At long last we have finally got the newsletter ready. Or, to be more precise we have finally got around to writing our own newsletter mailing software and, for some of you, it's been a long wait.
The reason why you are reading this newsletter is that, once upon a time, your address was placed on our subscription mailing list. If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter or that this e-mail address was posted onto our mailing list by mistake then there are instructions in the footer on how to remove yourself from the list so that you won't ever be bothered again.
If you haven't been to the UK Horse Racing site for a while then there are some interesting changes which you may wish to look at. Let's go through them in turn.
Well, we have to say that we're really proud of our ratings and they are a cornerstone of our site. People who look at them quite often tell us that they are the best ratings available on the internet. On top of that they were given a Four Star Rating by the new racing magazine, Racing Ahead.
Our ratings are different in that they are produced totally mathematically by various regressional analysis modelling tools. So when we say that a certain jockey is one of the best riding today we mean it because the regressional code has calculated it.
We don't work with the Official Rating figures at all as some ratings suppliers do as a starting point. What's the point; we're trying to get one over the Official Handicapper so why start where he leaves off? The point of the game is to find horses which are handicapped wrongly so like the Official Handicapper we don't rate a horse until its had a few runs so that we can work out his ability before rating it.
One of our innovations is the Class rating. We don't go along with the theory that just because a race is a Class A race it's better in class than a Class B race. These, we insist, are only invitations to the party and it's a case of who turns up which determines the class. So, again, by regressional modelling we can often pick out horses which are actually dropping in class but appears in the newspaper as actually rising.
The ratings are available for download, all one needs is the latest version of Adobe Acrobat (we recommend version 6) and we would like you to have a look at them. All you have to do to view them is to go to the Ratings page.
We are continually working on the ratings and it won't be long before we get more information diplayed. The next set of information is going to be stuff of a more statistical variety to round everything off.
The ratings are well worth looking at as we are always getting mails from people who have landed some wonderful forecasts and large priced winners because of them. Our personal record was Icare D'Ouberies at Cheltenham last November which won at a delicious £105.50 on the Tote. If anyone were there and wondered who that madman was dancing up and down on the lawn by the finishing post in the rain; well that was I.
One of the goals of the UK Horse Racing site is to be open and approachable. We have a rather active community on our chat room which is populated by any number of people; some are ex-jockeys, others are people who make a living from the bookmaker's satchels and others are normal people like yourselves.
The chat room isn't like normal internet forums with lots of little groups and discussion topics. Instead it appears like a long discussion. The idea is that we want to simulate a group of people standing together in a pub and chatting together so that one can hear bits of topics here and bits there.
On the whole the chat room is a very friendly place; except for one occasion on one slow racing evening a tipster tried to advertise on it and the next thing we knew was that Hounds of Hell seemed to be unleashed. But apart from this rare moment the discussions on there are friendly, can be heated but the people on there often put up suggestions for horses to lay, to back, systems and methods to follow and whatever is the topic of the day.
Do pop along there, register yourself and say Hello and I am sure that someone will welcome you. Even the regulars feel that this chat room is their own. Which is how it should be.
We are working on laying horses as well identifying horses to win. We've done this by having a look at a lot of indicators for the favourite and where these fail a lot of filters then we find that they are worth laying.
This process is described in our Lab Notes section. But, briefly, what happens is that each favourite is put through nine filters (soon it will be ten in our next release of the regressional model) and a horse which fails them all is known as Lay-0 (because it has passed 0 filters) and a horse which passes just one is a Lay-1. We concentrate on these two only and we have found that the Lay-0s are phenomenal in their success.
In the last fourteen days my particular Lay-0 bank has gone up 20%. This figure may be different from other people's because I tend to have conservative banks and a conservative staking system. We place these Lay-0s and Lay-1s each day on the chat page until we get our sister site, Weak Favourites, up and running. There is no point giving the URL for this at this moment in time until we have something worth showing. But we expect to have the lays posted daily on there.
There is a Lay-0 selection today, as it happens. In the 7:50 at Southwell we are laying Wunderbra if the price that one can lay at is less than 8/1. I've currently laid it at just under 3/1 to lose on the exchanges.
Other than the lays which we place on the chat page we will, when the Weak Favourites site is completed, also list all the Lay-0s and Lay-1s which are not favourites. Sometimes one gets a horse which is second or third favourite which we think won't win and these are also worth laying.
Our record with these Lay-0s is that in seven days my records show that we have had 16 lays and 15 of them proved to be correct. The only laid horse which came first was Wedding Party at Lingfield on the 9th of August. In those seven days which I laid anything my very conservative bank and staking system rose by over 20%.
To say that we're enthusisatic about our lays is an understatement.
The UK Horse Racing site isn't just about ratings and the chat page. There is a lot more on there than these subjects. For example, we're slowly starting to collect a series of articles for the newcomer to racing and the newcomer to betting on racing to help them understand what this game is all about.
It's quite a large site and most people who see it like it. We would like you to revisit it and have a look about to see what's changed. We think that you may be pleasantly surprised.
Yours sincerely,
The UK Horse Racing Team
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