Forecasts – your thoughts?

Forecasts!

A few days ago...

A member emailed me to ask the question... "These ratings have really helped my betting - do you have any systems on forecasts? will be interested if you have."

Now, I'm always very happy when we accurately predict the first and second horse in a race (in the right order?)

And I'm even happier when we get the first three!

I'm noticing that it seems to be happening more and more?

But I've got no idea in which races we do best.

As I seem to have misplaced my crystal ball...

I decided to do some analysis...

And find out.

Forecast Analysis

I quickly realised that the Builder would be no help in this...

It's not really designed for this sort of thing.

So I wrote some code and created a new spreadsheet which would help me identify any trends.

The file may be found here...

Forecast analysis file

Now, I should warn you that it's a pretty big file (21.4MB) and, thus, might take a while to download.

A walk through the file...

So, the file has 4 tabs at the bottom.

1). The first tab (called Complete) contains all the data that you'd normally expect to find on a Results spreadsheet but...

With an additional column on the right hand side of the spreadsheet (more of which in a minute.)

2). The second tab (called Races) contains all the data in Complete but, only for the top rated horse.

Thus, it lists just one line per race rather than the 3 lines for the Complete sheet.

Now, that additional column at the end shows CSF.

CSF is initially set to zero for all races.

CSF gets set to 1 if we got the forecast in that race.

CSF gets set to 2 if we got the reverse forecast in that race.

And, CSF gets set to 3 if we got the Tricast in that race.

I then built a Pivot Table and displayed the results on the third tab (called Race Types)

This tab shows the Strike Rate for each race type.

Finally, I created a fourth tab (called Race Type Analysis)

This is basically just a tidied up version of the third tab.

Race Type Analysis

To make things simpler, I created another spreadsheet with just the race tye analysis on it.

The file may be found here...

Race Type analysis file

This is a much smaller file than the first one.

Once again, this file has 4 tabs.

The first tab shows all the information that was in the last tab of the bigger file.

The next three tabs show the results (in descending strike rate order) for forecasts, reverse forecasts and tricasts.

Now, this might seem rather confusing so far but...

It does get easier from here on in!

So...

To make things easier, I'm going to start by looking at the straight forecasts.

What I learn from them, I will be able to apply to the reverse forecasts and tricasts.

Straight Forecasts

I decided to concentrate on all races where the Straight Forecast strike rate was above 6%.

The reason I chose 6% as the cut off point was that I wanted to include the 868 Flat Maiden races.

Race Type	Race Type 2	Handicap	Races	Strike Rate
Flat	Conditions Race	Yes	1	100.00%
All Weather	Auction Stakes	No	2	50.00%
Flat	Claiming	Yes	7	28.57%
Flat	Claiming	No	53	15.09%
Flat	Selling	No	66	13.64%
National Hunt – Chase	Graduation Chase	No	8	12.50%
Flat	Conditions Race	No	62	11.29%
National Hunt – Chase	Novice	No	129	10.85%
All Weather	Selling	No	74	10.81%
National Hunt – Chase	Juvenile	No	39	10.26%
National Hunt – Hurdles	Novice	No	391	10.23%
National Hunt – Flat	Intermediate Race	No	25	8.00%
All Weather	Amateur Race	Yes	13	7.69%
Flat	Charity Stakes	Yes	14	7.14%
All Weather	Maiden	No	465	6.67%
All Weather	Nursery	No	15	6.67%
National Hunt – Chase	Novice	Yes	212	6.60%
Flat	Maiden	No	868	6.45%

Now, to my eyes..

Bearing in mind that I know nothing about horse racing?

Flat Claimers (handicap and non handicap), Flat Sellers, Flat Conditions Races (handicap and non handicap), Novice Chases and Novice Hurdles (both non handicap) are the stand out race types to investigate further?

So, I now need to move forward and look at some other factors such as...

1). Number of runners in the race.

2). The Forecast Starting prices of the top two rated horses and...

3). The confidence levels of the top two rated horses?

I'll be doing this later on today and tomorrow

But first (and I need a bit of help here)...

Your thoughts please?

So, do any of you bet straight forecasts?

Am I missing anything obvious?

If you have any thoughts on what I should be looking at then please leave a comment here and I'll take a look.

Perhaps you might want to discuss forecasts (and a potential strategy) on the forum?

And make this a community effort?

Anyway...

As always...

My kindest regards