www.ukhorseracing.co.uk / www.weakfavourites.co.uk
The jump season has now finally got underway and we're definitely into the National Hunt season now that the Peterborough Chase has taken place. That, for me, is one of the milestones of the racing season. Sadly this event was rather diluted by only two horses running.
On the web site front we've done some more updates to the sites and there's been developments in other areas. We hope to explain a couple of them here.
Those new to UK Horse Racing and/or Weak Favourites may be interested to know that our sites are not like the normal tipster sites at all. We create daily ratings (examples of our recent ratings can be seen here) which are created by having years of data in our database and processed by using advanced regressional analysis calculus algorithms. Not your typical information site at all.
From these ratings we produce a number of selection systems, both for backing and for laying. The laying selections are mostly held on the Weak Favourites site. The ratings, which are our flagship product, are available from the UK Horse Racing site.
This is something which we've just started with and which we will expand in shortly.
The Trainer Calendar shows how each trainer has fared at this time period of time over the past five years. We've taken a moving window, seven days either side of today's date, and then looked at his record for these windows over the past five years.
Here's an example of the Trainer Calendar for the Aintree 2.50 (25th Nov, 2007).
In this example, the trainer JH Johnson, who trains Bewleys Berry, has had 121 runs over this fifteen day period in the last five years. Of these 121 runners 32 have won giving him a creditable strike rate of 26.45%. However, if one were to have backed all of these runners at the Starting Price (SP) then one would have returned £92.74 for £1 stakes making a loss of £28.26.
If one looks at HP Hogarth (trainer of King Kilone) we can see that in the same period he's been more conservative with his charges by only having 21 runner of which four won giving a strike rate of 19.05%. However after spending £21 on £1 stakes and receiving £37 one can see that £16 was made in profit, a ROI% (Return On Investment) of 76.19%.
Whilst this is not supposed to be used as a selection method it can be useful to see which trainers like to get their horses ready at certain times of the year. This information will be expanded up shortly so that one can compare the annual average of the trainer with this calendar period as some trainers do favour different times of the year or certain big meetings which tend to occur at the same time.
The last column, XD, is a simple division of the ROI figure by the inverse of the Strike Rate figure so that a 'big is best' type number is returned. This will be refined in due course to give a more meaningful value.
The Trainer Calendar is currently presented within the ratings PDF file and will, in a day or so be available for viewing on the UK Horse Racing website as well as being available for XML download.
Recent example of the Trainer Calendar can be found in the ratings on our Archive Server.
For a while now we, and many others, have been looking at the ratings and seeing a horse winning with a stand-out figure from the ratings.
Such selections, which are known on the forum as 'Cherry Picks' have come in with some tasty prices. In the last week or so the record price for a placed horse is 97.0 on the exchanges. Today Silver Prophet won the 3.35 Plumpton at 25/1 though anything up to 70/1 could have been had on the exchanges.
Finding a Cherry Pick is rather simple; look through the ratings and find a figure which, in the context of the race, stands out like a sore thumb and if it makes the reader utter "Cor Blimus! Look at that value!", then there is every chance that it will be ripe for a Cherry Pick.
Here's four example of four races from the 22nd November, 2007 ratings.
Whilst this one wasn't a winner, Antonius Caesar came in second at 33/1 and available at over 100s on the exchanges.
The reason for this selection stands out; Antonius Caesar's Cls (class) rating is 14.3 which is far ahead of the other horses' Cls rating. The TrForm of 120, second best in the race, was rather promising as well.
Spring Margot is top rated, rated seven pounds clear but the stand-out figure is the Spd (Speed) rating of 20.5 which is far ahead of the next Speed figure of just 3.0.
Spring Margot won at 7/1 though 10/1 could have been had on the exchanges.
This was a great start for the Cherry Picks. Dark Artist led from the start and held on to win by three and a half lengths at 20/1. One could have had over 40/1 on Betfair.
Dark Angel's figures certainly do stand out. The Conn (Trainer/Jockey connection rating) of 13.5 is the stand-out figure. In addition there are some other positive figures for Dark Angel; the TrForm (Trainer's recent form) is a massive 166 and is ridden by the top rated jockey in the race.
Sometimes in a race more than one horse stand out. This race is shows two such horses which were both selections.
The first is the winner, Cryptic which won at 9/2. The stand-out figure with the "Cor Blimey!" reaction here is the Cls rating. The other horse which stands out is Flemens River didn't win but ran well and just missed out of the places by less than a length at 100/1 which isn't shabby at all. The figure here is Lst (Last run rating) which is 13.0; in excess of ten more than the next best Last Run value.
Back to Silver Prophet; the ratings for today's race can be seen here (see page 26). The interesting statistic here is the high Cls figure of 27.7 which certainly stands out heads and shoulders above the rest of the data.
Now it must be mentioned that not every stand-out figure results in a good priced winner but on the 22nd there were other Cherry Picks and between those not listed they would have paid for the unsuccessful ones. And, of course, on some days there will be days where nothing of value wins but if one has a wide enough betting bank then the higher priced winners should see you through.
On the day after these, the 23rd November, they were reported to show up to 55 points profit on the exchanges and then, on the 24th, they posted a loss. However, one doesn't need too many selections at 70s, as in Silver Prophet today, to do well from the Cherry Picks.
And don't take our word for it. Have a look through the ratings archive, find the stand-out values and then look up the results.
One of our subscribers, MrClox2, has kindly created a spreadsheet to select the day's Cherry Picked selections automatically. The spreadsheet requires MS Excel to run. The spreadsheet uses our daily CSV file to generate the selections.
One of the great features of MrClox's spreadsheet is that one is able to customise some of the parameters to change the selections if one feels that some aspects, for example the TrForm (Trainer Recent Form) should carry more or less significance. MrClox's spreadsheet is simple to use and is quick.
Please note that the macro security should be set so that the VBA code within the template can run.
Please download Mr Clox's spreadsheet (1.1 MB) here.
Thanks to MrClox for the spreadsheet, it is certainly appreciated by a good number of people.
Yours sincerely,
The UK Horse Racing Team
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