Visualising Horse Racing Revisited

A while ago I posted an article about using more visual methods to help you find the winners. If you haven’t seen this article then visit Using Graphs to Visualise Horse Racing to read it.

In that article we looked at using different ratings for each horse and seeing which clearly excelled in different areas. Today I would like to offer a different approach.

This approach will involve using just one rating, the rating can be anything but a power rating would be preferable, and looking at a horses past races to see its improvement or decline over time.

I shall be using one of my own ratings in this example called the PFP rating. This rating is a form rating which analyses the class of a horses form and brings all runners onto the same scale. I am going to look at the top 3 rated in this rating for the 15:40 at Beverly on the 27^th July 2010.

The top 3 ranked in this rating are Shadow Time, Ailsa Craig and Cherry Bee (in that order). There previous ratings are as below.

It is straight away obvious that Shadowtime has run a lot more races than Ailsa Craig. who has run more races than Cherry Bee. Immediately we know that Shadowtime has experience on his side.

The problem we face is what to do with such a large amount of figures, and this is just for the top 3 contenders! This is where our visualisation technique comes in. We are very simply going to graph each runner’s previous results against the date they ran the race.

Shadowtime



Ailsa Craig

Cherry Bee

This begins to give us a good idea of the shape that each horse has. Shadowtime has had some volatility but the overall trend is up and so he is improving. Ailsa Craig seems to be racing at around a similar level in each race and Cherry Bee hasn’t really had enough races to start developing a trend.

Swapping between the graphs is not ideal though and so it would be better if we overlaid these graphs into just one.

There is a lot that we can deduce from the above graph. Instantly you can see that in Cherry Bee’s few performances he has never broken the 1502 line by very much whereas both of the other two have.

Ailsa Craig has had a couple of breakout performances but is generally performing at a level of around 1501.

Shadowtime has had a slightly volatile but steady increase from his low point in 2008, overall we can see that he has been performing, on average, at a higher level than Ailsa Craig and Cherry Bee which would make him our selection in this race.

As you can see Shadowtime won and Ailsa Craig came in second place. Ideally you would perform this process using all the runners in a race, however you can remove your non-contenders first. Whether you choose to use the top 3 as contenders, the top half of the field or something else is up to you.

Visualising numbers can very often help make the process of finding winners a lot easier.