The Secrets Of Building A Killer Betting System – Part 3

Following on from part one and part two of The Secrets Of Building A Killer Betting System, you now know exactly…

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• What factors your going to be measuring
• How you’re going to measure the factors
• Exactly what race conditions you’re going to be considering

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However you’ve decided to measure your factors, there is going to be a problem. You may not be aware of it yet, but there’s a major obstacle that you have yet to face.

In effect your measurements are going to be ratings. And each rating is almost always going to be on a different scale.

And that is going to be a problem when you’re building a betting system.

If you’ve got an earnings based ratings it could be very large numbers, in the thousands. If you’ve got a form based rating it could be very low numbers, less than ten. If you’ve got a speed based rating it could be between zero and two hundred.

The question  you need to ask yourself now is…

How do you build a system when all the ratings are on a different scale? How do you know which rating is more important, just because one number is 1000 and another is 100 may not mean that the first is better?

You have two possibilities. These are…

1. Build a bog standard betting system
2. Build a killer betting system

Using the first option is definitely the easiest. To do this you need to use what are known as AND, IF and OR statements. If you’ve ever used any kind of third-party system builder then you’ll have come across these statements even if you haven’t realised it.

The way these system builders work is to create rules such as:

[box type=”shadow” align=”aligncenter” width=”600″ ]IF the race has between 7 and 12 runners AND the going is Good AND (the Class is 1 OR 2) AND the Favourite has odds between 2 and 3 then this horse is a selection[/box]

I’m sure that you’re familiar with these kind of rules. You see them everywhere. And, it can work. But, as a general rule, the systems built using this approach will never be great. The few that work will have a very low edge and are likely to only be effective for a short period of time. Of course, there are some that will be very successful. But, the majority won’t be.

If you want to build killer betting systems then you need to be doing something different to most people. And, most people use the approach above.

Which is exactly why you don’t want to!

What you want to do is to find a way that you can put all the ratings onto the same scale. There are a few methods of doing this but, there is only one way that I would recommend…

…using Impact Values!

An impact value calculates how much “impact” a rating has on the horses chance of winning. For example you could calculate impact values for horses ranked 1, 2 or 3 for your speed factor. This would tell you how much of a difference to the horse actually winning being ranked 1 instead of 2 is.

The base number for an impact value is 1.00. This means that a horse is just as likely to win with this factor as those are without. An impact value of 0.50 means that horses with this factor are half as likely to win as those without it, and an impact value of 1.50 means that a horse with this factor is 50% more likely to win than those without it.

By calculating the impact value for your ratings you are putting all of them onto not only the same scale, but a scale which gives a clear definition of how it affects the horses chances of winning by having this factor.

This is powerful!

If you’re not sure how to calculate impact values then you can find out everything that you need to know here.

Start with the rankings, e.g. top rated, second top rated, third top rated etc…, and work out the impact values for them for each of your factors in races with the race conditions that you defined last week. I promise you’ll find the factors that make a positive and negative impact almost certainly aren’t what you thought they were.