MCRacing Selections

How do I make my selections ?
Today I’m going to talk about how I come by my selections. As you know I make my selections primarily through using ratings, so I thought I would go into the process  to give you an idea to what’s involved.

Firstly the Ratings that I use are made of  many, many mathematical calculations that are far beyond anything that I could come up with, but I do know how to use them to my best advantage. Hopefully  by showing you the process That I go through might help you understand the reasoning to how I come by my selections  ( hopefully ) and that I don’t just stick a pin in the paper.

I will take you through an example where all the runners are pretty close in the ratings so that you can see that the ratings used in conjunction with other stats from other sources.

So we are going back to 10th October for the  15:55 at Newton Abbott for a class 2 Intermediate chase over 2m 5f 110y.

Fig 1.

 

Ok the first column is the finish positions of this race ( 505 means Faller ). The next column is a ranking  figure  that incorporates many different ratings and then gives a horse a ranking , the third column is one of my favourite ratings and I suppose I could liken it to The Racing Post Rating. Basically it’s the software’s   own projected rating for each and every horse, whether it runs to that figure or not. What happens after the race is that with all the factors of the race taken into account the software will then calculate the actual figure it ran too and that can be checked against the run at a later date. ( I digress ) The next figure is an average rating for all the times that the horse has to on the day’s ground conditions. So basically I use these ratings to find contenders.

 

Fig 2.

From the 5 runners shown in fig 1, I then concentrate on the top 3 in the actual ratings.

Wonderful Charm = brown line
Double Ross = Red Line
Taquin Du Sol = Green Line
Ok in fig 2 I am able to see how a horse is progressing or not, so as you can see with Wonderful Charm every one of his recent runs he has run to a figure of over 200, its projected figure is also just over 200 and its average on the days going is over 200 with a big jump in the ratings 3 races back. As you can see from the graph is that all 3 runners are pretty much on par, which pretty much says they are all consistent types. On the actual software if you actually click on any one of the shapes it will tell you everything you need to know about the actual figures for that particular race.

Ok so know I have a basic idea that this will be a pretty close race as most of the runners are at about the same level. What I do now is I will add or minus point to or from each runner for certain criteria, say for example I will add points to each runner that has won or placed at the distance and again for wins or places on the days going and there are some other factors that I add and minus for as well, so from the original ratings figure I now have a new figure .

What I do now is refer to my own adjusted ratings   which will tell me a range of ratings that horses have won or placed in similar races at this course, distance and going. They then are all rehashed to give me a master rating of which any contender must be equal to or beat to become selection. In this case all three were still in contention at this point.

Now I know that this race is going to be well contested I have to go back to the original ratings and see if I can get an answer there, in this case I went back and had a look at the class of this race and other races that the horses had run in. Each horse is assigned a class rating and from this I can determine the ratings class of the race to be run and various other past races which then can be compared to find the horse which has been running in a better ratings class.

I also use a rating that tells me the monetary class of the race and I can also use a rating that tells me at what class any horse was last competitive in. There are a lot more ratings that I use to determine what I think will be the most competitive in any given race, which might make you think that this looks like it takes forever.

The ratings that I use can be exported to an excel csv file from which I can gather any number of ratings that  I want  use into an excel spreadsheet that I have to automatically spits out contenders and selections at a touch of a button and then with a little reading of the said rating I normally come to my final decision within about 10 minutes per qualifying race, which on average is around 10 races per day.

I’m always reviewing ratings to see if I can add or even take out of any equation to try and keep the systems viable and thus far they have held up, but I am in the process at the moment looking at a couple more ratings to improve one of the systems in the service which is dragging it down and hopefully have a solution very soon.

Ok that’s hopefully given you a quick insight into how my selections are made and the work that I put into the selections every day, to try and make sure that they all stand a good chance of winning the races.

If you have any questions or comments I will be happy to answer them below..

MC Racing