Creating A Tissue In Horse Racing

Guest article written by Eddie Lloyd

In this first article on how to create a tissue I thought I’d show you a very simple method for rating horses and converting these into odds.

Creating your own tissue can be a very profitable approach to horse racing and many professionals use this technique to make their living.

So what is a tissue?

When an odds compiler looks at a race he will give a price to each horse depending on many variables. It’s very technical nowadays with sophisticated data from statistical models and software that monitors the exchanges. On gathering all this information he will go about constructing his tissue. Once he has built in the over-round (please read my article here on over-rounds) he will then publish his tissue for the betting public to bet. This is the odds you can get in the bookies on the morning of the race.

Now as the day progresses these odds will differ. As more money comes for certain horses, their price obviously shortens and vice versa. This is where as a professional understanding the market and spotting mistakes in the tissue price we can make a profit.

Imagine you had priced up a horse at 5/1 and upon walking into the bookies you can get 10/1. You take this over price and before the off the horse goes off at 5/1! It’s a good feeling knowing that you got the price right!

So how do we go about pricing horses up then?

Let’s concentrate on a mythical 8 horse handicap. Don’t worry I’ll be using a real life example in article two. The first thing we’ll assume at this early stage is that each horse has an equal chance. On this assumption then the simple maths here is to divide 100 by the number of runners (8). This gives us 12.5% about each runner.

So we now have 7/1 about each runner. (100 / 12.5 = 8 or 7/1)

I’ll keep this simple for the first article which will enable you to practice the steps below and grow your understanding of how odds work.

Looking at our 8 runner race we need to now add a percentage for each positive value of every runner.

Let’s assume we are going to use form reading as our main approach to finding the winner. Using the following form elements: Going, Class, Distance, OR, Course, Trainer Form and Jockey Form we will assign 1 point to each positive (i.e we believe this positive will benefit the horses performance in today’s race) that the horses form shows.

So let’s say that the table below is our tissue:

GOING   CLASS     DISTANCE              OR            COURSE                  TF             JF              %

HORSE 1:                1               0               1                                 1               1                                 0               0               16.5

HORSE 2:                1               1               0                                 0               0                                 1               1               16.5

HORSE 3:                0               0               0                                 0               0                                 0               0               12.5

HORSE 4:                1               1               0                                 0               0                                 0               0               14.5

HORSE 5:                0               1               0                                 1               1                                 0               0               15.5

HORSE 6:                0               1               1                                 0               0                                 1               0               15.5

HORSE 7:                1               0               0                                 1               0                                 0               1               15.5

HORSE 8:                1               1               0                                 0               0                                 0               0               14.5

Now you’ll notice that I’ve added 1 % per point awarded to each horse. The problem we have now is that all these percentages add up to 121%. We need to lose 21%. To keep this simple at this stage I’ll suggest that horses 1 and 2 are my strongest fancies so I’ll add another 1 percent to these and as a consequence remove 23% from the rest of the book (the 21% plus the 2% added to our stronger fancies). Now 23 divided by the remaining 6 horses will mean taking 4% off each horse. This is irrelevant at this stage though. More on that in part two!

Having added our 1 percent to the two horses we fancy we now have 9/2 about our horses 1 and 2 (100 / 17.5% = 5.71 which we’ll round down to 5.5 or 9/2).

Having established 9/2 about our two fancies I can now go over to an odds checker and see if one or both of these horses are over-priced.

Try this simple technique out over a 100 bets and see if you can make a profit. If you can then you have quite simply made a profit from finding value! Another brilliant approach that I use daily in my betting is to find these value bets, back them at what I believe to be over-priced and then lay them off in the last 10 minutes before the off for either a free bet or a green book

Please remember this is not the full method of constructing a tissue and the whole process is a lot more complex. The above illustration is to merely give you an opportunity to practice your odds compiling and extend your portfolio whilst trying an age old tested approach to betting!

Please leave a comment and I will answer as soon as possible.

Ed