How To Use The Racing Post Race Predictor

[box type=”note” align=”aligncenter” class=”” width=””]IMPORTANT NOTE: The Racing Post have removed the functionality of adjusting the settings. However, thank you to Greg, who has shared that if you go to https://www.punters.com.au/ choose Form Guide and select a race, on the left-hand menu is a Predictor where you can change the settings.[/box]

Today I want to look at a tool that the Racing Post provide on their betting site at http://betting.racingpost.com/

It’s called the Race Predictor and it’s actually available in other formats on different sites who get their racing data from the Racing Post.

To use it you start by selecting your race at the top:

Then once you’ve chosen your race you can click the Run The Race button to start the simulation.

During the simulation you will see horses running towards the front of the field and you will end up with something similar to:

There is one clear horse in the above race. But, not everything is as it seems and we can use this tool to become a much more useful, and accurate, indicator of where to place our bets.

I would suggest only using this tool to find the strongest contenders in the race and from there I would look further into their form.

To do this you need to start by pressing the Adjust Parameters button:

Once you’ve pressed this button a panel will slide up from the bottom like in the image below.

You can see that there are different factors that are going into the simulation and you can apply different weights for the factors.

This is the key to using this tool.

Let’s start by considering the race conditions of the race.

We can see that this race is a Class 5 Chase Handicap being run over 2 miles at Southwell.

In chase races the distance and going is important. In the parameters I would put Going at 5 and Distance at 4.

Trainer Form I think is over-weighted at 3 and I would drop that down to 1.

Recent Form I would drop down to 2 as runners generally have longer layoffs in distance races, and I would leave ability at 3.

Then, we press the Re-Calculate Prediction button again. Having done this our finish positions look like:

Okay this looks different so let’s compare them side by side:

We can see that the biggest difference has been made to the back two. The predicted winner, The Absent Mare, is still in the same position. Fiftyonefiftyone has moved a tiny amount forwards and Barrison and Carobello have moved closer to the front of the field.

Now we’re going to run the simulation six times. Each time we will have one parameter set to max and the others turned off. Here are the results…

Looking at this we can see some very interesting information.

The Absent Mare is at the front of the field for every simulation except Trainer Form. As you know I personally put this into a lower weighting so that wouldn’t worry me too much.

All horses are similar in their ability over Distance and Going so there is unlikely to be an edge to be found there.

The only horse with decent Recent Form is The Absent Mare.

In the Ability the horses contesting are Fiftyonefiftyone, Barrison and Carobello. In Course the only horse contesting is Fiftyonefiftyone.

We’ve now got a good overview feeling of this race. We can discount JajJa De Jau and Danby’s Legend based on this predictor.

However we then go to the race card and look into the form of these runners. Any that we’ve discounted which are at the top-end of the market we need to bring back into consideration.

In summary this can be a useful tool to visually, and quickly, find the runners which are likely to be the strongest contenders in a race. From there we can look into their form before deciding on who we are going to place our bet.