(DSLGR) HORSE RACING RATINGS: +731 Units Profit Without Breaking A Sweat

Horse racing ratings are an integral part of finding a profit from betting on the horses.

With more ratings for every horse than any other provider in the UK, we began a public analysis of each one in 2020, and are adding to them regularly.

You can see all the ratings in the series here.

Some will perform well and make insane horse racing profits on their own, others will not perform as well but will indicate strong horses and work excellently when combined with other factors.

In this post we’re going to look at the DSLGR. This isn’t really a rating, more of information, but information that I use in every single race. It’s information that isn’t available anywhere else, yet it’s critical to know!

What is this information?

It’s the Days Since Last Good Race. We all know how many days it has been since a horse last won a race. But just because a horse didn’t win a race, doesn’t mean it hasn’t raced well.

The DSLGR tells us how recently a horse has run well, which is far more powerful than knowing when the horse last won.

As this isn’t a rating in the true sense of the word, there are no rankings or difference from top figures for it, there is only the raw rating.

Before we dig in and see how it performs, let’s see…

WHAT HORSE RACING RATINGS STATS MEAN

We use a few pieces of information that help us to understand the performance of horse race ratings. Below you will find an explanation of these for reference.

SELECTIONS

The number of selections that have been found

PROFIT

The profit, or loss, of the selections to Betfair SP with a 2% commission. Where Betfair SP isn’t available we have used the SP odds.

WINS

The number of winners found in this sample of selections.

STRIKE RATE

The percentage of winners found from the selections.

ROI

Return On Investment. The percentage return made on turnover, based on betting 1 unit per selection.

A/E

Actual/Expected. Also known as the PIV (Pool Impact Value). This shows how many winners were found compared to the number of expected winners (based on odds). If this figure is greater than 1 then we have an edge, less than 1 and we don’t!

CHI2

The chi square is a statistical test which tells us how likely the results are due to chance or skill. 100% means the results are 100% based on chance, we want them to be as low as possible.

DOES THE DSLGR RATING MAKE HORSE RACING PROFITS?

Using data from 2018 to the present day, I’m going to start by breaking the ratings down into some relevant groups. Each of these groups has been designed to have roughly the same amount of runners.

DSLGR RAW PERFORMANCE

The above table gives us some very interesting information. The first is that, unexpectedly, horses with a good race between one and 45 days ago have made a profit straight out the box.

That was something I wasn’t expecting.

However, the ROI and A/E show us that this is effectively a break-even position, and the profit would probably be bouncing around the break-even level a bit.

What we did expect to see is a decrease in strike rate the longer ago a horse’s last good race was, and that’s exactly what’s happening.

There is a steady decrease in ROI, except for the 366 to 730 days where it suddenly increases again. That could be due to horses being away for a season and coming back, which would make sense, and this is a grouping we should investigate further.

We are left with two solid starting points and there are a number of choices in the ways we could go.

We could either:

(a) start with one (or more) of these starting points and investigate further

(b) see whether race type alone makes an impact on any of these groupings

I am going to choose to take the range of 1 to 45 days, and look into them further to see if there’s an angle we’d be interested in using as a base contender finding strategy.

WHAT IMPACT DOES MARKET FAVOURITE HAVE?

For this factor, I’ve decided to see if the market favourite has an impact. We’re going to be considering only the horses which have had a good race between 1 day and 45 days ago, and the data comes from 2018 to the current date.

Here’s what we find…

MARKET FAVOURITES

The favourite makes an immediate profit of +244 units, although the edge is only 2%, so it’s very small. Then we start to see the figures bounce about a bit, there isn’t much consistency, which is a bit of a concern.

If we were just considering the favourite, then we’d still have around 16 bets per day on average. Which gives us a lot to work with if we want to look further into it.

Now it would make sense to take the favourite and look at race types.

FAVOURITES IN DIFFERENT RACE TYPES

We get some profits here, but again the advantage isn’t really high enough for us to be confident. The volume of selections is also too low for us to be able to dig into any of them further.

So with this in mind, we need to go back a step and see how the DSLGR performs alongside other factors, such as the PFP here, to see how these runners perform when combined with a non-market based rating which gives an overall assessment of the runners expected performance.

DSLGR & PFP RATING

I think you’ll agree that paints a pretty picture!

It gives us a 25% advantage, the Chi2 shows us that the results are definitely due to the ratings and not chance, and the ROI is a whopping 38%. All of which goes alongside a profit of +731 units, or an average of +24 units a month since 2018.

Why did I choose a PFP score higher than 1530?

Because that’s what this analysis indicated were the best performing horses without any other information.

The downside is that the strike rate is a bit low at 20%, to increase that you could just focus on favourites as well…

But this sees a big reduction in profit as compensation for the large increase in strike rate to 41%.

The issue with having a low strike rate is the downswings, as you can see from this graph.

However, there are other ways to combat this, such as using the staking plan explained in this blog post.

Using a staking plan that is based on the risk, we can see that the risk is reduced with the volatility.

IN SUMMARY

The DSLGR (Days Since Last Good Race) is a piece of information that is not generally available, and whilst not a rating in the true sense of the word, it is a factor which has a big impact on a horse’s performance.

We saw this in the runners who had a good race between 1 and 45 days ago made an instant profit across all race types since 2018.

There wasn’t a huge advantage on these horses, but it gave us strong evidence that these runners perform better.

The decreasing Strike Rate and ROI as the days since last good run became further away gave further weight to that evidence, except for a bump in the 366 to 730 days, where we would be seeing horses that have had a seasons break coming back.

By focusing on just favourites who had a good race in the last 45 days we found a profit. This produced a +244 unit profit, but showed only a slight advantage.

We then investigated race types, to discover that there was no real edge on race types to be found for favourites who had a good race in the last 45 days.

That isn’t hugely surprising, considering that by focusing on favourite who had a good recent run, the market is going to be fairly well attuned to them.

So we pivoted to consider another rating we’ve already investigated, the PFP rating. Using that rating produced these results.

We got these results by:

• Only looking for horses with a DSLGR between 1 and 45 days ago
• PFP rating >1530

The strike rate of 20% was a bit low, so we looked at changing the staking to reduce the volatility.

Of course, there are a lot of ways that you could use the DSLGR, and we’ve uncovered more angles that would warrant more investigation.

Leave me a comment to let me know if you’re using, or have ever used, the DSLGR rating.

I’d love to know how you can include this in your selection process.

The DSLGR horse racing rating is available to RA Pro members on the Standard race card. In just a few seconds you can create a custom race card with the ranking version of this horse racing rating on it.

If you’re not yet a member of RA Pro, you can register here.

You can practice this approach, and develop it further for zero-risk at Aldermist, the world’s only LikeReal Racing platform. Any system or strategy that is profitable at Aldermist will also be profitable on live racing.