In this post I’m going to show you why you need access to a lot of horse racing ratings to start finding winners, and how you can choose just the five to ten that you need to make a long term profit.
I probably don’t need to tell you that if you want to become a long-term profitable bettor, then you’re going to need to be using horse racing ratings. In fact almost everyone who bets on a horse race uses horse racing ratings, but when you question the ratings you’re using and what they’re saying, you have the opportunity to join the 1% of profitable bettors.
If you’ve never been quite sure what a rating is telling you, or how you can choose the right ones to use, then I’ve got great news! This blog post is going to show you why you need to have a lot of ratings to choose from, and how to choose the five to ten that are going to make you profitable. Let’s dive right in…
459 Horse Racing Ratings
A horse race is a complex puzzle. The horse on it’s own is a complex animal, and that’s before you put a jockey on its back!
In order to solve the horse racing puzzle, we need data. As much of it as possible. There are very few places that you can get this data, and the Race Advisor’s 459 horse racing ratings is exactly the data you need for long-term profitable betting.
I expect at first glance 459 horse racing ratings sounds like a lot. And you’re right, it is.
Until you start digging a bit deeper and realise that we have speed ratings for every going condition.
A form rating also has the option to see how many points were added in the last race, or the last two races, and has a reliability score to see how much confidence you can have in the rating.
We need a complete picture of the horse that’s taking place in a race, and in order to get that complete picture we need to look at the horse from as many different angles as possible.
This information is critical to your success, because it means that you can look at a race completely differently to the general public. You can find the horses that have hard-to-see strengths, which will allow them to win by ‘surprise’.
And that’s where your profit is hidden.
An Example
If you consider a flat turf sprint race, most people will know that they need to focus on speed.
The horse with the strongest speed is likely to be the winner.
Of course, there are other primary factors that could be considered, but speed is definitely going to be one of the strongest.
Most bettors only have access to a single speed rating. This may be shown for the last race only, or it may be shown for the last two or three races, and this is the information they use to make their selection on.
By making this assessments, and when we have access to 459 horse racing ratings, we can decide to look at the race from a different perspective. From a perspective that won’t be used to make the odds.
Which means we can gain an edge.
Maybe we consider the horses average speed over the distance and ground, or the distance and race type.
Perhaps we compare all of them to see if the horse is weak in any specific area.
We could take the horses 90 day average speed rating, and compare this to it’s best ever speed rating to tell us if the horse is performing at its peak or not.
Alternatively we may decide to simply see the average speed figure, but give more importance to recent races (something known as time decay).
Any of these possibilities, and any more that you can imagine, are ways of looking at the race that most bettors won’t be doing. And they won’t be doing it because…
…they don’t have access to the data!
So, in summary, we want access to as much data as possible. We want to be able to look at a horse (and race) from every possible angle in order to gain an edge over the market.
But, while we need access to as much data as possible to do this, we know that we only need between five and ten horse racing ratings to be able to make a profit.
Horse Racing Ratings Names (why they’re so weird!)
You’ve probably noticed that horse racing rating names are usually pretty weird. There’s a good reason for this, when you know what the shortenings stand for, it makes it simple to know what they mean.
Look at this sample of ratings from the Race Advisor.
There’s some pretty weird names there, but here are some of our shortenings and their meanings:
Pro = Projected
Cl = Class
L/Lr = Last race
GR = Good race
BR = Best race
Vol = Volatility
E = Earnings
Ae = Average
Now that you know that, we can break down the meanings of ratings. Look at AeEProClL
That’s a mouthful; I’m not even sure it’s pronounceable!
But with the information above we know that it’s the Ae (Average) E (Earnings) Pro (Projected) Cl (Class) L (Last Race).
It’s the average earnings projected class rating from the last race.
Still quite a mouthful, but one that makes more sense. Of course, you could simply choose to look at the description:
(High-Low) Prize Money Horse Class. Total prize money earned in winning races (Earn1) divided by EPS (Average earnings over career starts)
That makes it even easier to understand.
So that’s why we have weird names for our horse racing ratings, it’s actually to make them more understandable!
Oh yeah. When you see (High-Low) that means the best horse is the highest rated, when you see (Low-High) that means the best horse is the lowest rated.
How To Choose Winning Horse Racing Ratings
You already know that we only need between five and ten horse racing ratings to be long-term profitable.
The secret is to get the right ratings for the right set of race conditions.
So how the heck do you choose them?
To keep things simple, you generally need one rating from each of the core rating groups.
Rating groups are categories that every rating will fall into, depending on what it’s measuring.
As you can see, when you create a race card inside the Race Advisor software, it’s possible to choose from categories.
Each of these categories represents a core area of performance for a race horse, including it’s connections such as Trainer, Jockey etc.
There are four primary categories, and you should start by choosing one rating from each of those categories.
That means you need a rating which measures Class, Form, Speed and Connections.
Once you’ve got those four ratings, you can fill in some of the gaps you feel you’re missing with other ratings, or add in odds lines, power ratings or other tools to the ratings you’ve chosen.
3 Steps To Choosing The Right Horse Racing Rating For Each Category
There’s no need to spend a lot of time agonising over the ratings we’re going to choose for each of the categories.
After all, it’s possible to change your mind at a later date if you don’t feel one of them is performing how you expected it to.
I like to use three steps to choosing the right rating for a category:
(1) Determine what most bettors are going to be using
Looking at the class of a race, most users are going to use the standard class numbers.
But these don’t represent the true class of the horses in the race, because the race conditions allow such a wide range of horses into each class.
With that knowledge, if the race was a difficult jumps race, we may choose to use a class based on the form of the horses over an extended period of time (PFPProCl rating). We know that this would relate specifically to the challenge the horse’s are going to face in the race.
Or… we could consider the horse’s average earnings over recent races and divide it by its average earnings (AeEProClL rating) to determine if the horse is improving or declining in class.
In sprint races, a speed based class horse racing rating would most likely be more appropriate.
(2) Spend no more than five minutes choosing each rating
It’s very easy to get lost in choosing the ratings you want to use, and it’s not good time spent.
Far better is to pick quickly, and then start testing with the ratings you’ve chosen, and switching them out if they don’t perform as you like.
In order to do this, I suggest limiting the amount of time you spend choosing each horse racing rating to just five minutes.
This gives a maximum time spent of twenty minutes to choose your four primary ratings.
(3) Fill in any gaps, decide on power ratings or other tools to use
Once you’ve got your four core horse racing ratings, it’s time to fill in the gaps.
Personally I always put the DSLGR (Days Since Last Good Race) and 5278 CFR horse racing ratings onto a race card.
I like to know how long it’s been since the horse had a good race, as I don’t like placing money on a horse who hasn’t performed well for a long time without me knowing why. The 5278 CFR rating is a nice quick overview of how likely it is a horse is going to be a contender in the race.
As well as these I tend to use either some of or a combination of PR Odds, Monte Carlo Simulation and Speed Graphs.
Those are just my personal preferences, and you don’t need to choose more than one.
It’s a mistake to think that the more data you use the more profit you will make.
We want a lot of data to enable us the flexibility to choose how to analyse a horse race from the most successful view point which doesn’t contain information that most bettors will use.
But we only want to use the most relevant data for each race, and if you are using more than ten items you are making it too complicated.
In Conclusion
Horse racing ratings are used by every horse racing bettor, but most bettors use the same ratings.
We can get an advantage in our horse racing betting by using ratings that most bettors don’t consider.
To do this we need access to a large pool of ratings which measure a horse’s performance from as many different angles as possible. We can then choose the most appropriate ratings from this pool of data that will allow us to look at the horse race from a different view point to everybody else.
Here’s how you find the list of ratings, and create that custom race card inside the Race Advisor.
Let me know which horse racing rating you have found the most success with in the comments below.
