Boom… You just hit a bullseye!

“Lo Michael,

Have you ever looked into:

Distance WON by.

Distance behind winner (irrespective of its official position) ie a horse could

finish 6th or 7th and only be 1-1/2 lengths behind the winner; as opposed to a horse finishing 3rd

beaten 5 Lengths.

Only considering “like for like races in the above””

Tom left this comment on the blog the other day. In doing so, he hit a bullseye. So a big congratulations there.

Have I ever considered the distance behind winner rather than finish position?

Hot diggedy dang, yes I have.

In fact, a lot of the factors inside the Racing Dossier are based on this information!

The Distance Behind Winner is a far better figure to use than recent finish positions because…

It gives you a significantly better picture of what happened in a race. For example.. if a horse you’re interested in came in 4th position last time out, you may think the performance was average.

But, what if you looked at the “distance behind winner” last time out and saw that although the horse came 4th, it was only one length behind the winner.

Do you still think the performance was average, or do you now think the horse performed well and the race was very close?

Most people would choose the latter.

That means that your entire perception of how a horse has performed has changed, on just this one piece of information.

Want to get some actual figures statistics on this?

I’m in the process of writing an article about it, so keep an eye out for it over the next few days 😉

In the meantime…

This software has ratings which has the distance behind winner hard-wired into them!

All the best,

Michael and the Race Advisor team