What exactly is value?
Value is a term which we hear all too often, usually by TV pundits to mean that a horse's price looks interesting and they may say "There's value at that price" and at which point we usually end up shouting at the television set explaining to the pundit that he's a blithering idiot and that the 3/1 on offer is certainly not value at all.
The problem, quite simply, is that the pundit doesn't know what value is. And if they do understand the meaning of value they don't have an idea what value is in this particular instance.
We, on the other hand, think we do.
Value has a simple definition. Value is simply the horse's chance (if we're talking about a horse race) of winning the race expressed as a price.
So if a horse has a 20% chance (one in five) of success then the value price will be 4/1. Similarly, a horse with a 50:50 chance of winning will have a value price of evens.
And that's it.
If you look at our selections, backs and lays, and on the ratings you will see that every horse has a value price. We believe that we are unique in that we calculate this figure whereas no-one else seems to be willing nor able to do the same.
Which is not surprising as it's rather tricky to calculate as it involves all sorts of nasty bits of hairy calculus, but we've looked at this over the years and we think that we've made the best possible value forecasts.
The issue is not how we calculate value but the fact that we calculate it for you and it's there for you to use, if you so wish.
Quite good really. We've gone through 400,000 recent horse ratings (well, we've used 399,368 to be precise) and when we did a back check we made sure that there were no no-runners to skew the data.
So when we say that, for example, a horse has a 4/1 chance of success we would expect that one fifth of these would win. When we say that a horse has a 9/1 chance of winning we would hope to see that one tenth of them win.
What follows is our results table.
There's a couple of points which ought to be made. First that we didn't have enough horses running at high value prices to give us a good enough figure. And look how few there are valued at odds-on. Yes, we rarely say that in a race with a medium sized field that a certain horse has a more than a 50% chance of success.
This is one reason to be wary of backing odds-on runners; clearly the bookies are having a laugh. Anyway, have a look at our value predictions and they're not too bad. Not perfect, we admit, but rather strong. Certainly the range from 2/1 to about 15/1 is good.
So the next time you hear a pundit describing a horse going out to 4/1 as "good value" confirmation or not can be found by looking at the value column. If we say that the value price should be nearer 8/1 then you know that the pundit really hasn't got a clue and is talking out of his hat. Sadly, most of the pundits are like this.
If proof is required that this value figure works then look no further than our results pages for our Value For Money Lays. These lays are simply the lowest price:risk in each race calculated by looking at each horse's price and each horse's value and finding the best ratio.
This system is unique is that it doesn't look to avoid laying winning horses but to lay the horses with the best value lay. If our value figures didn't work then these results wouldn't look so good.
| Value Price | Runs | Wins | Expected | Error % |
| 1.29 | 11 | 2 | 9 | 350.00 |
| 1.30 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0.00 |
| 1.33 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0.00 |
| 1.36 | 26 | 2 | 19 | 850.00 |
| 1.40 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 20.00 |
| 1.44 | 22 | 5 | 15 | 200.00 |
| 1.50 | 42 | 6 | 28 | 366.67 |
| 1.53 | 23 | 10 | 15 | 50.00 |
| 1.57 | 10 | 8 | 6 | 25.00 |
| 1.62 | 29 | 10 | 18 | 80.00 |
| 1.67 | 75 | 19 | 45 | 136.84 |
| 1.73 | 44 | 30 | 25 | 16.67 |
| 1.80 | 33 | 18 | 18 | 0.00 |
| 1.83 | 47 | 29 | 26 | 10.34 |
| 1.91 | 97 | 52 | 51 | 1.92 |
| 2.00 | 141 | 70 | 71 | 1.43 |
| 2.10 | 178 | 99 | 85 | 14.14 |
| 2.20 | 161 | 83 | 73 | 12.05 |
| 2.25 | 205 | 97 | 91 | 6.19 |
| 2.38 | 372 | 171 | 157 | 8.19 |
| 2.50 | 449 | 204 | 180 | 11.76 |
| 2.62 | 499 | 210 | 190 | 9.52 |
| 2.75 | 519 | 220 | 189 | 14.09 |
| 2.87 | 636 | 227 | 221 | 2.64 |
| 3.00 | 1,071 | 376 | 357 | 5.05 |
| 3.25 | 1,687 | 532 | 519 | 2.44 |
| 3.50 | 1,905 | 589 | 544 | 7.64 |
| 3.75 | 2,157 | 612 | 575 | 6.05 |
| 4.00 | 2,725 | 718 | 681 | 5.15 |
| 4.33 | 2,643 | 683 | 610 | 10.69 |
| 4.50 | 3,850 | 887 | 856 | 3.49 |
| 5.00 | 6,284 | 1,374 | 1,257 | 8.52 |
| 5.50 | 6,936 | 1,310 | 1,261 | 3.74 |
| 6.00 | 7,270 | 1,247 | 1,212 | 2.81 |
| 6.50 | 7,708 | 1,302 | 1,186 | 8.91 |
| 7.00 | 8,108 | 1,234 | 1,158 | 6.16 |
| 7.50 | 8,055 | 1,190 | 1,074 | 9.75 |
| 8.00 | 8,370 | 1,117 | 1,046 | 6.36 |
| 8.50 | 8,358 | 1,102 | 983 | 10.80 |
| 9.00 | 12,582 | 1,500 | 1,398 | 6.80 |
| 10.00 | 16,543 | 1,796 | 1,654 | 7.91 |
| 11.00 | 16,959 | 1,697 | 1,542 | 9.13 |
| 12.00 | 16,634 | 1,441 | 1,386 | 3.82 |
| 13.00 | 24,009 | 1,942 | 1,847 | 4.89 |
| 15.00 | 29,783 | 1,988 | 1,986 | 0.10 |
| 17.00 | 39,222 | 2,181 | 2,307 | 5.78 |
| 21.00 | 43,205 | 1,757 | 2,057 | 17.07 |
| 26.00 | 46,639 | 1,279 | 1,794 | 40.27 |
| 34.00 | 53,285 | 773 | 1,567 | 102.72 |
| 51.00 | 11,545 | 98 | 226 | 130.61 |
| 67.00 | 3,221 | 20 | 48 | 140.00 |
| 101.00 | 3,177 | 39 | 31 | 20.51 |
| 151.00 | 1,427 | 12 | 9 | 25.00 |
| 201.00 | 382 | 1 | 2 | 100.00 |