Morning News

Good Morning

I do have to warn you that...

I am going to put on my serious hat, later on in this post, and...

As a result of an email that I got yesterday morning...

Be Captain Sensible, once again.

And I've also got some statistics about Dutching that may (or may not), be interesting.

And I also have to try and explain yesterday's results.

Yesterday's Results

In a way I was sort of hoping for another 24.24% strike rate today (as that would have been really weird) but I have to say that I'm not too unhappy with what we got instead, as you can see from the Results.

A strike rate (for the top rated horse) of 30% is pretty nice.

Forecasts

There were no forecasts yesterday.

Tricast

There was one tricast yesterday.

Ascot 14:140 - The Tricast paid £98.73

Winners

From the 30 rated races there were 17 winners (from the top 3 rated horses) - Two of these were at reasonable prices.

Course	Time	Horse	ISP	BSP
Ascot	15:50	Leviathan	5.5	6.46
Wolverhampton	17:15	Topaling	10.5	9.0

Comments...

A better than average day and nothing really stands out from yesterday's results:

Apart from this...

In the 13:40 at Ffos Las, our 3rd rated horse was a non-runner. The Live ratings replaced it with River D'or which came second.

In the 15:25 at Ffos Las, our top rated horse was a non-runner. The Live ratings moved the 2nd rated horse up to top rated, the 3rd rated to 2nd rated and brought in Surprise Us as the new 3rd rated horse. The new top rated horse won and the 2nd rated horse came second - a Forecast, in other words.

In the 15:40 at Haydock, our 2nd rated horse was a non-runner. The Live ratings promoted our 3rd rated horse to 2nd rated and it came second (our top rated won) - a Forecast, in other words.

In the 16:00 at Ffos Las, our top rated horse was a non-runner. The live ratings promoted our 2nd rated horse to top rated horse; our 3rd rated horse then became 2nd rated horse and, the Live ratings brought in Tambura as our new 3rd rated horse. Tambura won at 66/1 - the BSP was 144.54!

I'm not really going to comment on that because...

I don't really think that any comments are necessary.

The Portfolio

Our Banker's Bet, yesterday, was...

Bankers Bet = AW Maidens - RC1 greater than 84% - Top Rated horse with an LTO of less than 42 days - where R4 Status = 1 and where Race Type = All Weather and where the Race is a Maiden Race and Horse\'s last run was less than 42 days ago and the Race\'s RC1 is greater than 84%

Selection = Back to ISP - Wolverhampton (AW) - 16:40:00 - Blue Bounty (1)

Races (over last year): 31 Wins: 19 Strike Rate: 61.29% ROI: 159.97%

Blue Bounty came third (and I'm going to say a bit more about this further down this page.)

There was no Chancer's Bet.

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Any other business

And finally...

Dutching

I have started the analysis of the Results spreadsheet.

Rather than waffle on about this here, I'll let you take a look at a post about it here... http://focusratings.com/strategies/dutching-a-strategy-stage-1/

I will say that, by blindly dutching the top three rated horses in AW Sellers, you'll get a winner in 75.68% of those races.

Captain Sensible

I want to share with you an extract of an email from Paul, who wrote to me yesterday morning to share some of his thoughts about Thursday's Portfolio selections.

Felt I should write as something was bugging me in the news today.

Having read the mail through, my curiosity got the better of me and I took a second look at the 'Banker' bet. I have to admit that I've not looked at the portfolio - or indeed any of the systems - for a while, purely because I am wrapped up in experiments of my own. Oh, and yes, hindsight is wonderful! However, my thought was that there must be an alarm bell somewhere that wasn't getting picked up, and as the kinda all round good-guy that I am (looking for tongue in cheek emoticon) I should endeavor to find it.

I didn't look at the results, because from your comment it sounded like the selection did nothing; instead I opened the full daily csv and looked at the race as if it were going to happen today.

Here is what I noticed at a quick glance:
1) The horse has no recent win form, whilst others in the race have
2) It fell lto
3) 2 horses in the race have CIT, one is now with a top trainer, the other has the top jockey on board.......

That's enough for me, I need to ignore the race and move on.

However, I decided then to take a look at the result, and this revealed the loudest alarm bell of all!

One of the CIT horses was joint favorite with our horse, having been F/C @ 6.5 whilst ours was F/C at odds-on. It was also our second rated or 'benchmark' horse. I'd had enough when the early alarms rang, but now.......... TAXI !!!

Now, I know that I have waffled on about being Captain Sensible before, and applying an additional layer of human logic but...

There really is good reason to do that and not just blindly back the Portfolio selections.

You see, the Banker's Bet yesterday came from a system that, over the last 365 days, has produced the following...

Bankers Bet = Chase the Winners!

where R4 Status = 1 and where Race Type = National Hunt - Chase and where the Race is Not a Handicap Race and the Race\'s RC1 is greater than 70% and Runners was equal to or more than 7 and Runners was equal to or less than 15 and the Horse\'s R4 is greater than 4.0 and the Horse\'s Confidence is greater than 120% and Horse was a Favourite, Joint Favourite or a Co Favourite

Selection = Back to ISP - Thurles - 12:55:00 - Hidden Cyclone (3)

Races (over last year): 6 Wins: 5 Strike Rate: 83.33% ROI: 246.66%

As you can see, an amazing strike rate and a great ROI but, I don't have any way of filtering the Portfolio selections (by applying the sort of logic that Paul used) before they get sent out; or, indeed, the skills to do so.

But, by applying the sort of logic that Paul used, you can actually discard that selection and, save yourself some money?

I'll put it in car terms...

You're in a race with two other people. One of these people drives a Ferrari and the other drives a Porsche - you've only got an old Landrover.

Now, if there was such a thing as a car racing betting system (perhaps based upon horsepower, top speed and lifetime wins), it would probably suggest that the Ferrari would win, the Porsche come a close second and you'd come last.

And that would be true at Silverstone or Le Mans.

But, what about if that race was 20 times round Farmer Giles's muddy bottom field?

Or, what about if that particular model of Ferrari had a tendency to burst into flames every other lap?

Or, should that be the Porsche?

Any systematical selection is only as good as its implementation to the specific race in question.

I've said it before (on this post about Captain Sensible.)

And I'll almost certainly say it again but...

Every race is a unique event.

I guess that what I’m trying to say is that I’d hate to think of you sending your kids down the pit, selling your house and auctioning off one of your Granny’s kidneys just to raise enough money to put it all on a Banker's Bet.

Of course, if the selection is valid, it’d be wonderful and you’ll be reading this from your new beach house in St. Tropez (with a special annex for your understandably grumpy granny?)

But what happens if that Banker's Bet loses?

Today

Six meetings today and I shall be largely working on the Dutching spreadsheet.

I shall also update the Live Ratings table (with results) so that we can compare the results from the Live Ratings with the normal ratings.

Easy Dutch

Frank emailed me yesterday to suggest that I change EasyDutch to use the Live Ratings.

I think that this is an excellent idea and don't really know why I didn't think of this myself.

So, sometime today (before the racing starts), I shall do this.

If any one has any objections to this then I'll have to create 2 EasyDutch pages (one for live ratings and another for the static, 10am, ratings) as this really is a very sensible idea - thanks, Frank.

At the same time I'll see if I can add live prices to the EasyDutch page.

Not too sure that that's going to happen, though.

Once again, if you've got anything to say about Focus Ratings, please wander over to Focus Ratings Review and have your say.

As always...

My kindest regards