LAST
I promised after the Melbourne meetings to say more about them. I apologise for the long delay in doing that which reflects a busy time of the year. And also I seem to get writer's block when the pennies keep dropping about what it all means.The following is not terribly well sequenced, but is there as I wrote it.
One of the outstanding things I saw at the meeting was Chris Stebbing's graphing tool which enables you to monitor visually the performance of a system which can tell you at a glance a great deal about a system's performance. As we could see, a quick look at a graph and its lumps and bumps could tell you a lot about a system that you may not find out in a summary. He doesn’’t want systems that have failed to perform over six months. I might make an exception for longshot systems. But I will get that.
I also like Chris's proposal to speed up the testing in Bet Selector by testing all meetings and all horses over say five years over a weekend and dropping the CSV file into Excel to enable it’’s analysis. He has since invested in PPFA so that should make the exercise even more worthwhile.
Steven Dutch bets with the top 2 base rated horses provided he can get $4.00 (or is it 4/1).
He says that those that are Blackbooked can be bet for a profit and someone is doing so. If a horse is in the top 2 In the Field Strengths, it has an excellent chance of scoring.
He has explained how you can use the Field Strengths as a check on the quality of the selections by the systems. If the selections qualify but don’’t meet the Field Strength, it may be possible to bet them at a higher price. If they do meet the field strength criteria, as well as being selected, they may be bet at a shorter price.
Steven is recommending Bestform because he feels it will give a bonanza on the wet tracks in New Zealand next year. The addition of barrier trial results also enables you to look at a horse more closely that may appear to have no form for first up.
However, PPFA does not need 10 start form. Steven says 1 start is enough.Steven is placing great emphasis on the form analysis getting the ratings in the right order. I think this is more important than the actual impact on the base ratings which we all know leave much to be desired.
Steven is also moving towards PPFA ratings which will outperform the existing ones. They will be speed based. In his typical thoroughness, He has times for every relevant track in Australia as fast, good, slow and heavy for every distance. This will enable us to compare horses more accurately. Imagine the work that would entail. He concedes the problem with performance of the existing ratings and the much more accurate data through PPFA is essentially trying to make inferior ratings better. A patch work job. And hence the need for new ratings which I would await eagerly.
Steven’s Staker increases the bet in a winning streak not a losing one. Because of the minimum bet being high, the low strike rate is more than offset by the excellent dividends.
Steven does not like Adelaide or Perth. He feels there are too many form reversals in Adelaide and too many poor jockeys in Adelaide and Perth. Sydney and Melbourne are what he prefers.
BlackBook horses can be found by opening File Maintenance and setting the filter Racing2Day.
Steven is saying that you can use the Black Book as a check on the stength of system selections. If the top 4 rated are also top 4 in Field Strength, they tend to perform to expectation. If they are not in the top 4 of field strength, they can be risky betting propositions.
Working with Steven and Brendan at Sandown on the Saturday was also instructive. A big crowd for the Sandown Classic and other major events. He watched the first couple of races and then said that the track was favouring front runners. Just watching the early events can give you valuable input for the later races and could lead to the abandoning of some selections. Even quality horses were not making any headway on the leaders and only Zipping, the favourite in the Sandown Classic was able to reverse this pattern.
I gather also that the rail position can make a big difference to the ability of backmarkers to get a run. If the rail is true, all horses get a chance, but if it is out wide, especially on a narrow track, the front runners have a big advantage. Some of you will know all that but it was an eye-opener to me.
Wind also can be very influential. If it is across the track, it won't make a lot of difference. A head wind favours the backmarkers because the front runners are slowed down. A tail wind also favours the backmarkers because is gives them extra speed! All very new to me.
Possibly the most important thing I will take from the week end is to be much more aware of the importance of keeping the data up to date in PPFA. Important parts of PPFA include jockey and trainer allowances and the chances of horses that did not do themselves justice in recent runs. Steven thanked me for driving him by updating all my PPFA data and I could see an immediate improvement.
Steven is less concerned with the odds than the order and with getting that right. Obviously the fact that jockeys move in and out of form means that keeping it all up to date is crucial and I will therefore invest in his updates. And I can see the importance of updating several times during the day. I missed a $9.50 winner last Saturday by not doing that. Previously I've been updating to 12 o'clock but not much past that.
I enjoyed the meeting at Box Hill where I met SlowNEasy and Charlie and Mouteka and Lucky Phil and others. It was good to put faces to them. It was well after midnight before I finally got home.
Footnote in Early January:
You have to crawl before you can walk. It was only when I started subscribing to the updates and saw them arriving daily that it impinged on me just how much work Steven does in keeping the data up to date and making it reflect what is going on right at the moment. I read what Steven had to say about the Drongo Systems on PPFA adjusted data and saw how the performance lifted as the data became more accurate each year. And I was also impressed with how the last couple of months which have been less impressive for Drongo, for my data at least, became profitable with Steven’s additional requirements about price, market order, age and weight.
However, sadly, I can also see an end to the high strike rates that I have worked with happily for so long. And I am not ready for that. Because of that I’ve had a further look at favourites. Are they viable? Where are the edges? The rules for Mackay which are fairly typical follow and point to some of the edges.
SYSTEM SELECTOR RULES FOR: FAVSB5!BR$2 MAC
Race Field Size: 9 - 17
Venue: *MAC
Track Condition: G
Age of Horse: 3 - 12
Career Starts: 1 - 26
TAB Number: 2 - 24
Weight to Carry: 40.0 - 4.0
Av Prizemoney Rank: 1 - 7
Predicted Posn Rank: 1 - 1
Predicted Odds: 0.0 - 6.9
SP Price: 2.0 - 4.0
SP Rank: 1 - 1
With over twenty tracks we get the following result:
Meetings considered : 15980
Win Strike Rate/Seln. : 43.8%
Plc Strike Rate/Seln. : 71.6%
Average Win Dividend : $2.83
Average Plc Dividend : $1.44WIN PLACE QUINELLA EXACTA TRIFECTA FIRST FOUR
Races Bet : 1056 1056 1056 1056 1056 472
Races Won : 462 756 476 340 226 59
S.R./Race : 43.8% 71.6% 45.1% 32.2% 21.4% 12.5%
Outlay ($): 1056.00 1056.00 5280.00 5280.00 21120.00 28320.00
Return : 1307.20 1087.90 6499.60 7139.90 30998.50 39676.20
$ Profit : 251.20 31.90 1219.60 1859.90 9878.50 11356.20
% P.O.T. : 23.8% 3.0% 23.1% 35.2% 46.8% 40.1%
The edges? Handpicked tracks: My top ones for the record are Tamworth, Pinjarra, Rockhampton, Belmont, Seymour and Yarra Glen. No small fields. Favourites improve a great deal around field size 13 which must be the point at which the better strike rate and lower profit of small fields is offset by the better profit but greater uncertainty of large ones. Favourites seem not to like heavy tracks and are at their best with career starts of around 6 to 20. Letting go of the overbet and usually unprofitable TAB1 and prices below $2 are further edges. Combine these edges with CIS1 and you get a strong pattern of profit over eight years with only 2002 unprofitable.
That is where I think the edges are for favourites, and it should give me enough bets to carry me through the longer runs of outs in the main set of bets where I have followed Steven’s suggestions.
A braver person than I am would probably dispense with them altogether, but it is crucial that we be happy with how we operate and are comfortable with what luck dishes up to us. Each person has his own zone of comfort!
In selecting tracks, I've been helped by Grit's ideas and have used performance of SP1 and CIS1 as a guideline. This is tricky because the data for any one track is relatively small, sometimes tiny. Rather than follow the data blindly, I've looked and compared and tried to see what might simply be sample variation and what is important. And I've tried to see some kind of consistency over time.
Finally, just to emphasize just how powerful a system can be and how few rules it can need when you are looking in the right place, look at this:
Meetings considered : 15980
Win Strike Rate/Seln. : 14.3%
Plc Strike Rate/Seln. : 38.7%
Average Win Dividend : $7.80
Average Plc Dividend : $2.49WIN PLACE QUINELLA EXACTA TRIFECTA FIRST FOUR
Races Bet : 2403 2403 2403 2403 2403 1441
Races Won : 344 930 434 213 129 31
S.R./Race : 14.3% 38.7% 18.1% 8.9% 5.4% 2.2%
Outlay ($): 2403.00 2403.00 12015.00 12015.00 48060.00 86460.00
Return : 2683.00 2314.34 11183.10 11907.40 45510.90 71748.70
$ Profit : 280.00 -88.66 -831.90 -107.60 -2549.10 -14711.30
% P.O.T. : 11.7% -3.7% -6.9% -0.9% -5.3% -17.0%
And the rules:
SYSTEM SELECTOR RULES FOR: SP2COREBR$1PR$
Race Field Size: 11 - 16
Track Condition: G
Horse Win %: 1 - 100
Career Starts: 12 - 21
Predicted Posn Rank: 1 - 1
SP Price: 2.6 - 999.9
SP Rank: 2 - 24
I've tried also to listen to what Steven and one or two others have been saying about being willing to share the fruit of our research. I've been cautious about doing so in forum, but encouraged by others, I've put this forward. We can be too timid.
The combination of CIS1 with a decent sized field and omitting the favourite is just magic. However, with a 14.3% strike, you can probably understand why I wanted to buffer the runs of outs with a set of favourite systems.
There are two other factors here. One is that if it were not for Steven’s posts on the Drongo systems showing the benefits of scrapping the favourite and raising the minimum bet dividend, I’d not have stumbled on such a powerful system, in spite of what has been said on such matters for some time. Nor would I have felt that I could do much with it if it were not for the new enhanced Trigger betting I’m trialling which allows you to specify market criteria and allow the software to identify the horses far more accurately while I’m away doing something much more interesting than watching tedious market fluctuations in the hope that I’ll be able to swoop. Much more easily just to set and forget, especially as the software now enables you to specify many other ranges of market criteria, so I can also be using my favourite systems on automated betting as well and other sets of systems with different market criteria. We’ve never had it so good.
What has this to do with the user meetings? Well I’d never have stumbled on these goodies but for meeting Steven and seeing that some of what I was doing was a bit like fishing on the wrong side of the boat, to allude to the story at the end of St John’s gospel.
I can’t really do justice to the meetings. I thought they were fantastic! Don’t miss those that are happening shortly!
Allen
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