Pace Analysis Part 3 – Pace Ratings

Following my last two articles:

Pace Analysis

Pace Analysis Part 2 – Track Pace Bias

I’m going to finish of this mini-series on pace today by looking at how we can create pace ratings. The previous two articles looked at how we can find selections from races by using pace and how we can determine if the bias on the track is likely to affect our selections. Today we are going to delve into the process of creating the ratings that are going to allow us to find these selections.

In most countries where there is a strong interest in horse racing, they also have something that is known as sectional times. These are records of the time a horse past different points in the race, and are very valuable pieces of information.

By measuring a horses time at different points around a race track we can determine how fast they leave the stalls, whether they speed up or slow down towards the end of the race and other pieces of information about how they like to run.

Unfortunately, in the UK we don’t get these ratings. They were made available for a short period of time on limited courses by TurfTrax, but these were withdrawn from the public domain a number of years ago.

That leaves us in a difficult position. We need to create ratings that measure how a horse is performing during a race, but we have no measurements that take place during the race with which to do this.

There is a single source of in-running horse racing information in the UK, and that is… the in-running comments.

This means that our only option is to use these in order to make pace ratings. The in-running comments are written by race readers and tell us how a horse has performed, we can use these comments to rate a race for pace.

If you remember, in our first article we looked at the different types of possible pace a horse could have. They were:

1. Leaders
2. Early Pressers
3. Mid-Pack
4. Closers

What we are going to do is to categorise each horse in a race into one of these pace types. If we take an example from the Racing Post results we can see comments like…

Underneath each horse you can see one sentence which determines how a horse has run during the race, this is what we’re going to be using. Luckily they are all written in a similar style and once you have gone through a few races you will be able to put horses into a pace category very quickly. You can either do this for the horses you follow, or you can go back through a past few races for each horse in a race to determine your selections for a specific race.

HINT: If you are looking to rate horses in a specific race then you can look for races where a horse has won or come within a few lengths of the winner and rate those races for the runner. This means you are looking for situations where the horse has proven it can perform well and determine whether today is similar to them or not.

We can create pace ratings very quickly for these runners, and we’ll go through them now.

Me And Ben has the comment… “tracked leaders” this tells us that this horse is an Early Presser.

Je T’Aime has the comment… “led” which tells us that this horse is a Leader.

Tillernoora has the comment… “chased leader” and that lets us know that this horse is an Early Presser.

Mini Muck has the comment… “chasing leaders” so we know this horse is an Early Presser.

Langley House has a comment… “chased leaders” to tell us this horse is also an Early Presser.

In this race we have four Early Pressers and one Leader, and this tells us that the race is likely to be run very fast. We are going to have the Leader running in-front initially and then the other four horses trying to catch up resulting in all the horses burning out before the finish position. In this race we would be looking for the horse that is the most dominant leader to win the race.

Using the in-running comments we can find pieces of information that other punters won’t be using and use this to our advantage to take profits from them!

Start using this technique of rating pace today and applying the last three lessons to your selection process and I can assure you that you will notice the difference in the extra profits in your bankroll.