefer not to over complicate things. Secondly, some of the above factors would cause some problems for one reason or another.
The draw was the first to be discarded. In all of the articles I have written on the draw in the past, I have mentioned that draw bias works best in handicap races. Hence, although the draw may affect some 2yo races at certain courses, I felt it was not a reliable enough factor to use here. Next to go was purchase price as I had no easy way to source it, or indeed back check it on past results. Further, many horses are home bred and therefore never go through a sales ring. I felt it had importance, which is why it made the longlist, and I wished I had some data I could ‘crunch’ to see how important it actually was, but I felt it was a no go for these ratings.
Fitness using the days since last run metric was the third factor I decided to discard. My main reasoning here is that the advantage of a quick return, that tends to happen in older age handicaps, is not replicated for 2yo runners. I looked briefly at some win and placed stats which were very even across the days ranges, so I felt it was unlikely that the more accurate PRB figures would really give a wide enough spread of figures. I felt it wasn’t worth the hours of data gathering and sorting if the figures were likely to be almost identical across the board. One makes decisions like this all the time when delving into horse racing research. Of course sometimes we make incorrect ones but, with experience, decision making improves.
That left me with six factors/variables so let’s look at each in a little more depth.
1 Trainer record – I am not someone who bets often in 2yo races. Occasionally I will if I spot what I feel is a good betting opportunity. However, my main bets that involve 2yos occur when I play the Tote Placepot. Most meetings have at least one 2yo race in their first six so I have to use some methodology to choose which juvenile runners I am going to put into my ‘pot’. Trainer information is always my first call.
Many trainers do follow a similar path year in, year out; they generally stick to the same training methods, know which races to target, etc. Now it should be noted (albeit it is fairly obvious) that each year trainers have a completely new ‘string’ of 2yos, so variances in overall performance are going to happen from year to year. However, when we think about the bigger stables they tend to keep many of the same owners, and these are likely to be purchasing similar animals to what they have done in the past. Hence, past trainer 2yo data is usually quite a good guide to future performance. The graph below offers a real life illustration through the record of Charlie Appleby in 2yo maidens/novice races over the past four full years:
These figures are very similar from season to season and, as I am writing this, his current stats for 2023 are in the same ballpark – 31% win strike rate and 55% each way strike rate.
So how best to utilise past 2yo trainer data was my main consideration as there were different stats I could potentially use. One option would be to use PRB figures calculated from all 2yo maiden and novice events for each individual trainer. However, my concern with that was that the number of runs that a 2yo has is usually extremely important. This is a graph I shared in a previous article written in April when examining 2yos on their second starts:
As we can see there is a significant difference in 2yo performance on debut compared to second starts. Such differences would be replicated when comparing the relevant PRB figures. Not only that, this graph is taking all 2yo runners into account and as you can imagine some specific trainers have even more acute differences. For example, and once again using data from 2017 to 2022, Michael Dods had a 2yo debut win SR% of 5.3%, whereas his second starters won over 16% of the time. William Haggas 2yo debutants scored less than 12% of the time, but on second start won 27% of their races. These are just two examples showing one potential pitfall of using overall 2yo trainer data to produce a trainer rating score.
It was at this point in retrospect when the alarm bells should have been ringing, about how complicated just creating the trainer part of these ratings would be. However, I thought that using previous runs would almost certainly be the way I would want to go, and trainer stats would make the final ‘cut’. However, before digging any further I wanted to look at the other five factors.
2 Sire Stats – sire stats are often an important part of the 2yo betting picture due to the limited past run data most juveniles have. In some cases, especially early season, all the runners in a 2yo race will be making their debut. Hence we have no past form to go on, so we have to look elsewhere. Sires are the fathers of the respective horses and can have a significant influence on their offspring. When we dig deeper we find that the offspring of a good proportion of sires have clear traits or preferences. These may be going/ground related, distance related, age related, experience related, etc.
Having essentially decided to use previous starts as a key factor in determining the trainer rating PRB score, it would be difficult to do the same for sire stats, as this would potentially overlap somewhat. It is not as bad as using LTO position and Beaten distance LTO as two factors in a system as they are virtually the same metric. However, the improvement from debut to second start for sires would mirror trainer improvement to some extent.
Therefore for sire stats I felt a distance metric made more sense: splitting the 2yo sire PRB data into two, obtaining figures for sprints (5-6f) and for longer 2yo races (7f or more). The majority of 2yo races are contested at a mile or less so this seemed logical to me. To give an example of a sire whose 2yo distance stats differ across these two distance ranges, let me share the non-handicap 2yo win stats for Kingman. In 5-6f races his strike rate has been 12.8%, at 7f or longer this increases to 22.2%.
Interestingly, though, when I calculated PRB figures for Kingman they were closer than I had expected. His progeny’s 2yo PRB for 7f+ was 0.64 compared with 0.60 for 5-6f. This comparison helps to highlight why I believe PRB figures are the most accurate of all the statistical metrics that compare performance. Win stats are a good barometer, but PRB figures are much better because they effective ‘grade’ each run; not just whether the horse won or didn’t, or placed or didn’t.
No Nay Never is another sire whose 2yo offspring show a distance bias. At sprint distances his 2yo non-handicappers score over 19% of the time, at 7f or longer this drops to 13.6%. The PRB figures for No Nay Never this time do underline the strength of this bias as the sprint figure stands at 0.63, while the 7f+ one is much lower at 0.53.
Sire stats using this distance metric looked a good option to use in the ratings.
3 Debut course – this is something I have researched in the past and the track at which a horse makes its debut can be a factor in how it subsequently performs. It particularly affects the second career start as we can see if we compare the PRB figures for second starting 2yo that made their debut at either Ascot, Newmarket, Redcar or Ripon.
The importance of the debut course becomes less of a factor the more runs a 2yo has, but it still can have a bearing, so I would have to separate out the number of runs since debut in some way or other. Alarm bells were ringing this time as this factor is definitely going to be time consuming from a data gathering aspect, as I would need to collect the LTO course data one at a time and then combine number of last runs to each course. That could mean anything between 100 and 200 separate data ‘dumps’ into excel as well as adding extra columns and data to it. Ouch. However, at this point I was undeterred, as there have been times in the past when I have had to perform an enormous amount of data collection to write an article or series of articles. Also, I felt this factor was really important and would improve the ratings if it was included.
Having slightly buried my head in the sand regarding the enormity of this project, the question I now considered was does factoring in debut course combined with past career runs conflict / overlap with the trainer data idea which was going to use past runs too? I guessed it would to a small extent, but I was open-minded enough not to dismiss using this metric because of that slight concern. Clearly trainers have their preferred starting points for 2yos in terms of races and courses for debut runs, but individual course debut data combines all trainers and hence any significant overlap is extremely unclear. I was fairly confident – hopeful at least! – that the two factors would not conflict enough to make the ratings biased in any way.
Before moving on, I started to think about another problem that I had known would be a real issue in terms of 2yo ratings. What to do if the horse was making its debut? They have no past race data to work with; no debut course stats. What PRB rating could be assigned to those runners? I had several things to ponder, but decided to move onto the next factor as I felt it would at least have fewer issues.
4 Horse Sex – the sex of a horse has relevance and in 2yo races there are essentially three types of runners – colts (entire males), geldings (males who have been gelded) and fillies (females). I did some initial number crunching as this data collection was easy to do and not time consuming. I compared their PRB figures based on about 25,000 2yo runs in maidens and novices. Here are the findings:
As we can see colts have the best record, followed by fillies and finally geldings. The majority of 2yo runners are colts and fillies (around 87% of all runners combined) leaving geldings that make up a much smaller 13% of the runners.
These stats look promising from a ratings perspective, and I had some data collection completed!
Onto the last two factors now, both of which I used last time.
5 Most Recent form – LTO finishing position is a good barometer of most recent form and it seemed to work well in the handicap ratings. However, I would have same issue with the course debut stats with horses making their debut. What PRB figure would I use?
6 LTO price – LTO price also seemed to work well with the handicap ratings but again the question was what to do about debutants?
*
At this point I was feeling happy that potentially I had six factors to combine to create the ratings. On the flip side, there were a myriad of issues. Perhaps the biggest was the problem of 2yos that were making their debut. These runners would not have PRB figures for three of the six factors (LTO course, LTO position, LTO price). I needed to consider the options.
Option 1 – To use just one of the three LTO factors giving debut runners a standard PRB figure based on all debut run performances.
Option 2 - Combining the three LTO factors giving debut runners a standard PRB figure based on all debut run performances, and dividing the score by three. This would mean all three factors had some relevance (in essence 1/3 of a rating factor).
Option 3 – Use the ratings only on 2yo races where all the runners had previously run at least once.
Of the three I felt the last option made the most sense as I really wanted to combine all six factors if I could. Based on a look at race data going back to 2019, 33% of 2yo races involved horses that all had run at least once previously. This would still provide around 350 races a year where the ratings could be employed. Added to that I had the facility to pull out all these races.
Having decided that was the preferred way forward, thoughts turned to the enormity of the data collection. As a researcher one is limited by the amount of data one has, or can access. We are also limited to a great extent by our computer skills. If you are able to write and use sophisticated computer programs for example, this gives you a huge advantage over those who cannot. If you have a vast database of results with every single type of variable/factor you can think of you also have a big advantage. Time is such a precious commodity and, without either of the above, my constant issue was the hours required for complicated or detailed research.
My expertise in terms of data number crunching is purely Microsoft Excel-based. I am proficient using Excel and use certain time-saving tricks such as cell formulae, pivot tables, functions like ‘VLOOK up’, and so on. However, I cannot write VBA code for macros, which impinges greatly on what I am able to do in terms of quantity and within certain time frames.
Back to the problem in hand. It was time to look at each factor again and try to work out how much work / hours would be involved with each one.
Trainer record – the advantage I have from a research perspective in terms of trainer data is that when I export thousands of results, the trainer of each horse is part of the data set. Hence as a rule trainer data collection/manipulation is not as time consuming as many others things. On the negative side I would be looking at probably three or four separate data sets which I would need to combine and sort. Once that was done I could create the necessary formulae to calculate individual PRB figures and once those are added for all runners, I could use a pivot table to help calculate each trainer’s individual PRB figure. At least I didn’t have to worry about getting the debut stats; that would save me a little time.
The ideal plan would be to have PRB trainer figures for horses that have raced once, raced twice, and then group those who have raced three or more times together.
That part of the research was not too daunting; definitely doable. It would take several hours probably, but not several days!
Sire stats – when I started thinking about how ‘easy’ it would be pulling and then crunching the sire PRB data for the two distance ranges, I suddenly realised that a trick I often use with sire data collection would not work for PRB figures. I could pull sire data relatively quickly if I was using win strike rates or each way strike rates. BUT not for PRB figures. It suddenly dawned on me that I would have to go one at a time, sire by sire. If that wasn’t bad enough from a time perspective, I also realised that even once I’d done that I’d need to find a way of ‘marrying’ the sire data with the trainer data. That would be even more time consuming and rather fiddly to do.
I thought then, OK I could ditch the sire stats part. I’ll still have five factors to use. The other ratings worked well with five, and even with four when I rated races without the draw factor.
Debut course – back to this potentially tricky factor. I no longer needed to worry about debutants and what figure I would assign to them. However, as I mentioned earlier, I would still need to collect the LTO course data one course at a time combined with the number of career runs the horse had. As with the trainer data collection plan the aim would be to have ‘course on debut’ PRB figures for horses that had raced once, twice, and three or more. Earlier I had reckoned that I would need to collect separate data around 100 to 200 times and marry it together; it was clear that this was going to be within that range, although at the lower end (roughly 110).
-------
It was at this point that, if I had a towel nearby, I would have thrown it in! I had already reached the moment where the data collection and subsequent number crunching was too much to comprehend and hence attempt. It would take several weeks – far too many hours of my time for what I was endeavouring to do. Not only that, I still had three other rating factors where I would need to gather data. That being said, data collection for those three factors would all be far less onerous than the first three. However, it would still be several hours’ worth to add on top.
I was at a crossroads: I needed to decide whether I totally shelved my idea, or adapted it in some way. It has already been established that logically I cannot back test the data over several hundred races as I’d like to, due to the vast amount of time it would take. However, an alternative would be to look to rate races one by one, in real time as it were. Find races for the remainder of the season that qualify and then number crunch each individual race. To be able to do that though, I would still need to have sourced and collated the trainer data from the last few seasons (probably going back to 2015 or thereabouts).
In addition, I would need to source and calculate the PRB figures for LTO position and LTO price. I cannot use the PRB figures I used in the all-age handicap ratings because I used past all-age handicaps to calculate them. To collate the LTO position and LTO price PRB figures for 2yos would not take too long. Again, hours rather than days. On a more positive note the horse sex figures I had already calculated so that rating factor is no problem.
Then, for the sire stats (which I could incorporate doing it this way) and the debut course stats, I would need to check each horse in the race, crunching and then collating the relevant figures. That would take some time, and rating one race would potentially take up to 20 minutes if there was a big field of runners. On the plus side, once I had calculated the individual sire PRB figure that could be added to my 2yo ratings database.
The same would apply for the course on debut/number of career runs PRB figures. Once one was calculated that, too, could be added to the database. After rating, say, 20 to 30 races, the sire PRB stats and the debut course PRB stats would be starting to build up. That would make rating subsequent races far easier as I would start to have some data to hand for some horses that I didn’t need to recalculate.
Hence this is a potential way forward for these ratings should I choose to go that route in future. It will still be a very slow process, and because of that I am undecided in terms of what to do. What is most likely to happen is that I will start to collate some stats over the coming weeks, then try and rate five or six races, and go from there. If the first few races offer some positive signs, it will be easier to plough on and look at more races. If they don’t then it possibly is back to the drawing board.
-----
I hope this article has highlighted the fact that not all horse racing research goes smoothly.
It also shows that, despite all the best intentions, some ideas, no matter how good they may turn out to be, are simply too time-consuming or difficult to research. What has happened to me here is not a one off. In the past I have started researching numerous ideas with the plan of writing about them, only to abort the process at some point. So I’m used to the disappointment!
That was going to be the end of the article, but before checking it through I decided to source and collate the trainer data. As I have now done that I feel it is only fair to share the data with you. If nothing else, you now have some 2yo trainer PRB figures that may prove useful.
Below is a table of 2yo maiden/novice PRB figures for a selection of trainers. I have chosen the 30 trainers who have saddled the most 2yo runners. The figures are grouped as I discussed earlier into horses that have run once previously, horses that have had two career starts and then horses who have run three or more times:
As you can see most trainers have similar figures in the first two columns, with the third column being the best. My next job will be to source and calculate the PRB trainer figures for horses making their debut. However, that will need to wait for another time.
So I will finish here and ponder what next as far as my attempt to produce ratings for 2yo maiden/novice races is concerned. There will be an update in the future, I promise!
DR
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/LTO_PRB.png320830Dave Renhamhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngDave Renham2023-09-04 08:53:522023-09-04 08:53:52An Attempt at Creating 2yo Ratings
There’s modesty and then there’s Dubaian owner Ahmad Al Shaikh, writes Tony Stafford. We’ve known each other for more than 30 years, since he used to be the media specialist attached to the Sheikh Mohammed entourage when our main topic, apart from the racing, was our mutual lack of success in keeping off the kilos.
Ever genial, and now pleasingly if not excessively trimmed, Ahmad worked for his country’s first official newspaper Al Ittihad and he remains an advisor. He was employed by the Dubai Government but always loved his trips to Europe for the major race meetings when the Sheikh Mohammed support team was much more in evidence than now.
Why modest? I think this covers it. We bumped into each other in the paddock at Epsom before last year’s Derby. Introducing me to his colleague, he said: “I’m here to support my friend – he has the favourite for the big race.” The friend was Saeed Suhail and his horse Desert Crown, trained by Sir Michael Stoute, duly won the Classic as the 5/2 market leader.
What Ahmad declined to say as we spoke was that he also had a runner in the race, and his horse Hoo Ya Mal, a 150/1 chance trained by Andrew Balding and ridden by David Probert, finished a creditable runner-up. That was Al Shaikh’s second Derby, and third Classic, runner-up, all at big prices.
Khalifa Sat, also trained by Balding, was second at 50/1 in the Covid Derby of 2020 won by shock Aidan O’Brien outsider Serpentine, and Glory Awaits was another 150/1 no-hoper when runner-up to Jim Bolger’s Dawn Approach in the 2013 2000 Guineas when trained by Kevin Ryan.
All three Classic placed runners were cheaply-bought and that is the normal strategy of this sensible man, whose latest big-race winner, Dubai Mile, has just left Charlie Johnston, Ahmad having sold a half share to Martyn Meade.
A £20k purchase by Mark Johnston at the 2021 Goffs Orby sale, he is a son of the ill-fated Roaring Lion, who covered only for one season at a fee of £40k. The Johnston pattern is always to buy and then issue a list to existing and prospective owners. Ahmad had the speed off the mark to secure him.
Dubai Mile’s appeal as a potential stallion is obvious, having won twice as a juvenile before finishing a close second to The Foxes in the Royal Lodge at Newmarket and then winning the Group1 Criterium De Saint-Cloud over one mile, two furlongs.
Fifth in the Guineas, he couldn’t match the exploits of his two predecessors in the Derby, but having switched from Charlie Johnston, he will race for the rest of this season for Freddie and Martyn Meade before hopefully joining Aclaim and co in their stallion team.
“It’s always been my ambition to own a stallion, so I rejected many offers to sell him. But when Martyn Meade came along with an offer to buy a half with a view to standing him as a stallion, I was delighted. I can’t wait to see his progeny running on the track.”
Al Shaikh does have a smaller interest with another stallion, Khalifa Sat, who was the result of a foal share between the Irish National Stud, who own Free Will, and Lacken Stud, owners of the mare Thermopylae. Twenty years old at the time of her covering by the then first-season stallion Free Will, she has produced ten previous foals, and Khalifa Sat was the last of hers to race. Seven in all were winners.
Khalifa Sat had cost £40k, also at Goffs Orby, and won more than three times that for his Derby second place alone. He had one more, unsuccessful, run and was then retired owing to lameness. He stands at a fee of €2,000 at Lacken Stud.
The post-Epsom story of the two horses that finished one-two last year is interesting, and it’s a matter of opinion, which of the two friends has fared better in the aftermath of that epic day in June last year.
Desert Crown did not race again in 2022 despite having several possible targets and stayed in training as a four-year-old. He made a very promising reappearance after more than eleven months off with a close second to subsequent King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes winner Hukum in the Brigadier Gerard Stakes at Sandown.
He of course also had the King George on his agenda but had to miss it and then last month came the unkindest cut of all, a fractured fetlock when undergoing his final piece of work preparing for the Juddmonte International at York. He has had screws fitted and Bruce Raymond, racing manager to Mr Suhail, says, “The operation went well but he isn’t out of the woods yet.” Obviously there will be no question of his running again in 2023 and the issue of whether the son of Nathaniel will race on as a five-year-old will need to be addressed.
Ahmad didn’t allow himself too long to dwell on his colt’s exploits at Epsom. In the days between Epsom and Royal Ascot, the Goffs London sale at Kensington Palace Gardens offers owners wishing to sell prospective Royal meeting runners the chance of securing a top price. Mr Al Shaikh needed no second bidding.
Hoo Ya Mal was an obvious target for the stamina-loving Australian market and appealed as a potential Melbourne Cup candidate.
George Boughey was the immediate beneficiary as Hoo Ya Mal was sold for £1.2 million to the bid of Gai Waterhouse. He had three runs for Boughey while awaiting the journey Down Under, winning the Group 3 March Stakes (1m6f) at the late August meeting at Goodwood, then took in the St Leger (8th of 9).
He ran his first race for Waterhouse and co-trainer Adrian Bott in the Melbourne Cup, without having a prep race. The Australian pattern usually involves at least one and probably two settling-in runs before Flemington for European imports in the race that stops a nation on the first Tuesday in November. Without any prep, 12th of 22 reads well.
Ms Waterhouse and Bott waited a full ten months before getting the now four-year-old gelding back on a racecourse. They chose a Group 3 contest over a wholly insufficient mile – that is the manner of Australian training! – last Saturday at Randwick and he was beaten just over a length in fifth of 11. I can smell a Melbourne Cup with the more normal training pattern of one of Australia’s great handlers already in motion.
With the £344K for last year’s Derby second – worth almost three times the figure of the Covid year – and the £1.2 million for the sale, you’d think Ahmed would be stretching the purse strings a little, but emphatically no.
He says, “A horse has a nice pedigree and looks nice; he can cost a fortune. But nearly all the horses, for example in Tattersalls Book 1, are nicely bred and any of them can be potentially good. I’ve bought plenty of slow horses, but so have the people who pay millions, I prefer to be sensible and able to afford and enjoy my racing.”
He has a couple of promising youngsters on the track this year. Sayedaty Sadaty (€30k from Germany) won at the fourth time of asking for the Balding stable the other day, making up for a roguish display on his previous outing when inexplicably taking himself out of a race by running through the running rail at the intersection at Windsor.
Erratic steering was also in evidence in the Kempton score, but despite hanging badly left across to the stand rail, he still had lengths to spare (and plenty more in his locker by the look of it) in hand of his rivals. It will be interesting to see his first handicap mark tomorrow.
The other youngster he was keen to mention in our chat was Deira Mile. Ahmad splashed out a bit (for him) at 47,000 Guineas but the signs from his first run for Charlie Johnston were bright indeed. You rarely got a Johnston two-year-old runner in Mark’s days going to one of the top southern tracks for its debut so you guess that the team had a decent enough regard for the son of Camelot.
Starting 25/1 for a competitive maiden, he lost ground from the stalls and ran green throughout yet still got within a short head and a neck of another Camelot colt, Defiance, trained by Roger Varian, in third place. Defiance had cost 150 grand as a yearling and you couldn’t be sure if they lined up again that the result would be the same. Knowing Ahmad’s sure touch with buying and trading horses and not to put too fine a word for it, amazing good fortune so far, big things can be expected from this very promising colt.
It’s not just where horses are concerned that this one-time journalist is sharp. Last week he signed up Richard Kingscote as his retained jockey. Kingscote, the man who won the Derby on Desert Crown, has a prior commitment with Sir Michael Stoute but will be available for most of the time his new employer needs him.
I told Ahmad the story of when I met Richard’s grandma in Tesco’s supermarket in Bromley-by-Bow, East London. It was early one morning, and I had picked up a Racing Post – my usual shop didn’t have one yet. She said: “Oh, you like racing. My grandson is a jockey, Richard Kingscote.” You could see how proud she was. Imagine what she felt when he won the Derby!
It's 1st September, the kids are about to go back to school, the nights are drawing in, and those hot balmy evenings are soon to be a thing of the past. OK, so point one may not be applicable to you, and point three wasn't applicable to any of us (!) but, nevertheless, the month of September is the beginning of the changing of the seasons. And it's also the time when we welcome back an old friend.
Yes, I am of course (of course!) talking about Peter May's UK National Hunt ratings! Dormant from May to August, where Peter feels they don't really produce as well as he'd like, they're now ready to burst forth once more until the end of next April. So, what are they and how do we use them?
They are ratings, numerical barometers of a horse's prospects in a given race, and they appear on your racecard in the 'SR' column. I think we might change that to 'PJM' because SR - speed rating - is not quite right. You see, Peter's numbers are derived from a neural network: he's been doing artificial intelligence since long before it became fashionable. And they're much than a measure of speed; they include a number of form considerations making them a sort of composite of, in Racing Post terms, RPR (Racing Post Rating) and TS (Topspeed) - both of which we also publish on geegeez. Here's an example:
But how have they performed? Well, it's important to consider that no rating set should be expected to be profitable to follow blind... although Peter's actually were last season. Backing the top-rated on his numbers in every NH race from September 2022 to April 2023 at Betfair SP would have yielded a 14% return on investment:
This was an outlier in terms of annual performance so I don't propose anyone bets the top one blind, and nor would Peter. But it's indicative of two things:
The predictive power of the ratings
The relative value of the ratings
In terms of predictive power, the top one won just about a quarter of all races last season. In terms of value, these figures are under bet because they're less fashionable than, say, Timeform or Racing Post Ratings, which are virtually ubiquitous and suffer from a profitability perspective as a result: if everyone knows something finds winners, that thing will affect the odds available such that the sum of those winners cannot pay for the sum of its losers. If fewer people know about something, it has more of a chance to pay its debts. If you see what I mean.
Anyway, like I say, blind betting is not the way forward. But what about a few angles?
You may not know that 'SR Rank' is a variable in Query Tool, which makes experimentation with these ratings easy.
Let's look at the last three years (1st September 2020 to 30th April 2023), by SR rank - keep in mind these figures are to SP, so not as sexy as BOG or BSP returns:
During that time, the top rated won 23% of all races and lost around 10.5% of stakes. Not bad but not great either. Notice the strong linearity in the win and e/w strike rates as we get further away from the top-rated.
Let's now look at the top three rated by race code - SR only covers hurdle and chase races, so no National Hunt Flat:
Win strike rates are similar (though average hurdle field size is greater, note the larger number in the IV column), and ROI is slightly better for chases - though again, not something to get stoked for. Nor either was there anything of direct value in terms of going, distance, class, or handicap/non-handicap.
One interesting angle is combining the race favourite with SR top 3 rated. Favourites in UK NH hurdles and chases in the sample period have won 35% of the time for an SP loss of just 4.7% - which is a lot of fun for negligible damage if that's the way you roll... but only betting those jollies which were also top 3 on SR reduced starting price losses to 3% at a winning clip of 39%. That's going to be a reasonable profit at BSP or BOG, albeit with the important caveat that we don't know the SP favourite in advance.
*In fact, and this is cherry-picking, using the top 4 SR rated and SP favourite reduces losses to a mere 2.78%
Another element unknowable in advance but, like market rank, at least somewhat predictable is run style. Regular readers will be aware of the enormous general importance of run style and, particularly, of a forward position. This next table shows the top 3 rated SR horses by run style, where 4 is led, 3 prominent, 2 midfield, and 1 held up:
It's worth labouring the point because that top row is so alluring: we cannot know the race leader in advance of the race. But Dave Renham has done plenty of work to show how predictive recent run style is, i.e. if a horse led in its recent races it is notably more likely to lead today.
To close, let's overlay three components: SR rank, market rank, and run style. We know that the top 3 (or 4) SR's combined with the SP favourite have performed well; and we know that those top 3 SR rated racing on the lead have fared extremely well, so let's combine these angles to give us SP favourites in the top 3 SR which led:
Because we cannot predict the SP favourite or which horse is going to lead, it's worth asking how much value the above actually offers. Well, I believe a fair amount. Even if we went with the first two in the betting, and those with a led or prominent run style, and the top 4 in SR, we'd still have effectively broken even over a three year period and 8000 bets. At SP.
These horses win, a lot, and there are ways to profitably incorporate them into your broader form reading - and ways to analyse the historical data using Query Tool to find further angles. So, yes, welcome back National Hunt SR!
Matt
p.s. you can of course do similar research for flat races within QT - and you might well find similarly attractive angles 😉
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Cookie_Ascot_2022.jpg387830Matt Bisognohttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngMatt Bisogno2023-09-01 07:18:572023-09-01 07:18:57Welcoming Back an Old Friend after the Summer
This is the third article connected with my attempt at creating simple ratings for certain horse races, writes Dave Renham. The first piece looked at how you could create a simple ratings method; the second tested this simple idea using some historical results. As the results were quite promising, I thought I would extend the number crunching to more past races, and in this third article I will report back my new findings.
To give some context, I was looking for a method for rating handicap races and, as far as weighting was concerned, I decided to give each factor a similar one. In order to do this I used the PRB (Percentage of Rivals Beaten) metric.
The rating method I came up with involved five factors or variables – these were:
Draw – splitting the draw into thirds;
Most Recent form – for this factor I used last time out (LTO) finishing position;
Recent Market data – LTO price was used for this one – so the Industry Starting Price the horse was returned in its most recent race;
Long term form – for long term form I used career placed percentages in handicap races.
Fitness –I used days since last run to create the PRB figures for this final variable.
For more ‘meat on the bones’, the first article explains in depth what the individual PRB values were within each of the above categories. Here's the link.
Essentially each horse ends up with five PRB values and therefore when rating a race, we simply add up the five PRB figures for each horse giving them a final total or rating score. The horse with the highest total becomes top rated, the second highest total becomes second rated and so on.
In the second article I did some back testing on the ratings, although for this stat-busting exercise I decided to ignore the draw factor by focusing on longer distance races. ‘Time’ was the main reason for ignoring the draw – it was something that was going to take far too long to collate the necessary information. Hence my ratings were ‘trimmed’ – now they would be created by using the four other PRB figures produced from LTO position, LTO price, career handicap placed percentages and days since last run.
For this next batch of testing, I kept the first three rules mentioned above, but changed the runners rule to 10 to 12 runner races. Before sharing the results of this second phase of testing, let me quickly share my thoughts on what I perceive to be the most important finding. For any ratings to have the ‘potential’ to be useful, they need to show strong similarities with the actual betting market. The first phase of testing did see this happening. For example, the top rated runner started favourite in over 41% of the races rated. Just 3.7% of top rated runners started 7th, 8th or 9th in the betting. Ultimately if your ratings do not mirror the betting market that well, then the chances are they are going to be dud.
Of course, as punters, we are looking for value, and the hope is also that the ratings throw up value selections. The first set of results shared in the second article offered some promise in that regard.
OK, it is time to look in detail at the 10 to 12 runner 2018 results. For the record this comprised of 362 races in total.
Firstly, let's review how the top rated horses matched up against the actual betting market.
This graph perfectly shows the type of sliding scale one wishes to see. It is similar to the one we saw when analysing the 8 to 9 runner race data.
Over 35% of the top rated runners started as the favourite, while more than 72% of the top rated runners started in the top three in the betting. Compare this to 8th or bigger in the betting which accounted for just 5.1% of all top rated runners.
Let's now look at the second top rated runners next in the same way:
Again, this graph gives the type of results that suggest the ratings are fairly accurate in terms of assessing potential chance of winning. We would expect the highest bars in the graph to be on the left hand side once more with a sliding scale going from left to right. 57.2% of the 2nd rated runners ended up in the top three of the betting compared with 2.3% ending up in the bottom three of the betting (10th or worse).
So once again the top section of the ratings are looking good. Time to take a look at the lowest rated to see how they fit against the market. Firstly let us look at the market rank percentages for the lowest rated runners. To begin with let's review the 12th rated runner in 12 runner handicap races:
This graph is effectively a mirror image of the first two we saw, which is exactly what I would hope to see. Over 66% of the bottom rated runners ended up 10th or lower in the betting.
Now a look at the 11 runner races (bottom rated):
An even better set of figures here in terms of correlation. This is probably due to the fact that the 11 runner sample size was around 33% bigger than for 12 runner races.
I don’t see the need to show the whole graph for the 10 runner races as well, but the results were similar once more. The bottom rated runner appeared 8th, 9th or 10th in the betting market over 63% of time, while only 12% of them ended up in the top three market positions.
It is very pleasing to see that the results we got for 8 to 9 runner races are being replicated here. Essentially these simple PRB based ratings are looking like providing a relatively sound framework in terms of forming our own market – if nothing else. I discussed some ideas about how to form a betting tissue/market in this article which preceded this series. These ratings could be used in conjunction with that – or even be used in a stand-alone manner.
Time to see how the ratings fared in terms of winning – their win strike rate. In the 8 to 9 runner results, the higher rated runners comfortably out-performed the lower rated ones. Obviously, I'm hoping for the same scenario here:
These results are reasonably positive – the top rated runner has done extremely well and we do get the type of sliding scale one would hope for. In truth, the 8 to 9 runner data looked stronger, but when you analyse win and placed data, the picture looks more clear-cut:
This graph gives excellent correlation with higher rated runners hitting higher win and placed strike rates; lower rated runners doing the reverse.
It is time now to look at the performance of the individual rating positions in terms of profit/loss to BSP. At this point it should be noted that in the whole data set for this article, there have been some unusually big-priced winners. The ten highest BSP prices of winners during this study were:
Within the type of sample size used for this piece, huge priced winners are a common problem when trying to use BSP as a value metric. That is why in other Geegeez articles, where appropriate, I have quoted BSP on shorter priced runners only. Unfortunately using this shorter priced idea will not work effectively on the rating positions data due to very small sample sizes (for the lower rated positions in particular). Therefore, in this case, the BSP profit/loss figures for individual ratings positions shown below may confuse matters for some readers, but hopefully you'll still get the gist at least:
We do have to take the profit/loss figures here with a pinch of salt however; especially the lower rated ones. Ordinarily strike rates of 4.1% and 5.2% are not going to produce stunning returns of 78.6 pence in the £ or 57.2 pence in the £.
Thus, instead of dwelling on these skewed figures, it makes more sense to dig deeper into the top-rated runner results as these prices as a whole are much shorter. In fact 88% of all top rated runners were priced 12.0 BSP shorter.
I want to look at two main areas when it comes to top-rated runners. Firstly I want to delve into profit / returns, so here are the profit/loss stats for top-rated runners in terms of their market position.
It is interesting to see that the top-rated runner has made a decent looking profit when actually starting as the favourite. From a ratings value perspective though, I would have liked to have seen slightly better figures from the poorer market positions. Having said that, 362 races is too small a sample to see a potential pattern emerge such as that, especially when just 63 top rated runners started 5th or higher in the actual betting market. It is heartening to know that top rated runners that were 5th or bigger in the betting did make a profit of £11.15 from these 63 runners, but we need much more data. Not just on top rated runners but on other rating positions too.
Secondly, I wanted a breakdown of how far clear of the 2nd rated the top rated was. This is something that I omitted to think about when penning the last article. Hence for this next table I have combined the relevant stats from both articles to include all 8 to 12 runner handicap results. This gives us a bigger data set for analysing the gap between the top two rated runners. Here are the findings:
Before commenting on this, it must be stressed that despite expanding the sample size, it is still a relatively modest one. However, one could not have dreamed of a much better set of results (well, I suppose I could have, but you have to have some sense of realism!) The bigger the gap, the better the results – both from a strike rate and returns perspective.
My next port of call was looking at ratings position versus betting market position. I wanted to compare the performance of horses that are rated better than their odds position, compared to those who are not. Here are the results:
As with the 8 to 9 runner data, horses ranked better than their price ranking have done best from a profit/loss perspective. There is a big differential here, but as I have already stated, the BSP data for all these races is not too reliable, and hence I would not read too much into this.
Before finishing, I have one more set of figures I want to share. As I did in the previous piece, I want to look at the actual rating scores and group the lower rated runners as a whole, and compare them with the higher rated runners. Tthe lowest possible rating using my PRB scores is 1.64; the highest possible is 2.39. The groupings I have used are horses that were rated 1.64 to 1.84, and horses that were rated 2.18 to 2.39. These are exactly the same groupings I used in the 8 to 9 runner article. Here is the comparison of wins, runs and strike rate for our two groups in 10 to 12 runner handicaps:
These stats are what one would have expected based on all the previous data shared in this article. However, it is always nice to have expectation validated in black and white.
I have not added the BSP profit figures as the 1.64 to 1.84 group had two of those huge priced winners I alluded to before (353.78 and 137.3). Such winners totally skew the profit/loss column making a comparison a mockery (as we have seen twice before in this piece, with the profit/loss figures for individual ratings positions, and with the rating rank v market rank BSP comparison). For the record, the 2.18 to 2.39 group, which did not have big priced winners skewing the results, lost a modest 20 points to BSP equating to an ROI of -4.7%.
So that’s currently where I’m at. There has definitely been further promise in this latest piece of research. I will decide where I go next with this over the next few days and any new ratings research will be written up and shared with you in the very near future.
- DR
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/ratings1.png320830Dave Renhamhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngDave Renham2023-08-29 08:54:352023-08-29 08:58:20My Simple Ratings Method, Part 3
The fashion had been highly acceptable for the first three days of York’s Ebor Festival, but I hadn’t been prepared for what was to confront me on Saturday, writes Tony Stafford. I arrived early as usual, and it was only when I ventured from the box after an early cup of coffee, that ranged before me was a sea of colour.
Looking closer, the wearers of those extravagant dresses were rarely past mid-teens, some even as young as eight or nine. It was Travellers’ rather than Ebor day, and by no means for the first time, but I had generally gone home before the final day of the meeting, so it was totally unexpected for me.
But regulars were fully aware of the make-up of the day and watching more closely, you could also discern the young men, again many in early teens. Both sexes were immaculately turned out, suits and ties for the boys, fulfilling the old-time posh enclosure style requirements (largely relaxed nowadays) and the girls, beautifully coiffed and their dresses looking fit for a catwalk at Paris Fashion week.
As I made my way out of the stand aiming at the paddock, those 70 yards were a minefield – no hint of trouble, just difficult to navigate through the throng which swayed back and forth all day.
I learnt that the travellers come from all over the UK for this day, swelling the crowd on Ebor Day on which inevitably Frankie Dettori, now operating without his long-time business manager Peter Burrell, took the riding honours.
He conveniently collected the big race (£300k) on Absurde and the other half-million Group 2 City Of York Stakes on Kinross to end a most astonishing fortnight of achievement.
Referring to the Burrell issue – Pete was the man who set up the book deal when I ghosted Frankie’s Year in the Life book. Frankie said the other day: “That must have been 25 years ago! <27 in fact> and added, “Pete didn’t like that I was retiring – it was as if he was the one retiring.”
You would have thought that the rider/manager bond would have been able to withstand this after 35 years together but apparently not. The way Frankie is riding though, you wonder whether he might go through his enjoyable winter spell in California with Bob Baffert and think, maybe, “just one more year?” - the punters will love it if he does.
A little admin followed by a catch up: I failed to deliver an article last week – I was almost halfway through an Ebor preview when we were forced to take our 15-year-old lovely little Yorkie Josephina to the emergency vet. She had suffered a sudden seizure and they said there was no alternative but to euthanise her. Here we are, on a happier day not long ago...
Tony Stafford and his beloved pooch, Josephina
The week before, I suggested Frankie had probably picked up around £40k for his percentage of the half-million first prize for the Jacques Le Marois at Deauville. He took a few days off after that and from that point, he had ten more rides, mainly at York.
Five wins from the 11, with two second places both in valuable contests and one third place, his total tally of prize money amounts to £1,882,000. His percentage – bearing in mind the place earns a jockey considerably less – will still be the best part of £150k. Nice work.
Before he changed out of his civvies, a smart light-blue suit as befitted the general air of sartorial elegance on the day, Frankie spotted Brian Meehan in the paddock. “What a winner, 16/1, why didn’t you tell me?” “Why would a jockey want to know?”, asked Meehan before Isaac Shelby’s run - he finished a slightly disappointing fourth to Kinross.
Frankie had time for his lightning change into the Kinross livery while I spoke to Sam Sangster about his ever accelerating career as a buyer of yearlings. The 16/1 shot Frankie referred to was Friday’s Newmarket debut scorer Jayarebe, who had tracked and then outpaced 4/11 shot Broadway Act, a Charlie Appleby/ Godolphin colt who had already had a good debut.
Sangster had bought him for €180k at Arqana’s October Yearling sale and the colt was passed on to the returning Iraj Parvizi, owner of Meehan’s 2010 Breeders’ Cup Turf winner Dangerous Midge at Churchill Downs 13 years ago. Parvizi had been out of racing for some time and Meehan’s predictable comment was, “It’s great to have him back.”
Jayarebe could be in line for some big-race action and the decision seems to be the Royal Lodge Stakes over a mile rather than the Dewhurst at seven. That would seem sensible for the son of Zoffany who is a half-brother to a true two-mile mare and decent staying hurdler, Ian Williams’ Malakahna.
Sam Sangster said that the 180k he paid for Jayarebe was comfortably the most he’d ever paid for a yearling; Isaac Shelby cost €92k to his bid two years earlier. The Greenham winner, and runner-up in the French 2,000 Guineas and the Lennox at Goodwood has picked up £340,000 on the track but realised a good few times more than that (Sam remains coy about just how many times) to Wathnan Racing before the French Classic.
He says he has bought 12 Group performers, ten of which have been trained by Meehan – the other two by Nicolas Clement in France. Four of them have been Group 1 performers, although he has yet to supply a Group 1 winner. The average price paid for those smart performers has been a very modest £51,000, given the amazing prices paid at the sales these days. He truly is Robert Sangster’s son.
When I spoke to Brian Meehan on Friday morning, he was very measured in his analysis of Jayarebe. “He’s very, very nice.” On Saturday I tasked him with, “You put me away. You said he was very, very nice. He’s very, very, very nice!”
In performance terms, on debut he beat a field chock-full of potential and almost all with big-race entries this autumn. He put up the fastest time of the day, rare enough for a two-year-old. You could imagine Derby thoughts going through the minds of trainer, owner and talent spotter. It’s early days but if he did win the Royal Lodge, it could be within the realms of possibility.
Deauville’s month of excitement came to a climax with a big win for Paul and Oliver Cole, their Jack Darcy winning the Group 2 Grand Prix de Deauville at 11/1. A winner of his first two races, Jack Darcy’s best run since had been a second place to the smart William Haggas seven-year-old Hamish, who would have been top-weight for Saturday’s Ebor if he had taken up the entry. But 10st9lb (including a penalty) would have been too much, requiring a 9lb higher weight-carrying achievement than Sea Pigeon’s 44 years earlier, in 1979, to win.
It was great last week to see Sea Pigeon’s winning Ebor rider, Jonjo O’Neill, still looking in his prime. He reported his team at Jackdaws Castle is ready to go as the jumps season gathers pace. One jumps trainer, though, whose horses are always primed obviously is Willie Mullins.
When I bumped into him, asking if it was right that he was expected in the same place that had been my base all week, he said: “Sorry no, I’m off to do the day job. Maybe later.” You could say it was day job done after Absurde had won with a peach of a ride from Dettori. Later I saw him leaving the track and said, “You might be okay at the day job, but you aren’t much good at coming up for a drink.” He laughed and said: “Next time.”
- TS
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Absurde_Ebor2023_FrankieDettori_WillieMullins.png318830Tony Staffordhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngTony Stafford2023-08-28 03:54:262023-08-28 10:52:11Monday Musings: Ebor Wrap (and a word on a late friend)
Still something of a quiet summer on the courses for me, writes David Massey, with York throwing up little to report, although Craig David on the Saturday last was a busy day. Or it least it might have been, had the bookmaker in front of me not broken down (his equipment, not him personally) and been unable to take a bet all afternoon. Sadly, all he did was prove a blocker for me as he tried to get his equipment going but alas all to no avail. Let me demonstrate what a difference it makes - for the first four races whilst he tried without success to get going, I took 40 bets a race. Once he decided there was no way he could work and moved his kit from in front of me, I took 140 bets a race for the last three. Position is everything in the ring.
I see from the latest missives coming from the BHA that attendances are up slightly year on year. No doubt these music events have something to do with that but whether they make a difference to betting turnover is a different matter.
Haydock last Friday saw me working the Silver ring for the Nile Rogers and Chic gig. I've seen them twice in the last few years and they are an excellent outfit. You know more Nile Rogers compilations than you think you do, and you always find yourself singing along to Get Lucky at some point in the evening. Anyway, I digress. We're told there's a crowd of around 12,000, which would be about a thousand more than when Madness played here last year, and business that night was colossal, arguably the best I've known in the past 18 months or so. We simply couldn't get everyone on quick enough. So there are high expectations for the evening and we have three pitches (and six workers) in the ring.
However, through nobody's fault at the track, the place absolutely stinks. A local farmer, clearly no fan of Chic, has manured his ground and with the wind blowing in the wrong direction, Haydock doesn't so much rock, as honk. It's awful and very offputting.
Business is always slow to get going on these music nights, with many not turning up until halfway through the card (but will, of course, count in the official attendance) so we're not too downhearted when the first couple of races are poor. However, even when it does get going, it isn't the beano we expected. It's moderate stuff and everyone is betting early, so the last ten minutes before race time we barely strike a bet.
This is very much a "selfie" crowd. Lots of photos taken for social media to show everyone what a great time you're having, but little of that involves having a bet. One woman has a hat on that reads "RIDE" from where I'm stood; thinking that's a bit of a bold statement, it's not until she turns slightly that I can see it actually says "BRIDE". A relief all round, not least to her soon-to-be husband, I guess!
One bloke asks me for a tenner twist forecast 1 and 4 in the next. I inform him I don't do reverse forecasts. "In that case I'll just have a tenner win on 3". Work that one out, because three days later, I certainly haven't.
Twist forecast. Only at Haydock and Aintree do you get asked for those. Reverse forecast everywhere else. I suppose I should be grateful he's not asking me for a Liverpool Round-The-Clock. (Google it, if you're unsure. You can't call yourself a settler until you've done one of those manually. Fun for all the family.)
I've another punter who has, shall we say, had a Tizer or two. He's talking so fast I can't understand a word. We appear to be communicating in Morse Code. Dot dot fiver eight dot, dash each way. He seems happy enough, mind.
Sadly the final race is a three-runner affair, not what you want for the lucky last, and you know what's coming - everyone will back the outsider of the three. I make an easy £20 for myself backing and laying it pre-race - that's my petrol paid for - and when the jolly wins there's little to pay out. We've won on the night but business has only been fair. The only consolation is a call-in at the cheapest chippy in Britain on the way to the digs; fish and chips twice, and a portion of chips, just over £13. And they say you can't eat value.
Saturday is Ladies Day at Haydock, with an expected crowd of 8,000. The weather forecast is for some showers early but clearing up after 2pm. We can only hope that's right.
Sadly the Eau De Farmeur Gilles is still in the air, worse if anything, giving off a right pong. We get up and betting, slow to start again. However, we hit a problem. For some reason, the master pitch can't see my bets. This is a major problem as they can't get a picture of the whole book. I'm frantically trying to make things work, running up and down the ring (one pitch at one end and mine at the other) but nothing works. I give Tech Support at Newmarket a call but they can barely hear me with the PA, as is usually that case at Haydock, too loud in the background. In the end they have to take over the software from their end, a very useful tool, but they do fix the problem (server issues) within a few minutes. Sadly they're about to jump for the first and I've taken five bets. A waste of a race.
Race 2. I take my first bet and nothing comes out the printer. It was working fine ten minutes ago and now it isn't. Restart everything. That doesn't work. It's now hammering down with rain as well. Now the keyboard has frozen up. This is a disaster. The printer is still having none of it either. Ring Tech Support again. Now it turns out the USB port the printer is in has packed up. I'm soaked to the bone running up and down the ring and right now I want to throw everything in the bin and go home. I'm trying hard to listen to Ian as he explains how I can fix things but all I can think about is being in a warm fluffy pair of pyjamas with my tea in front of me. That's only six hours away, I tell myself. Hello, the printer's working again. I take two bets on Race 2 before it's off a minute later. That's two-sevenths of the afternoon wasted.
And in truth is doesn't get any better. Business is so poor I take 110 bets all afternoon. There's nothing to report of any interest, other than it was so windy by Race 5 my trousers had dried out completely. Attendances may be up, but on days like today, my spirit isn't. I realise not every week can be Royal Ascot but days like today really make me wonder how much of a future some of the smaller rings have.
I'm home for half eight and in comfy PJ's ten minutes later. Let's see what four days of the Ebor Festival bring...
- DM
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/LisaWilliamson_Celerity.jpg319830David Masseyhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngDavid Massey2023-08-16 16:16:142023-08-16 16:16:14Roving Reports: Let The Music Play
A bright sunny Sunday smack bang in the kids’ school holidays, writes Tony Stafford, and what’s to do? “I know”, says Dad, “How would you like to go horse racing? You’ve seen it on ITV on Saturdays and always seemed to like it, especially when my bets win. But there’s nothing like being there.”
Looking at his computer – he doesn’t bother with newspapers nowadays, it’s all on the screen. “Oh dear”, he says. “Only Windsor and Leicester and nothing over jumps, which we always find more exciting. It’s a bit far to both, so we’ll have to give it a miss this time. You’d think there would be more choice right in the middle of summer.”
Dad’s right, you would have thought so. As a telly punter, no doubt he wouldn’t necessarily go into the intricacies of the day’s two programmes, but I have. Eight races at Leicester and seven at Windsor. The Thames-side track comes out just on top on prizemoney but only because it includes on the card a qualifier for a series contest, the £15,462 to the winner Juddmonte British Stallion Studs Restricted Race (Bands C and D).
A race designed for cheaper buys that might have some talent, it was by £10,000 and change the most valuable on the card. Apart from one 0-65 handicap, worth £5,234 to the winner, all the other five races carried a first prize of less than £4,500.
There was no stand-out race, value-wise over at Leicester. The top race was a handicap which carried £6,281 to its victor. All the other seven races were worth less than 5k.
Leicester did cater for slightly better class, if inadequately remunerated, horses, viz a 0-85 nursery, £4,711 and that six grand race which was 0-80. Otherwise, the upper limits in card order were 65, 75, 68 and 55.
Windsor, as stated above, had its most valuable (sic) prize in handicaps for a 0-65. Lesser prizes were affixed to a 0-60 amateur riders’ race and further contests with upper limits of 68 and 52.
Sundays in Ireland are usually planned to appeal to the likes of Aidan O’Brien and the other top trainers, but yesterday’s card, apart from one Listed race for fillies and mares, worth €32,450 to the winner, was humdrum.
That never means small fields and, with the big guns elsewhere or just taking a Sunday off, the other six races were worth two each at €14,750, €11,800 and €8,800 for a total of €104,250, still comfortably more than the £77,000 for the two UK meetings.
It’s unfair to compare with Deauville which featured the Group 1 Prix Jacques le Marois, worth £505,664 to its winner and a handsome £25,309 for fifth place. Fifth in the bulk of the UK races yesterday ranged between £367 and £214, not enough to pay the jockey and entry fees, never mind the ever-escalating transport costs and training fees.
Generally, two-year-old novice and maiden races here do not even carry a fifth prize nowadays, but the Juddmonte qualifier did break out from the norm with £906 for fifth place and even £453 for sixth.
The four Deauville Group 3 races, each worth a not exceptional £35,398 in comparison with their UK counterparts, had a uniform £3,539 for fifth place, near as makes no difference to matching the win prize for 12 of yesterday’s 15 UK contests.
Now take Dad’s other gripe. No jump racing. Indeed, the stables with summer jumpers have been put on an artificial hold for two weeks, ironically at a time when the recent weather would have allowed plenty more to run than would have been the case in last year’s exceptionally hot and dry weather.
They start again on Saturday at Perth and Market Rasen when there’s also four flat fixtures including Newbury with its Group 2 Hungerford Stakes. There’s no jumping next Sunday either, I’m afraid Dad, just Sandown (Sunday Series finale), Pontefract and Southwell hoping to attract the family audience.
If our mythical Dad had not been dissuaded already he might have asked whether Frankie Dettori, Ryan Moore, William Buick and Oisin Murphy would be there to sign autographs. No dice. Indeed, the only thing Dettori had to worry about yesterday was not breaking his ageing ankles with his flying dismount after Inspiral won that Gallic Group 1 for the Gosdens and owners Cheveley Park Stud.
https://youtu.be/ke9UdusqV9A
That probably works out at around 40 grand for the ever-accumulating veteran whose farewell tour is proving lucrative in the extreme.
Jamie Spencer would have been delighted too with his share of the 100k Light Infantry earned for the David Simcock stable for third and Neil Callan picked up some handy pocket change for his fifth place, referred to above, for Kevin Ryan on Triple Time.
The aforementioned Moore and Buick had to be content with smaller rewards having trailed home in the last three in the big one. Buick won a Listed (24k to the winner) and Moore was second in another. Even the top jockeys don’t have it all their own way every day.
Cut back to the sort of owners, trainers and rides who ply their trade at the lowest end of the UK horse racing pyramid. One trainer sent me details of a recent runner he had in a 0-60 race at Carlisle. The entry fee for this £3,000- odd to the winner contest was £37.45. Jockey insurance was £24.42. Jockey riding fee was £131.60 with £26.32 VAT and a processing fee by Weatherbys of £36.42 plus £7.28 VAT. Expensive things to push, those computer buttons. The total outlay, never mind transport to the track and training fees, was £263.49.
That same owner/trainer was bemoaning the fact that, as he sees it, the smaller owners with lower-grade horses are subsidising events like the Sunday Series which does not carry entry fees. Six lots of races carry extraordinary amounts for the grade of race and the last of six Sunday dates next weekend at Sandown will carry total prize money of £225,000.
Yet the take-up has been less overwhelming than might have been expected by trainers. The last of the series at Haydock eight days ago featured six races and none went ahead with the intended full field of 12, although one non-runner in the last reduced that to 11. The other field sizes were 9, 7, 11, 7 and 6. I can understand that person’s suggestion it was a waste of money.
Last Thursday’s latest instalment of the Racing League hardly suggested that this competing Sky Sports Racing Thursday series was doing much better than its Racing TV equivalent. The seven races, culminating in a richest flat race ever at Chepstow (echoing a similar situation at Yarmouth two Thursdays previously) still struggled to fill fields. The numbers here were 12 (full), 6, 11, 8, 10 and 8, with 11 for the big one.
Ian Williams, always one to aim for the big money, has regular runners in both series. He says that there is a real fear that if the take up does not improve, neither series is safe for the coming season. His horses in the Racing League run under the banner of Wales and the West, one of seven regional teams. They lead the way after two rounds with 319 points ahead of Ireland (242) London and the South (231), The North (217), The East, so Newmarket (187), Yorkshire (147) and Scotland (58).
As much as the presenters on the channel try to keep the team competitiveness interesting, it’s all so much a contrived enthusiasm. Punters want to back winners and are not bothered that the Wales and the West second string got up for third to stretch their points advantage.
These two competitions of course owe more than a sideways acknowledgement to the daddy of them all, the Shergar Cup, which started in 1999 and despite nowadays being less of a magnet for top jockeys, has a formula which has stood the test of time. Its latest edition happened conveniently on Saturday while both the other events that mimic it to a degree or another, were still ongoing.
There were some nice camera shots from the inside in close finishes on ITV on Saturday and it was clear that the Ascot grandstands were packed as usual. Ascot has that magic whatever time of year, although some people suggested to me that Craig David performing after racing might have had a bit to do with it.
The day before, I tried out one of racing’s most notorious traffic hotspots, the M6 on a Friday. I left home before noon and it took me almost exactly seven hours to complete the 260-odd mile ordeal thanks to one accident and some long established road works leading to my destination.
I had time for a quick bowl of soup before going into the paddock and was surprised to see just how calm Tom Dascombe’s Dufresne looked as he went around before the race as his horsebox preceded me by only two vehicles into the course. Imagine how long the poor horse had been on his feet rocking around.
The object of my journey was in the same race, the Michael Bell-trained Wootton’s Jewel fading to a very disappointing fourth after making the running in that novice race for juveniles.
Dufresne was a couple of places further back but considering he probably didn’t get the chance to have a quick rest in his box in the racecourse stables before being readied to run, that was a very fair effort, Next time, Dufresne could well do much better for owners Sleeve It Ltd and Tom Dascombe.
In the last piece I wrote on Geegeez I attempted to demonstrate to readers how you could go about creating a rating method in order to help you to analyse a race, writes Dave Renham. This article continues on from that simple ratings method, as I have decided to dig into the past and do some testing using historical results.
To recap, I was looking for a method for rating handicap races and, as far as weighting was concerned, I decided to give each factor a similar emphasis. In order to do this I used the PRB (Percentage of Rivals Beaten) metric.
The rating method I came up with involved five factors, as follows:
Draw – Using the Draw Analyser tool rather the draw tab in the racecard in order to define a more precise date range, I set what I felt were relevant parameters. These parameters had to ideally a) match the race in question; and b) give me a big enough sample size.
My ideal date range is a recent one such as 2016 to 2023, for handicaps only and, in terms of runners, covering a spread of plus or minus two runners compared with the field size of the race I was rating. So, for example, if it was a 10-runner race, I would set 8 to 12 runners on the Draw Analyser. The Draw Analyser gives PRB figures for individual stalls as well as grouping them into thirds. I used the thirds method for the ratings, grouping low draws together, middle draws together and high draws together.
Most Recent form – for this factor I used last time out (LTO) finishing position. For the relevant PRB figures I looked at two full years of handicap race data (2021 and 2022) to give what should be incredibly accurate readings. This amounted to several thousand races. The PRB figures had a range from 0.60 for winners last time out to 0.41 for horses that finished 9th or worse LTO.
Recent Market data – for this factor I used LTO price – so the Industry Starting Price the horse returned in its most recent race. Once again I used 2021 and 2022 handicap races to create these PRB figures. The PRB figures had a range from 0.60 for horses priced 6/4 or shorter LTO to 0.36 for horses that priced 40/1 or bigger LTO.
Long term form – for long term form I used career placed percentages in handicap races. Again the data for the PRB figures was taken from the two years of 2021-22 handicap results. The PRB had a range from 0.58 for career placed percentages of 51% or more, down to 0.44 for those who hit 20% or less.
Fitness – for this final factor I used days since last run to create the PRB figures. To give the most accurate scores I used the same data set (’21-’22 handicap races) as I had done for the previous factors. The PRB figures ranged from 0.61 for horses that returned to the track within three days to 0.43 for horses off the track for 71 or more days.
So, essentially when rating each race, I took the relevant five PRB figures for each horse and added them up. The horse with the highest total became top rated, the second highest total became second rated and so on.
After writing the original article my plan was to rate a few races and see how the figures worked out. This is something I am still in the process of doing and will feed back my findings in a future article.
[I initially had no intention of back testing results because I thought it would take far too long. However, using a bit of excel, a fair amount of copying / pasting, and a few shortcuts I thought of as I was going along, I managed to get a year’s worth of ratings data in a few hours. The only ‘problem’ is that to do this I had to ignore the draw factor. The main reason for this was that it would take me far too long to gather the draw data (probably several months). But there were other reasons as well, one being that a good proportion of course and distances do not have a significant draw bias so trawling through masses of these types of race would not really improve the ratings or make them more accurate.]
So my ratings would be created using the four other PRB figures based on LTO position, LTO price, career handicap placed percentages and days since last run.
When you create ratings or systems and then back test them on past results, it is important to ensure that you use a different data set. This is a common mistake people make – one I made the first time I tried to create systems back in the early 90s. Hence, having used a data set of 2021 to 2022 to create all the PRB figures, I needed to choose a different year for the testing phase. I chose 2018.
A year of handicaps gives me plenty of data to work with. I did however want to narrow that down by looking only at 3yo+ and 4yo+ handicaps, as this would avoid handicaps with younger, less exposed runners. My assumption is that these ratings will work far better in races that involve older horses. I also chose to try and eliminate any draw factors by choosing handicaps races of 1 mile 1 furlong or more. Without the draw in the ratings, it made no sense to test shorter distance handicaps where draw bias can be extremely relevant and potential skew some ratings results (without the draw PRB being considered). Finally, I looked at 8- or 9-runner 3yo+/4yo+ handicap races for the basis of this article.
Just to reiterate I am back testing my ratings on:
Year - 2018 (UK racing)
Age group - 3yo+ / 4yo+ handicaps
Distance - 1m1f or longer
Runners – 8 or 9
Before sharing the results of my testing, let me discuss briefly what I am hoping to find. For the ratings to have the potential to be useful/effective, more often than not, they need to show strong correlation with the actual betting market. If your top two rated horses are consistently near the head of the actual betting market this is a far more positive sign than if they are consistently near the foot of the betting market. Of course in terms of making a profit from your ratings, you are looking for them to be more accurate than the actual betting market and throw up value selections. Not easy!
OK, let’s dig into my findings:
Firstly let's see how the top rated horses matched up against the actual betting market.
This graph is extremely positive with over 41% of the top rated runners starting as the favourite. Indeed 79% of the top rated runners started in the top three in the betting. There is a definite sliding scale, too, showing the type of correlation you would be hoping for. Let me look at the second top rated runners next in the same way:
Again, this graph gives positive results. You would expect the higher bars in the graph to be on the left hand side once more, and they are. Just over 72% of the 2nd rated runners ended up in the top four of the betting.
So the top section of the ratings are looking good. How about the lowest rated? Firstly let us look at the market rank percentages for the lowest rated runners. To begin with let me look at the 8th rated runner in 8-runner handicap races:
The graph is reversed compared with the first two we saw, which is exactly what we are looking for. 44% of the lowest rated runners were at the bottom of the betting market in 8th place. Less than 17% of them ended up in the top four of the betting. Further positive news as far as the ratings are concerned.
Now a look at the 9-runner races (bottom rated):
A similar lay out to the 8-runner races with nearly 72% of 9th rated runners ending up 7th, 8th or 9th in the actual betting market.
I have to say that I am extremely pleased with the correlation to date between my ratings and the betting market. For something that is relatively simple (just four parameters), it is mirroring the betting market well.
So these ratings, on the evidence we have so far (based on 324 races), definitely show some potential. Time to see how the ratings fared in terms of winning – their win strike rate. Clearly I was hoping that the top rated runners would comfortably out-perform lower rated ones. Here are the findings:
More positive news with the top two rated runners both securing strike rates in excess of 20%. Also a clear break between the top four rated and those rated fifth to ninth. The 7th rated is very slightly out of kilter, but this can happen – the important fact is the trend from top rated to bottom rated is downwards.
What I now want to look at is how the ratings would have performed if betting on them. I am assuming that we are backing at £1 level stakes to Betfair Starting Price (BSP). Here are the findings:
The results for the top rated runner are a little disappointing, losses of around 17p in the £. Horses ranked 7th have made surprisingly high profits, but most of the big priced BSP winners happened to pop up in this specific ranking position. I doubt these figures would be replicated again – this is just the type of outlier you can get when analysing BSP profit/loss.
When taking the top four rated as a whole, they have outperformed horses rated fifth to ninth as the table below shows:
Considering how big priced runners on Betfair can skew the figures, these grouped results are very heartening.
I must admit I am pleasantly surprised with these initial findings. I am intrigued to see how the ratings work with shorter distance races where I can include the fifth parameter – draw bias.
My next port of call was looking at ratings position versus betting market position. I wanted to compare the performance of horses that are rated better than their odds position, compared to those who are not.
Just to clarify, some examples of horses that are rated better than their odds position would be as follows (I appreciate for many I am just stating the obvious, but just in case there is any confusion in my English/grammar):
And here are examples where they are not (these include identical positions in the rank of the ratings compared to the actual market rank):
My hope is that I see better returns for horses that are rated better than their odds position, compared to those who are not. This would suggest that the ratings can potentially pinpoint some value selections.
Here are the returns for each:
These figures suggest the rankings are doing a pretty good job – it seems there has been more value when the rating rank has been better than the market position.
Before winding this piece up, I have one more set of data to share with you. I am looking at the actual rating scores and grouping the lower rated runners as a whole, and comparing them with the higher rated runners. Now the lowest possible rating using my PRB scores is 1.64; the highest possible is 2.39. The groupings I have used are horses that were rated 1.64 to 1.84, and horses that were rated 2.18 to 2.39. These groupings from 2018 3yo+/4yo+ handicaps would have produced the following results:
The strike rates should come as no surprise based on the evidence of the ‘Ratings Win SR%’ graph shown earlier, but the differences in returns are even wider than I had expected. It is another indication that these simple ratings have some real potential.
I'm to park things here for now and start further number crunching for the follow up article. The data set of 324 races is a decent one, but before making too many bold claims, I think we need to look to how these ratings fare in other races. Research wise, I plan to analyse the 2018 data from 10- to 12-runner races next. Once that’s done, I will write it up and share my findings.
I traded the first seven races of the day from Ayr and Ripon. Below is the crib-sheet for each race along with a brief description of the trading decisions.
Ayr… Good/Soft
2.25
Roman Secret @2.9… Was outpaced on his debut, possibly due to being green, but did keep on well in the closing stages. Consensus is that he will be suited by stepping up a furlong to 7f, but this is not backed up by his dosage numbers [which I utilise in these situations]. He has a poor draw on the outside (0.44 PRB). His sire’s record with 2yo’s is 6% win/21% place against 9% win/26% place for all ages.
Prior to the race, Roman Secret was a bit reluctant to enter the stalls. In the race itself, he never really travelled but I failed to trade him! The crib sheet notes were quite strong, but I was wary that the race was full of debutants and perhaps a little trigger shy on the first race of the day.
3.00
One Dickie @2.26… Took a very keen hold last time in blinkers and disappointed. Headgear change to cheekpieces here, but if he pulled again in the early stages, I would trade him. He also has an awkward head carriage, but that isn’t useful for trading as he runs decent numbers when displaying that trait anyway.
Turbo Command @4.6… Has taken a keen hold when disappointing and is rarely seen over 1m (7f his optimal trip to date).
In the race, Turbo Command did take a hold and I laid him at 4.7. He took the shortest route however and when the favourite looked in trouble, I traded out @7.2. Surprisingly, he stayed on very well into second place, although I was relaxed having traded out.
3.35
JKR Cobbler @ 2.16… Was up 4lbs for last win when he was potentially favoured by being held up in a decently run race. Being held up and drawn high gave a 0.26 PRB and so I would watch to see if the scenario of a slow race and him being held up wide may occur.
Bernie The Bear @ 4… Looks thoroughly exposed and so I would trade at any sign of weakness.
In the race itself, JKR Cobbler wasn’t far from the pace and Bernie The Bear gradually drifted in the market through the race and I was never able to secure a price close to his bsp. No trade.
4.10
Flyawaydream@ 1.67… He was predicted to race prominently on the Geegeez pace map, which is an advantage here.
Glasses Up @4.8… Was an 8yo with 58 runs! But was falling down the weights considerably to a mark below his last winning one.
In the race, Flyawaydream was slowly away and I could have traded at that point, since it was a deviation from the anticipated, but I lacked conviction and only got involved when he was niggled at the back of the field. I laid at 2.72 (a little late) and then backed him back @4 (which, in hindsight, was premature) when he briefly looked like he might rally. I think I was wary of him being a Prescott ‘improver’ and conscious that the race was weak. Despite that, it was my most profitable trade of the day.
Ripon… Soft
2.45
Night Eyes @1.95… Lowther Entry. Most experienced in the field and should lead.
Roast Chestnut @3… Had shown promise on his debut.
It was a tricky race to call throughout and I was never tempted to trade it.
3.20
Juri @5.9… 3yo debut (but the trainer stats were positive for stable debutants). Wearing a hood on debut and going down to the start early suggested he was perhaps not straightforward. I thought he was worthy of single focus in the race. He also drifted appreciably in the betting.
Corellian Star @3.1… 3rd run but on dosage stats I wasn’t convinced that 5f was far enough for him (though tempered because of the soft ground).
Prior to the race I saw Havana Pursuit @8 look very reluctant to post. I placed a lay at 8 (anticipating a drift because of his antics), but as soon as I pressed the button, he came to life and went down to post perfectly well! Simultaneously, he was backed into 6.4! My reason for the trade was no longer valid and so I swallowed a red by backing him at 6.4. He went on to be backed into less than 4!
In the race, Juri was both slowly away and jinked to his right (drawn on the outside). As I had sole focus on him, I was hitting the lay button and got some at 13. He briefly recovered and I backed him back @21. I then saw on my TPD (Total Performance Data) Par Chart that he had used a lot of energy getting back in the race and had another lay @36 when he looked beaten. I had no need to trade out of that final lay.
3.55
Ey Up It’s Maggie @ 2.38… Had won off this mark and had a valid excuse for her last run.
Storm Fox @ 4.8… Had run poorly on the ground many times.
In the race itself, Storm Fox grabbed the stands rail and although he raced at the upper end of the pace chart, I could never justify a trade and his price gradually ran away from me.
A day I traded conservatively overall. I traded three of the seven races. I managed to take a ‘red’ pre-race on Havana Star which highlighted an important ‘rule’ that if your reason for entering a trade disappears, then you should exit regardless of price… no finger crossing!
If anyone has any questions, then please feel free to leave them in the comments section and I will answer them.
- Russell
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/pw5.png320830Russell Clarkehttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngRussell Clarke2023-08-09 14:02:562023-08-09 14:02:56In-running trading diary, part 2
In my previous article I went through some basic ideas in terms of trying to create your own odds line or betting tissue, writes Dave Renham. In this piece I am going to show you how to go about trying to create a rating method in order to help you when analysing a race. There is no perfect way to rate a race; there are no perfect ratings, so this idea / method I am sharing is just one of thousands of potential ways to rate a horse race.
Two problems in the past I have found with rating a race have been firstly which factors to use, and secondly what ‘weighting’ or importance do I give to each one. Let’s look at factors first:
Factors / variables to use – to start with, one important thing to be aware of is to make sure the factors you ‘rate’ do not overlap in any way. A simple example of this would be using ‘last time out (LTO) finishing position’ but using ‘LTO beaten distance’ as well. These two factors are very similar as they are both measuring last time out performance and they should not be used in combination in terms of rating races; rather, choose one or the other.
For me I do not want to over complicate things so I would be looking for a handful of factors/variables to use in my ratings. Here are the factors I tend to concentrate on when trying to develop a rating system, and what ‘measure’ I would use:
Most Recent form – either LTO finishing position or LTO distance beaten
Recent market data – LTO price or prices from last 2-3 runs
Long term form – some stat connected with the horses’ overall career
Fitness – days since their last race
Draw – past C&D draw stats split into thirds
Weighting of factors/variables – this is tricky in my opinion, and I have no magic bullet to share with you I’m afraid. What I have struggled with in the past is which stats to use for each factor – win strike rate, placed strike rate, A/E indices, etc. Not only that, but how on earth do you ‘weight’, for example, LTO position versus days since last run? How do the individual LTO finishing positions compare with a grouping of days since the horse ran last? What grouping for days since last run do I use? I cannot use individual days, so do I group it in weeks, blocks of 10 days, etc?
There are lots of questions, but no clear cut answers. Suffice to say, you just have to go with your gut instinct in terms of weighting factors. Once you have rated a few races, you will get a feel for what you may have to adjust to improve them.
For this article I will be using the five variables mentioned above in an attempt to create simple ratings for horse races. As far as weighting is concerned, I am basically going to weight each factor in a similar way. In order to do this, my stat of choice is going to be the PRB stat (Percentage of Rivals Beaten).
Percentage of rivals beaten (PRB) – Before becoming a member of the Geegeez family I had not really delved into this metric much. However, now, I think it is arguably the most important racing stat I consider. For more information on PRB (and the other metrics used on geegeez.co.uk) check out this article.
On Geegeez you can find the PRB stat in a variety of areas which can be accessed from the racecard – individual horse records such as:
On the Profiler tab:
In the pace / run style tab:
And in the draw tab:
Hence, we can find the draw PRB stats needed for my simple rating method on Geegeez. For the remaining stats we need to make use of several hours of number crunching I did prior to writing this article.
How is this simple rating system going to work?
Essentially, I am going to use the five factors mentioned earlier and find the relevant PRB figures for each horse within each factor. Then I am going to add up the five PRB scores to give me their final scores or rating. I said it was simple! I would suggest trying this idea in handicap races; I would use a different idea for say 2yo races or 3yo maiden races.
Right, let’s go through each factor one by one:
Draw – I would like to start with one of the tabs you can use on Geegeez. Let us imagine we have a 1m handicap at Pontefract with 9 runners. I would actually go to the Draw Analyser tool rather the draw tab in the racecard in order to use a more precise date range. Hence this is what I would enter in terms of parameters:
As you can see, I have chosen a recent date range (2016 to 2023); handicaps only due to it being a handicap, 7 to 11 runners (+ or -2 from 9 runners), full ‘going’ range from hard to heavy, and ‘Actual’ rather than ‘Card’ as this takes non-runners into account.
In this imaginary 9-runner handicap example, any horse drawn 1 to 3 would get a ‘0.60’ PRB ‘rating’ figure, those drawn 4 to 6 would get ‘0.48’ and draws 7 to 9 the figure would be ‘0.42’.
Most Recent form – for this factor I am going to use LTO finishing position. For the PRB figures I have looked at thousands of handicap races to give the most accurate readings. Here are the PRB figures for LTO finishing position:
As you can see LTO winners have a PRB figure of 0.60 when running in their next race; compare this with horses that finished 9th or worse LTO whose figure is much lower, not surprisingly, at just 0.41.
Therefore, when rating each horse you simply need to look for their LTO finishing position and assign the relevant figure from this graph.
Recent Market data – for this factor I am going to use LTO price – so the price the horse was in its most recent race. Here are the PRB figures, again taken from thousands of races:
Another sliding scale here as you would expect with shorter priced runners LTO producing higher PRB figures. Hence a horse that was priced 11/2 LTO would be assigned a rating figure of 0.55, if they were priced 25/1 LTO their figure would be 0.44, etc.
Long term form – for long term form I am going to use career placed percentages in handicap races. The data shared again is taken from thousands of races to give us the most accurate figures possible. I have split the percentages into four groups as the graph below shows:
The beauty of this stat from a Geegeez perspective is that you can find these percentages by using the ‘Instant Expert’ tab from the racecard. All you need to do is to adjust the distance tab (top left of screenshot) to include all races (I use the full range from 5f to 4m4f), click the handicap tab (top right of screenshot), and for ALL flat races click the ‘Flat & AW’.
In the above example, the horse at the top has a career placed percentage of 43% and as this lies between the ’36 to 50%’ grouping, this horse would be worth a PRB figure of 0.54.
Fitness – for this metric I am using days since last run (DSLR) with once more thousands of races analysed to create accurate PRB figures. Here are the splits:
As you can see this metric is going to be quite even for most horses, as the vast majority of runners will have been off the track for between 8 and 70 days. The 8 to 14, 15 to 28, 29 to 42 and 43 to 70 groupings are very close together in terms of PRB figures.
And that’s it for configuring my factors. Hopefully it has been fairly self-explanatory.
However, let me give you a fictitious example which hopefully will help. I will stick to the 9-runner mile handicap race at Pontefract that I used for the draw data earlier.
Firstly here are our imaginary horses and their relevant stats:
From here we can convert these into the relevant PRB figures for each individual stat:
I have totalled up the five PRB figures for each horse to give them a final total (furthest column on the right). These totals are their final rating figures and I have ordered our imaginary horses highest to lowest below:
From these ratings, you would hope there is good chance that the winner will come from one of the top three (Fireball, Frazzle and Dobbin); likewise you would hope the bottom three rated (Monty, The Closer and The Gooner) are unlikely to produce the winner.
How you deploy your ratings is going to be different for each individual. You may want to use them as a basis for an odds line – in a 9-runner race, each horse theoretically has an 8/1 chance of winning so you could initially price up the middle rated horse at 8/1. This horse is Plodder – from here you could assign the rest of the prices using Plodder as your starting point, and then adjust them to get a book percentage of close to 100%. Once done you could compare them to the actual prices on offer to see if there are any horses that potentially offer you value.
An alternative approach is to simply compare the actual market position with your rating positions. Let’s say for argument’s sake Dobbin, your third rated horse, is priced up at 10/1 and is 6th in the betting, you might perceive this to offer value. Likewise if the top rated horse Fireball is third in the betting priced 5/1, again you might perceive this horse to offer you some value.
Essentially how you interpret the ratings is going to be personal to you – again there is no right or wrong way. What ultimately matters is how predictive your ratings are. I have not back tested this rating idea as yet, but it is on my ‘to do list’, as I have enjoyed researching and writing this piece. What is likely with a first ratings attempt is that I will need to make some adjustments – for this idea it may be that I am underrating one particular factor and overrating another. If that proves to be the case, I could apply some multipliers to the relevant PRB figures to help with that adjustment. For example, I may need to multiply the underrated PRB figures by 1.10 and the overrated ones by 0.90 to give more accurate overall ratings. However, that is for another time.
Until next time, I’d encourage you to experiment for yourself and if you find anything interesting, feel free to share in the comments below.
DR
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/LTO_PRB.png320830Dave Renhamhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngDave Renham2023-08-07 12:04:222023-08-07 12:04:22How To Create Simple Horse Racing Ratings: Example
There have been a few Goodwood meetings where the term Glorious did not exactly comply with weather conditions, writes Tony Stafford. Indeed, the lavish sponsor Qatar, whose name affixes to several races, in the process making the meeting’s prizemoney extravagant by most UK standards, is a more accurate term nowadays.
What was glorious and equally extravagant though was the performance of Quickthorn in Tuesday’s Goodwood Cup. It was notable for the less than gushing praise allotted to Hughie Morrison’s six-year-old gelding compared to the deluge of compliments afforded to his jockey Tom Marquand’s front-running ride.
Tom sent him quickly into the lead, maintaining the speed for the first half of the race by which time he was a good dozen lengths to the good.
It’s worth reiterating here, lest we forget, that in opposition were the winner, Courage Mon Ami, runner-up, Emily Dickinson, third home, Coltrane, and fourth, Eldar Eldarov, from the Gold Cup at Ascot six weeks previously. In between Aidan O’Brien had found time to win a Group 2 at home with Emily Dickinson.
On television and on the racecourse the commentators glowed with praise for Marquand as he merely had to keep his mount going to maintain a sizeable lead – albeit diminishing to six lengths at the line. It was a very good ride, replicating his 14-length win on the same horse at York last summer.
Excuse me if I misheard, but I understood the stewards had the also rans in to ask about their “misjudged” riding, as they had “allowed” Quickthorn and his rider to go around 20 lengths clear at some stage.
But this was a Group 1 worth £283k to the winner, and therefore worth at least 20 grand for the winning jockey. I doubt they were in any way culpable, just guilty of taking pains not to go too hard after what they considered a pace, if not too quick for the leader to maintain, certainly one to burn up their mounts in the early part of the race if they pursued it too energetically.
In finishing order, the beaten jockeys were Moore, Murphy, David Egan, Atzeni, Dettori, Buick, James Doyle, Rossa Ryan, Crowley and Kingscote, hardly the least talented band of ten to challenge for a major race.
In the event they provided a rousing conclusion (for the not inconsiderable place money) with a short-head, short-head, neck, and one and a half lengths separating Emily Dickinson (£107k), Coltrane (£53k), Eldar Eldarov (£26k), Giavellotto (£13k) and the favourite Courage Mon Ami (a puny £6,750 for Frankie to take a piece of.)
I always (additionally having been lectured by the Editor over the years) take no more than a passing interest in Racing Post speed-figures but it is remarkable that, having gone so quickly in the early stages, the winner of a two-mile race should record the fastest speed figure of the entire meeting.
Their RPR’s also sometimes have a sickly sweet aroma of fudge about them, too, but since his head second to the very well handicapped and subsequent Irish St Leger winner Sonnyboyliston in the 2021 Ebor at York, Quickthorn has run 14 times and only once recorded an RPR below 100. That happened when he collapsed late on (and was by no means the only one!) behind last year’s champion stayer Kyprios in the Prix du Cadran (2m4f) last October.
His overall record boasts nine wins in 22 starts, with three second places and one third. As well as that Ebor near miss, he was also close behind Princess Zoe in last year’s Sagaro Stakes. By the way, the moving of that great mare from Tony Mullins earlier this year smacks of ingratitude if ever I heard it.
Criticism of last week’s Goodwood Cup jockeys was the obvious way to go, but Oisin Murphy, who won twice on Quickthorn earlier in his career, told Morrison he dare not chase him as when his mount Coltrane, ridden by Rob Hornby, attempted that in last year’s Group 2 Lonsdale Cup at York, he was beaten more than twice as far as at Goodwood. The question now is whether Hughie will attempt the Lonsdale double but when I spoke to him after the race, he seemed to be thinking more in terms of drawing stumps for the year. “He doesn’t seem to like the winter, so we can always bring him back next year if we are kind to him now.”
His earnings are a touch short of £800k, putting right the near miss of a slightly bigger prize in that 2021 Ebor. Morrison had been without a Group 1 win since Sakhee’s Secret gave him his second July Cup, two years after Pastoral Pursuits also won that Newmarket sprint. In between, the 10-year-old Alcazar won the Prix Royal Oak. Also a gelding, if the typical Morrison training pattern holds firm, what more could come from Quickthorn?
**
I recently outlined how Paddington is quickly creeping up on the Iron Horse sequence of Group 1 wins of his O’Brien forerunner Giant’s Causeway. His emphatic Sussex Stakes victory on Wednesday made it four Group 1 wins since the end of May and leaves him only needing to collect the Juddmonte at York already to match the achievements of the old champion.
Many more options are available to this later starter and now Ryan Moore has confessed publicly that Paddington could be the best horse he’s ever ridden. He even suggested that the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe may not be beyond his scope. If that was either the seventh in a row (with the Irish Champion in between) he surely will have eclipsed Giant’s Causeway. Slip in a race at the Breeders’ Cup and the Coolmore cup (and even their superlatives!) will runneth over.
My second favourite horse at the moment is one that hasn’t won a race this year, but the doughty sprinter Apollo One, dubbed trained by Peter Charalambous and James Clutterbuck, but firmly in the Chambo camp, is a true star.
Saturday’s latest instalment of his sequence of near misses in sprints came in the Stewards‘ Cup in which, remarkably considering the meeting was to be called off immediately afterwards, all 28 horses stood their ground.
Annoying for two, previous winner Summerghand, who was withdrawn lame at the start, and the sole three-year-old Rumstar, who dropped to his knees as the stalls opened jettisoning his rider Rhys Clutterbuck, only 26 completed the six furlongs that was finally about to succumb after a day-long deluge on top of all the earlier drenchings during the week.
When I spoke to Pete last Monday, I got the feeling Apollo One, up near the top of the weights with his rating of 100, might not run. The ground had been good to firm when he ran a one-length second of 27 in the Wokingham Stakes at Royal Ascot and similarly when also second to prolific winner Badri in a close finish on Derby Day at Epsom.
He’d never indicated an equal facility for handling heavy ground, for that assuredly was what it was on Saturday. But Richard Kingscote got him away alertly from his stall one off the stand rail and he was always heading the pace on that side as the contest devolved into the customary three groups.
Apollo One maintained his pace and above all his action in the ground all the way to the line but could not quite match conceding weight to the penalised Aberama Gold, a six-year-old ridden by Goodwood ace and soon off to Hong Kong Andrea Atzeni and trained by David O’Meara for lucky owner Evan Sutherland. Aberama Gold earned his penalty only seven days before in another valuable race at York, but nowhere near the £128k on offer on Saturday.
Charalambous had the consolation of collecting the £60k second prize for pcracing.co.uk which he heads and now can be looking at the Portland at Doncaster and, realistically now the heavy ground question has been positively answered, the Ayr Gold Cup.
Behind him in third and fourth were two eight-year-olds, Bielsa and previous Stewards’ Cup consolation winner Mr Wagyu. Quite a week then for the old boys, but Paddington stood firm for the Classic crop and bestrode the meeting with his sheer class and toughness.
- TS
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Quickthorn_GoodwoodCup2023.png319830Tony Staffordhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngTony Stafford2023-08-07 06:23:162023-08-07 06:56:45Monday Musings: Still Glorious despite the weather
geegeez.co.uk uses cookies to improve your experience. We assume that's OK, but you may opt-out from the settings. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
