Creating Your Own Ratings

[BillyHills]

As promised I am going to do a little tutorial on how I make my own handicap and create a rating for each horse, it may help some people who fancy giving this a try and cant find a starting point or create a discussion on how others approach this interesting subject. I must say from the very start that each person will have their own way of doing things and this is not a definitive approach to anything that is mentioned. Not written a tutorial before so I apologise in advance if its not very clear. Why Create Ratings; It takes a fair amount of time to produce and update your ratings each week, free time that many find precious and could be doing something else, so why bother if at the end of the day there is no guarantee the results will be any more successful than just following the guys in the papers, after all they get paid to produce them so they must be good, right? I have had this argument many times and I cant stand here and preach the gospel about how good it is to create a set of ratings, all I know is that I enjoy learning as much as possible about this wonderful sport and the horses that we place our hard earned cash on each day, at this stage its important to stress that there are certain types of people that bet on horses and not all of them know much about the actual participants and would sooner just back the favourite or follow a tipster, that’s absolutely fine in my eyes and some of them will make as much money as anyone else. Those same people will slag the jockey off when they lose, blame their losses on bad luck etc. Been there and done that over the 35 years I have had this addictive hobby and I am not trying to teach people to suck eggs either but eventually I wanted to get more involved in making my own decisions and more importantly I wanted to know why I lost? What went wrong? How can I avoid this next time? My answer was to be able to get a better grip on the sport as a whole, try and understand the handicapping system and for me a big step was to understand the class system too. Creating my own ratings by its very nature forces me to look at everything in that particular sphere, I tend to concentrate on Novices and Juveniles, its too much for me to rate everything but that doesn’t mean to say I haven’t done in the past and I still watch all of the races over the jumps so I’m happy with the way things are for now. By focussing on a specific section and having the time to do it properly has brought the enjoyment back and I don’t find it a chore at all, I think we have all looked at the racecards in the morning and thought “where do is start”, so much racing nowadays and not a lot of it is a very high standard. By only doing a specific type of race it immediately cuts down the workload and clears a lot of negative thoughts about the days racing and makes you concentrate on what you have learnt to do best, you are actually excited about sorting ‘your’ races out and making a valid judgement on its outcome. Win or lose you know you have gave it 100% and hopefully as I said earlier, if it doesn’t produce a winner you will probably know why, whether that be the ground, the trip or just another horse improving. I would advise this to anyone whether they do ratings or not by the way. So for me compiling a database of ratings ticks a lot of boxes, I get to know the form really well in a specialist area, it concentrates the mind by cutting down the amount of racing and I enjoy the task of trying to understand how one horse that wins at Plumpton is different to one that wins at Wincanton, and which one would you be on if they met next time out?

[BillyHills]

Re: Creating Your Own Ratings Where Do You Start? The biggest single question that is asked when talking about ratings is “where do I start”. Many people have said they would love to give it a go an try and form their own handicap but just don’t know how to go about it. Now I’ll make it clear from the off that I do not use speed figures in anything I do over jumps, its just too volatile on a day to day basis, they miss fences out, move rails, give false ground and so on and so on, it’s a waste of time for me personally and the only code I would even consider it would be on the AW and I know many people do it successfully and hats off to them, as I said we all do things our own way, speed is not my bag. The whole concept of ratings to me is try and evaluate the worth of any particular race, the first thing to do is draw up a set of rules for the different class of a race, some actually do this by looking at the value of a race; it makes sense to think at £5,000 race is better than a £3,000 race, that’s ok in theory but if you are rating the top handicaps this can be misleading as the Bookmakers add prize money to the big Saturday handicaps and also some small courses actually put in added money from sponsors to attract better fields, courses like Fakenham for example will have novice hurdles worth as much as Newbury at times, so you just have to be careful when doing it this way. For me the BHA Grading of races is as reliable as anything I have found as a starting point, for those that don’t know they work on a scale that starts from the bottom going from Class 6 to Graded races and horses are only allowed to enter handicaps according to their BHA rating, it roughly works on the following figures; Grade 1,2 and 3 = 155+ Listed/Class 1 = 145-155 Class 2= Horses rated 135-150 Class 3= Horses rated 120-135 Class 4= Horses rated 100-120 Class 5= Horses rated 85-100 Class 6 = NH Flat races and Hunter Chases Now you could just use the figures above and get cracking but you would probably end up with the same figures as everybody else, my idea of doing ratings is to try and get an edge that others have not. I split my figures into three categories depending on which course they run at, I think this sorts out the problem like I mentioned before where two horses could win a Class 4 race at different places and how do you tell the difference? It often follows that a race at Cheltenham will be stronger in depth than one at Stratford for example so I sort them into three groups, just my preference really over the years of doing these things, others may think different? Group 1: Cheltenham, Ascot, Newbury, Sandown, Kempton, Aintree Group 2: Haydock, Wetherby, Wincanton, Huntingdon, Warwick, Ayr, Doncaster Group 3: All the rest. Using the figures above you will see that a Class 4 race spans anything from 100-120, I would use this scale depending on which course the race was run at, so Cheltenham would be closer to 120 and Leicester closer to 100 etc. A third filter is the prize money, especially when doing my Novice Hurdles, an average prize for a Class 4 hurdle is about £2,500, if a race is worth more than that I would add an amount to the race score and if it was lower than that it would be reduced. Obviously just watch out for added sponsor money that may be out of line. So we are now ready to finalise the method of reaching a score for any particular race, that’s the hard bit done, the Grade of race, the track and the value will give us a pretty good place to start from. Its up to you what actual figures you use in place of the ones above, I don’t go so high as I don’t rate anything that is beaten out of site, without giving secrets away lets assume the following for this tutorial; For Novice Hurdles; Class 5= 60-70 Class 4= 70-80 Class 3= 80-85 Class 2= 85-90 Class 1= 90-95 Graded = 95-105 I leave a bigger gap for C4 novice races than the others as the majority are in this bracket and I need more leeway but 40pts from top to bottom for a base figure suits me. Handicap races would be different as Grade 1 horse is more than 30lbs better than a Class 4 handicapper in my book. Working on these figures it means a Class 4 race at Exeter worth about £2,500 rates to a figure of 72. Exeter is a Cat 3 course, and the prize money is average for the Grade. Sounds complicated but once you make a grid with all the scores on it it’s very quick to use. After using this figure for the winner we have to adjust the rating for the weight carried, I use 11st as a basic mark and deduct a point for every pound carried below 11st and add one for every pound higher. In this example if the winner carried 10st 12lbs it would end up with a rating of 70. Once this is done you then calculate the rest of the field. When the whole race is calculated it is then you can make manual adjustments if required. Manual Adjustments This is the bit where I think, rightly or wrongly that my ratings differ from the norm. You could just use bare ratings but what if the winner won comfortably and could have won by a lot further than he did? What if a horse fell at the last and would have earned a rating instead of a big fat zero? What if a horse in third was eased for the last furlong as he was in no danger of losing his place? This is why it is so important to watch the races closely, you can make little alterations to the horses individual ratings on what you feel would have been the correct distances. I don’t analyse every place to the nth degree but just what takes my eye in any race. (Its important to rate the race on facts first and only then make any adjustments as if you give the winner 3 extra points at the start it will increase all of the others by the same mark.)