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I was going to post this under the each way thread but as it concerns GNR I will post it here.<br>Before the race if you had to pick a horse that would make the frame the certain you would have picked GNR.I had a small e/w touch on him and he always looked like being placed at the least.Superb suff from McCoy.
Esc, looking at the strength of your ratings, I could imagine having priced it up at something like 4/1 (with 8 runners). So, yep a ‘value’ bet for you.
Having said which, the notion of a Pipe/McCoy horse ever being value is one that takes some believing.
I couldn’t ever have countenanced backing it each way Luke – but good on yer.
<br>
Escorial
Your method in effect is pricing up the race. If you produce ratings for each runner they are directly convertable to odds by simple maths. Of course you don’t need to actually do this the bet is generally obvious from your ratings if you rate something well clear of the rest then it is a bet for you, you say virtually regardless of price but of course if you converted your ratings to prices you would come up with a short price for a clear top rated selection anyhow. I guess you are also happy to bet possibly ew on your second or third rated horses if they are big prices so you are considering price to some extent.
Esc you ARE a closet value seeker – using your ratings I put them into the book software and it produce a book according to your ratings:
GUN`N ROSES (104) 7/2<br>HARFDECENT (84) 9/2<br>NOSAM (80) 11/2<br>SAMAKAAN (73) 10/1<br>MERRY PATH (44) 16/1<br>WOODFIELD GALE (27) 16/1<br>Unnanmed Horse (27) 16/1
I presumed that the unnamed horse was rated the same as you bottom rated but if it was lower then G&N may have been even shorter. According to your ratings anything 9/2 or above was worth backing and you were right so you found the value without knowing it!!
GUN`N ROSES (104) 10/3 <br>HARFDECENT (84) 9/2 <br>NOSAM (80) 9/2 <br>SAMAKAAN (73) 5/1 <br>MERRY PATH (44) 10/1 <br>WOODFIELD GALE (27) 16/1 <br>Ryalux (10) 40/1<br>Unnanmed Horse (10) 40/1
Great stuff.
Of course you’re still only a value punter on your ‘favourite’ Esc. Once we get you backing your 5th choice on the grounds of ‘value’, then we get you for keeps!!
Strange that – he sits by me at the Stevenage Road at Fulham.
He’s bloody useless on the horses though…
Some people look at it like that Esc, but I’m of the belief if it’s 5th rated then it’s the 5th best according to my ratings – the odd occasion where a horse is 33/1 and I have it near the top at less than 10’s I will punt on non-top rated animals to 1pt win if not top rated.
We all have different methods and thats what makes this game great.
Escorial …..
I wouldn’t say whenever someone picks a winner he has necessarily found a value bet. However if in the long run the particular punter in question makes a profit then it would be probable in my opinion.
I’ve left this wide open for a response that after the race ANY winner was a value bet, but a dice could sometimes be predicted to land on a six, and in my opinion (and I am pretty sure you will agree with me), even after the roll of the dice, someone who had correctly taken only 9/2 on six coming up is a losing punter in the long run. (This of course assumes a fair dice).
As for backing a 5th selection purely because it is the value in the book …… I think like many things it is a matter of personal taste. Personally I don’t do it, so I suppose I am not truly a ‘value’ punter. I am prepared to back my 2nd choice though if I consider it to be good value ……. after all there is never a certainty in ANY race. I do however have a lot of respect for the minority of pro-punters who are prepared to back any horse in a race, as long as they believe they are taking value. (Dave Nevison springs to mind).
I think maybe our methods have a lot more in common than we first realised. :smiley:
All the best
Nick
I don’t think anyone is really asking you to bet on the roll of a dice or the flip of a coin. It is just that they are usefull when trying to explain value as the odds involved are indisputable (provided that the dice or coin are fair).
Quite obviously the odds of calling a coin correctly are even money, and the odds of calling a dice correctly are 5/1.
Well done with your recent bets :biggrin:
Nick
Here is my approach to pricing up handicaps…
While it would seem that "pricing up" a handicap is the most difficult task of all this is not necessarily the case. For a start you can give the handicapper the benefit of the doubt, bowing to his superior knowledge of the form-book, and assume that, this being a handicap, all the horses have an equal chance! Of course, in an imperfect world, this is not true but it is a good starting assumption to make and allows us to begin to form our book. <br>So, in a hypotethical, ten-runner perfectly-framed handicap we have ten 9/1 shots. <br>However, let’s suppose one of the runners is out-of-the-handicap, say by ten pounds, and another has not run for over a year and even then was showing very little form. We decide to discount these runners. We are left with eight contenders – eight 7/1 shots. <br>Again, however, it being an imperfect world, we have to allow for the bookmaker’s margins even in the most competitive of betting markets – so, eight 6/1 shots. <br>Now, it is unlikely that any handicap will be so even that this will be the shape of the market but it is reasonable to assume that there will be 6/1 shots in there. If we order the horses from 1 to 8 depending on how likely we think they are to win, numbers 4 and 5 on this list can be deemed 6/1 shots. Now our market is starting to take shape. <br>If it is not possible to break things up distinctly in terms of order 1 to 8, we can at least break the runners up into groups: the three most likely, the three least likely, the two in the middle – our 6/1 shots. <br>Now we can compare the others, say the outsiders first, to our 6/1 shots. How do their chances compare to these horses? We might have one which is up in class, we might not like his chance and deem him a 12/1 chance. Another, unlikely to appreciate the ground, we find similarly hard to fancy and we put this one in at 10/1. But the third one we now find hard to separate from our 6/1 shots and we put him in at 7/1. <br>Next question is "how far have we strayed from the 6/1 average in pricing up these outsiders?" In other words, "how much do we have to shorten the favourites below the average in order to keep the book balanced?"<br>Well, 6/1 equates to a 14.3% chance, and three of these gives us 42.9%. Instead, in our example, we have 7.7% (12/1), 9.1% (10/1) and 12.5% (7/1), totalling 29.3%, a shortfall of 13.6%. <br>This we must make up in pricing up the more fancied runners, so their combined chance is now 42.9% (3@6/1) + 13.6% = 56.5%, or 18.8% on average, making each roughly a 9/2 chance. <br>Now, do these three horses have an equal chance? We might decide that it is tight but that we can distinguish. And again we can set the middle one to our average price, so, our second-favourite is a 9/2 shot. We cut our favourite to 4/1 and push our third choice to 5s.<br>The market on our hypothetical handicap looks something like this:<br>4/1, 9/2, 5/1, 6/1, 6/1, 7/1, 10/1, 12/1, 25/1, 40/1. <br>As you can see using this method there will always be a close correlation between the number of runners and the average odds available – which, in the ideal case scenario, is how it should be. It is something I have become wary of in the past couple of years – betting in races where there are a large amount of runers, say twenty or over. In these situations it becomes more difficult to convince yourself that you have attained fair odds against your selection. This is because it is rare for the favourite in any race to start at double-figure odds – this just is not a favourite’s price. In the numerous 30-odd runner sprint handicaps during the flat season how often do we see at least a few of the fancied horses starting at odds less than 10/1? This is ridiculous. Allowing for the often inscrutable nature of the draw in such events and that usually ALL of the runners are on their correct handicap marks, it seems foolhardy to accept even less than 20/1 on any runner!<br>I prefer races with, say, 8 to 14 or so runners, where there are strong grounds for counting out certain runners and where after that things begin to converge at 4/1 or 5/1 the field and where you can form a conviction about what price your selection should be and then look to consistently attain a point or two longer than expected – the internet betting exchanges have been a godsend in this sense. <br>I would have to concede that there is one obvious contradiction in the methods I adhere to at present. The argument for attaining value, founded on the idea of ascertaining the probability of any outcome (see "Value Betting" – Mark Coton, where the argument is built up very neatly from the analogy of the coin-toss), depends for it’s success on multiple repetitions of the event. But in horse racing each race is only run ONCE. Even if you argue that the method is aiming towards profiting in the long-term, that if you consistently get value on your selections it will even out in your favour, I believe there remains a tension between the "value" method and being selective about the races one applies it to.
Brilliant posting Nore – great explanation, and I’m not too different from you in my approach. (non handicaps are harder that’s for sure).
<br>Hi Esc,<br>the main difference between your approach and mine isn’t that I’m willing to bet against my choice on value grounds. The difference seems to be that I don’t (or very rarely) have a horse I think will win in the first place. I just have a market, which I compare to the bookies’ markets and see what stands out as bets from that.
It’s also now apparent to me that this is actually different from most value punters, (eg Daylight) who come up with a selection first and then look for value.
I think that’s pretty constraining.<br>
Not if you think of it in terms of odds Esc.
If I put a horse in as (say) 4/1 favourite, it far from means I think it will win – I’m actually 80% sure it will lose!
Looking at it that way, I’ve stopped trying to reduce the race to one horse, which I find opens up lots more opportunities.
As you say, plenty of different ways…
<br>interesting debate , allthough i have not joined in as yet, basically i prefer to bet on a selective basis in probably a similar way to esc.
as a question to tooting or any of the other value bettors would it be fair to say that the more bets you find as u are working on percentages the more chance you have of winning whereas to escorial working solely from the form book the more selective he is the more chance he has of winning
just a thought
Interesting post Nore the problem I see with this system is that once you make an error eg in your choice of horse to be a 6/1 shot middle marker then the mistake is compounded into the odds for all the other runners. One error and the whole book is wrong.
I would say for the vast majority of bettors Escorials methods are more likely to suceed simply because they are easier. (by success I simply mean do better than they did before).
Esc I find your statement that you cannot consider betting against the horse you think will win interesting. Are you saying that if on your ratings the top rated is say 95 and the next 90 but the top one is evs and the next 33/1 you would not consider backing your second rated ??
The prices probably are all wrong if one horse is wrong –
However, you do have the bookies own odds as a sanity check to iron out the worst wrinkes, and you als have the bookies over-round as a margin of error. (daylight prices to 90%, so he has the over-round and some – if he still finds ‘value’ he must be onto something)
Price Regent – yes think yu may be onto something there. I certainly wish I could bet on more races. I even wonder soemtimes if I should just turn the game into ‘beating SP’. My problems are that I seem to be able to do well only in good class racing (mainly all aged handicaps and graded races), and certainly only where there are early prices.
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