If the favourite is top rated the strike rate increases to 38.5%

Horse Racing Ratings and Value Bets

Value is one of the most misunderstood terms used in betting and yet it is one of the most important. If you continually back bad value horses you will never make a profit because bad value horses pay 'under the odds' and if you are receiving under the odds prices you are losing out.

Thousands of bets are placed each day by punters who do not know if they have value or not. Those punters are looking for the winner and yet they have no way of knowing if that winner is value or not.

How to Find Value

One way to find value is to create a betting forecast and compare your prices with the live market. In theory, if you price up a horse at 5/1 and it is 8/1 in the market you should have a value bet.

Creating your own betting forecast is quite complicated though and is fraught with pitfalls. This will be the subject of future Flatstats horse racing article.

If you want to quickly check if a horse is value then check it against the Flatstats ratings! The higher the rating, the more likely the horse will be value and the more likely you will profit from the horse.

The Flatstats ratings are created from value stats and their key objective is to find value bets. This is totally different from other ratings where their objective is to work out the fastest horse, or calculate the winning / beaten lengths of the winner and the second etc. Whilst there is nothing wrong with those methods for finding winners all they will do is find winners but not necessarily find value winners.

As the core stats used to create the Flatstats ratings are based on value then the Flatstats ratings are indicative of not only the winner but of value too. Thus the ratings can be used to check if a selection is a value bet or not.

Value Favourites

The favourite is the most popular horse in the race but many favourites are false favourites. False favourites are overbet for whatever reason: good form, fashionable sire, top jockey booking etc. Likewise underbet favourites exist for the opposite reasons.

Using the Flatstats ratings we can test if a favourite is value or not. All we have to do is to check the rating of the favourite and if the rating is high the favourite is worthy, if the rating is low the favourite is likely to be false.

Before the figures are checked against the ratings first we need to see the baseline figures for all favourites:

Those are the baseline figures for all favourites on the all weather. Backing them hits a strike rate of 31% and returns a loss of 7.7%. Amongst all those favourites some would have been overbet, some underbet but a punter picking a horse because it is favourite has no way of knowing if it is value or not.

The following table shows the performance of the favourite for various positions in the ratings - top, top third, bottom etc.

Notice the strong correlation between the performance of the favourite and the ratings position. The higher the rating the better the results for the favourite. It does not matter which metric you use: strike rate, impact value, A/E value stat or return on investment: the higher the rating the better the stat.

• Favourites in general win around 31% of the time.
  If the favourite is top rated the strike rate increases to 38.5%.
  
  
• Favourites in general return a loss of 7.7%.
  If the favourite is top rated the loss decreases to 1.5%.

Look at the performance of the favourite if it is rated in the bottom third of the race. It goes from winning 1 race in 3 to around 1 race in 4 and the 7.7% loss balloons to 24.3%.

Look at the performance of the favourite if it is bottom rated in the race. The rate of winning goes down to 1 in 5 and the loss increases further. This looks a perfect candidate for laying!

You can check these figures yourself via the Race Stats page. Just set the form for All Weather, choose All Courses and filter for the 1st Fav. Click Generate Report to see the results.

1. Change Course to all All Weather courses

2. Change the Favourites filter to only include 1st Favourites

3. Click the Generate Report button to see the results

You can perform the same task on second favourites, 20/1 shots, or even on all horses wearing blinkers. What you will find is that just about every report you run will show that the higher the Flatstats rating, the better the performance of the item being analysed.

Here are a few more examples. This time the ratings colour (Blue, Green and Red = Great rating, good rating, bad rating) is used to show that the better the rating the better the performance of the item being analysed.

This table shows the performance of horses that won their last race. In general LTO winners can repeat the win around 19% of the time and return a loss of 14%. But look at the difference in performance with each of the Flatstats ratings bands.

If the LTO winner is Blue Rated the strike rate increases to 30.5% and rather than a 14% loss a profit of 3.2% is returned. Are you looking for a quick and easy backing system!

If the LTO winner is Red Rated the strike rate plummets to 12.3% and the 14% loss doubles to nearly 28%. Are you looking for a quick and easy laying system!

Fillies and Mares are the worst genders for all weather racing and this site often advocates avoiding them when racing against males. Sometimes though fillies and mares can buck the trend and win despite being a disadvantaged gender. Once again the Flatstats rating shows a big difference in ability for each of the ratings bands.

Other Horse Racing Ratings or Tipsters

One of the best free ratings site around is Adrian Massey's site. This site produces ratings for the flat turf, all weather and jump races. Many punters follow the ratings but as with all ratings (Flatstats ratings included) they do not return a level stakes profit from backing the top rated horse in every race.

Some punters have worked out systems from Massey's ratings such as horse must be 5* rated, between 5/1 and 10/1 etc. etc. But wouldn't it be easier to just find out which of Massey's top rated horses are value and which are not?

This test used Massey all weather ratings for the past 6 months. There is a limit on the Massey site that restricts runners lists reports to 1000 runners. Only one test was performed. Results from previous years may be different.

There is another easy system! Just back Massey top rated horses when they are also blue rated with Flatstats.

Do you follow tipsters? Gorrie, Isiris? What about newspaper tipsters such as Robin Goodfellow, Chris McGrath, Newsboy or Templegate? I do not have the data but I am pretty sure that if you check the Flatstats rating of their tips and if the rating is high it will perform better than if the rating is low.

Related Articles and Resources

• Adrian Massey's UK Horse Racing Ratings

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• Horse Racing Ratings and Value Bets

          

Article created 4-Dec-09. Stats may have changed since.