UK Horse Racing

Backing the Top-n Rated Horses Blind - February 19th, 2009

Introduction

This report from Holmes shows what would have happened if one backed the top few horses with different numbers of bets.

All figures are from 2008 and are to prices available just before the off on Betfair within the live market (not to BFSP).

Reading the Results

If one decides to back, say, three from the top five then it is the three best, i.e. highest, priced horses from the Top 5 rated horses which are backed.

So in this example there would have been 33,267 bets in 2008 with 2,901 of them winning. The total profit, to logged Betfair prices just before the off, would have been 1,837 points. The strike rate for the market would have been 26.2% (with each of the horses each having, on average, a third of this) and a ROI of 5.5%.

So, the first column is the number of bets one is going to make from the top rated selections. The second column is how many of the top rated we're looking at. Remember, we're only backing the highest prices horses before the off; so if we have two bets then we're backing the two highest prices from our range of top rated horses.

The Report

Bets	First 'n' in ratings		Runs	Wins	Profit	SR%	Market SR%	ROI%
1	3		11,089	1,052	1,406	9.5%	9.5%	12.7%
1	4		11,089	715	949	6.4%	6.4%	8.6%
1	5		11,089	1,580	1,265	5.2%	5.2%	11.4%
2	3		22,178	2,918	1,586	13.2%	26.3%	7.2%
2	4		22,178	1,984	1,302	8.9%	17.9%	5.9%
2	5		22,178	1,491	1,543	6.7%	13.4%	7.0%
3	3		33,265	6,307	1,660	19.0%	56.9%	5.0%
3	4		33,267	3,993	1,465	12.0%	36.0%	4.4%
3	5		33,267	2,901	1,837	8.7%	26.2%	5.5%
4	4		44,354	7,448	1,541	16.8%	67.2%	3.5%
4	5		44,354	5,015	1,784	11.3%	45.2%	4.0%
5	5		55,443	8,496	1,874	15.3%	76.6%	3.4%