HOW TO: Make Your Own Horse Racing Power Ratings

We are all used to horse racing ratings, but what about horse racing power ratings.

At it’s most complex, a horse racing power rating is a figure that contains all the information necessary to analyse a race.

It’s a combination of all the factors needed to assess a race.

However, any rating that has combined multiple ratings, or pieces of data, can be considered a horse racing power rating.

Horse racing power ratings enable us to find the contenders in a race, and decide who we want to bet on, much faster than normal form analysis.

One excellent method for using horse racing power ratings, is to have multiple power ratings that each specialise in different race conditions.

The reason that most bettors don’t use power ratings, is because they’re traditionally considered difficult to make.

MAKING HORSE RACING POWER RATINGS

There are many ways to create power ratings. Generally they all follow similar principles, and in this post we’re going to look at a ‘fuzzy’ method.

METHOD 1: The Fuzzy Method

This method is one of my favourites, and whilst I’d love to claim the creation of it, I can’t. I’m not sure where I heard of it, but I first came across it many years ago, tested it out to find it works, and have been using. variations of it ever since.

STEP #1: Deciding On The Ratings

The first step is decide what ratings we want to include in our power rating. This is the longest part of the process, because we won’t get the best combination of ratings first time. Meaning we’ll need to repeat this processes a number of times to find the best solution.

For example, you may choose a Speed, Race Preference, Class, Form ratings to start with.

It’s best to have ratings that are as independent of each other as possible.

What I mean by that is… don’t put an estimated speed rating and a speed based form rating as separate factors. It would be better to combine these two factors together first (because they are both ultimately using speed), and then use it as one single factor.

Assuming each horse has one of those four ratings above, the next to decide how important each factor is.

STEP #2: How Important Is Each Factor

There’s only one easy way to start… with an educated guess!

Don’t worry if you get it wrong.

We determine the importance of a rating by applying a “weight” to it. It will become clear in a moment how that works.

I suggest giving each rating a weight between 0 and 100, and the rating you think is most important get a weight of 100.

In this example I’m going to give the following weights to our ratings:

This is where the fuzzy part comes in… We choose our fuzzy levels. An example of fuzzy levels are

• (5) Excellent
• (4) Good
• (3) Average
• (2) Poor
• (1) Weak

You’ll see that I’ve also given each of our fuzzy levels a number. We’re going to use these in a moment.

The fuzzy levels is an easy way for us to categorise each horse for a rating, instead of using numbers.

A REMINDER

1. We’ve chosen the ratings that are going to be used in our power rating
2. We’ve chosen the weights for each of the ratings
3. We’ve made fuzzy levels

STEP #3: Power Rating A Horse Race

I’m going to use the following race to show how we use all the information we’ve put together to create a horse racing power rating, and determine which are the strongest horses in the race.

Above I’ve listed our four ratings, and their weights above them.

Underneath each of these ratings I’ve put down a fuzzy level I consider each horse to be at for each rating, using the numbers I labelled each fuzzy level.

Next we want to multiple the horses fuzzy level number by the weight of that rating. This would look like this…

Next we add all the new ratings together for each horse, this gives us a total for every runner that looks like this:

This is good as we now have a total score for each horse, based on multiple ratings and their importance.

But it still doesn’t mean anything to us, and doesn’t help us choose our contenders. To do that we have two more steps.

The first is to add all of our weights together and then divide each horses total by that number.

Say whaaaat?

Let me show you what I mean!

Our weights are:

If we add these together we get…

38 + 24 + 62 + 100 = 224

We divide the total of horse by 224 to get:

The final stage is to convert these numbers back to our fuzzy levels:

There are two good horses, five average, two poor and one weak.

From there you can decide on the best way to bet.

In Summary

You now know how you can use fuzzy logic to create a horse racing power rating, and determine which are the strongest runners in the race.

You will need to play with the rating you use, and their weights, to find the best combinations. But once you have them, this process can find you the strongest horses in the race.

Let me know what ratings you’d use in your power rating in the comments below.