Horse Racing Ratings

[alexfirth97]

Hi guys, new to the forum but I'm seeking some help in creating my own ratings.

I get the general gist of handicapping and think I'm okay with that, I'm more needing help with exactly how to store my ratings. I've started off with a simple table with the name of the horse and then the top rating they've run to, but obviously it's useless only keeping one rating, as if they run badly I don't want that to replace the prior rating.

Should I be keeping a record of every race they've run? And if so, what's the best way of going about this?

Starting from scratch, what is the best way to go about creating your own horse racing ratings?

Thanks in advance.

[BillyHills]

Hi @alexfirth97 welcome to the forum

Its a big question you ask and something I cant answer in one go right now.

I take an average of the last 5 ratings, i think its dangerous to rely on their best rating only, this could be achieved in certain conditions and may be misleading. I think either you take the best rating of the last 3 or do an average like I do is much more reliable.

There is no easy way to store them in my eyes, i have used Raceform and that is excellent but its quite expensive at around £45 per month. You can work out your ratings and it will display the last 10 races no problem.
The old fashioned way is to keep a record in excel or something, years ago i used to write them down in a notebook after working the ratings out from the weekly handicap book newspaper.

There are some threads on making or creating your own ratings if you search the forum

This was my effort a while ago 

 

 

[alexfirth97]

Just now, BillyHills said:

Hi @alexfirth97 welcome to the forum

Its a big question you ask and something I cant answer in one go right now.

I take an average of the last 5 ratings, i think its dangerous to rely on their best rating only, this could be achieved in certain conditions and may be misleading. I think either you take the best rating of the last 3 or do an average like I do is much more reliable.

There is no easy way to store them in my eyes, i have used Raceform and that is excellent but its quite expensive at around £45 per month. You can work out your ratings and it will display the last 10 races no problem.
The old fashioned way is to keep a record in excel or something, years ago i used to write them down in a notebook after working the ratings out from the weekly handicap book newspaper.

There are some threads on making or creating your own ratings if you search the forum

This was my effort a while ago 

 

 

Thanks for the reply!

I have read through your post and it's actually one of the posts I found which kickstarted my enthusiasm for it. Unfortunately I haven't found too many others that actually go into much depth (obviously people don't want to give their methods away!).

I'm going to just throw myself in the deep end I think and give it a go as I can always alter it along the way. Think I'll start with the more high end stuff just to get a feel for things and see how it goes. Excel seems the best starting point.

I'll definitely re-read your post and have a look for more threads in the meantime too.

[BillyHills]

Good luck mate, 

Any probs or thoughts just stick them in here, there are one or two very experienced guys on here who may have some input too.

It takes a lot of time to keep up the ratings database and you may want to have a look at Horse Race Base who has a Ratings Maker, you put the variables in and it works them out for you, only problem is that you cant manually tweak it or keep a database but its fun and you can test the results out too.
Think they are doing free-trials at the minute, its £10 per month normally.

[alexfirth97]

19 minutes ago, BillyHills said:

Good luck mate, 

Any probs or thoughts just stick them in here, there are one or two very experienced guys on here who may have some input too.

It takes a lot of time to keep up the ratings database and you may want to have a look at Horse Race Base who has a Ratings Maker, you put the variables in and it works them out for you, only problem is that you cant manually tweak it or keep a database but its fun and you can test the results out too.
Think they are doing free-trials at the minute, its £10 per month normally.

Thanks! I shall have a look however I do subscribe to Geegeez Gold at the moment which is absolutely fantastic. I'm hoping a kind of "My Ratings" feature will be added like on the Racing Post.

[Trotter]

Re Storing your ratings

I used to store them on the Racing Post site ……. it was very handy as you just rated the winner then click the 'Calculate' button and it would insert ratings for all the beaten horses. Press 'Save'

Your ratings would show on the Race Result page and also on each individual horse's form page …… so after a while you could open a horse's form, select 'My Rating' and the rating for that horse in every race you had rated would show

 

edit …. crossed post. I see you already have a My Ratings service !

 

Edited December 6, 2018 by Trotter

[alexfirth97]

29 minutes ago, Trotter said:

Re Storing your ratings

I used to store them on the Racing Post site ……. it was very handy as you just rated the winner then click the 'Calculate' button and it would insert ratings for all the beaten horses. Press 'Save'

Your ratings would show on the Race Result page and also on each individual horse's form page …… so after a while you could open a horse's form, select 'My Rating' and the rating for that horse in every race you had rated would show

 

edit …. crossed post. I see you already have a My Ratings service !

 

I don't have a My Ratings service yet unfortunately! Hoping Geegeez create one though.

I did look at Racing Post but I could the fee for them myself as the majority of what I use RP for is free, so couldn't justify the fee just for the "My Ratings"!

[BillyHills]

The problem with 'My Ratings' is that you can only store one rating for a horse, I guess you would put its best figure in but I dont like that idea.

[alexfirth97]

3 hours ago, BillyHills said:

The problem with 'My Ratings' is that you can only store one rating for a horse, I guess you would put its best figure in but I dont like that idea.

I think on Racing Post you rate the winner of each race and it does the rest of the race for you. Then it stores your rating for each race. Not sure if you can tweak them though.

[Trotter]

Yes, on the racing post you can rate every race and all the ratings for each horse are then stored on each horse's form page …… when I was doing the all weather I had dozens of ratings for some of the regular runners covering several years

Basically each run had a rating

What you could do though, which I never saw the point in, was give each horse a Master Rating which would then show up on race cards

As BH said ……. one rating is no use when you can look at a form page and see a rating for every race it's run in ……. much more useful to try and find patterns in it's results

[Trotter]

1 hour ago, alexfirth97 said:

I think on Racing Post you rate the winner of each race and it does the rest of the race for you. Then it stores your rating for each race. Not sure if you can tweak them though.

you can tweak the ratings however you like & input any figure you want ……. as long as you press 'Save' it will save whatever figure you put in

[BillyHills]

Dont you have to manually put the rating in the 'my notes' section, thats what you used to do if you wanted to save it.

So basically you were manually entering every horses ratings and could only put one figure in the box.

On things like Raceform it saves every figure for every race and displays them when you look at a new race, far superior. I know its more expensive I dont know any others that do that.