Less Can Be More

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information that you need to go through when you’re analysing a race?

You’re not the only one. I get it as well.

It’s something that we bring on ourselves because we want to get the best results.

By wanting to get the best results, and make the most profit possible, we want to ensure that we’ve got every angle covered. There should be no stone left unturned so we can cover every eventuality.

But… we don’t need to do that to make a profit.

In fact quite often by doing that we can turn ourselves into losing bettors because most of the time in race analysis less is more.

And I’m going to help you over-investigating right now.

In order to do that we need to clarify something first. We need to answer the question…

How good do we need to be to make a profit?

You may think that’s a bit of an open-ended question. And it is. But that doesn’t make it any less valid.

The answer is surprisingly simple.

We need to do just a bit more than the average punter.

If we do just a little bit more than the average punter then we can make a good profit. Doing way more than the average punter means we should still make a profit, but the return doesn’t increase at the same rate as the amount of work.

So why bother!

We want to do just more than the average punter to make excellent profits. Without it becoming a 5 hour job to analyse a single race.

And do that we need to start with an understanding what the average punter is going to do.

Now, when I talk about the average punter I mean someone who actually picks up the Racing Post in a bookmakers rather than someone who just puts a pin on a horses name.

The first thing to realise is that most people use the Racing Post to look at form and they’re going to look at the information that is most readily available to them.

This includes:

Odds
Weight
Last Six Runs
TopSpeed Rating
RPR Rating
Number Of Tipsters Choosing Selection
Spotlight Summary

These are the most common pieces of information that are readily available and what the average punter is going to take into account.

They’re all relevant information. But they’re no use to us because if the average punter is considering them then there will be no value in the odds based on this information and so we can’t make a profit.

However, we can use this list that we’ve made to highlight just how much extra information we may want to look at:

Weight

If the average punter is just considering the weight then we could consider the weight the horse is carrying under todays race conditions, compare it to the weight carried under similar conditions in the past and see how they performed.

Last Six Runs

The last six runs on their own are not relevant because they may have been on completely different conditions. We can compare the last six runs that match the same conditions of the race the horse is running in today.

TopSpeed Rating

We could find another speed rating provided by someone else, make our own or look at the Top Speed rating achieved over similar conditions to this race and use the average of those to give us a figure for todays race instead of the standard one given.

RPR Rating

This is similar to the TopSpeed rating and uses it in it’s calculation, so the question is… Do you really want to include it at all?

It is probably better to find, or create, a form rating that is independent of the TopSpeed rating.

Number Of Tipsters Choosing Selections

If the tipsters were any good then this may be worth considering, but since the tipsters that are used in this analysis are generally of a poor quality, do you want to muddy your analysis with this information from tipsters who publicly show that they can’t make profits?

Spotlight Summary

This summary can be very useful but it can also point you in completely the wrong direction. Instead of using the summary as is we could use it to pick our horses names that they think are interesting and we may have missed in our previous analysis and so should go back and look at again. A sort of safety net.

Odds

I saved this to the last because it’s difficult to use this in any other way than most punters, but it is a strong indication of how likely a horses chance of winning is and should be considered.

What you’ve done is gone through what you think the average punter will be considering in a race and looked at each element slightly deeper than they will.

This is enough to give you an edge and make you profits.

And we already have an approach that can be used. But don’t let that stop you doing this yourself. Choose a set of race conditions and write down a list of what the average punter is likely to consider in these races.

Then go into each item on the list and determine a slightly better way of doing it to build your approach to analysing those races.