Morning News

Monday morning and I'm raring to go!

It's kind of funny how you can take a day off work and then spend all that day thinking about work.

But, that's pretty much what happened yesterday.

A nice glass of wine at my local PMU, and then a nice galette (a Breton pancake), seemed to help my thinking processes.

So, nicely refreshed, I'm ready to reply to the ten million emails waiting for me (I may just be slightly exaggerating there.)

Yesterday's Results

A below average day, yesterday, as can be seen from the Results.

A strike rate (for the top rated horse) of 18.18% is not what I really wanted but, if I can crow about the days when we get a 40% strike rate (for the top rated horse), then I have to understand that we are going to have bad days to compensate.

Forecasts

We only got one forecast yesterday...

Cheltenham 15:50 The CSF paid £28.25

There were three reverse forecasts as well but I'm not going to mention those.

Tricast

No Tricasts yesterday

Winners

From the 22 rated races there were only 4 winners (from the top 3 rated horses) - Two of them were at reasonable prices.

Course	Time	Horse	ISP	BSP
Cork	14:35	Rory O'Moore	11.0	12.64
Cheltenham	15:15	Garde La Victoire	11.0	13.83

Comments...

All eyes were on the Greatwood Hurdle (Cheltenham 15:15) - our top rated (in that race) didn't do anything but our 2nd and 3rd rated horses won and came second (albeit, in the wrong order.)

The Portfolio

There were no Bankers Bets (or Chancers Bets) yesterday.

You may subscribe to my Portfolio. To do so, you need to go to your Members Page and change option 4 on the Your Profile bit.

If you haven't subscribed, the button will say Yes - just click on it and you'll be signed up.

Any other business

And finally...

Change in Class

Now, in an interesting development...

George (a member) contacted me to let me know that he'd read an internet site thread which suggested that betting on horses that have risen in class is better than betting on horses that have fallen in class.

I did a quick bit of research on the Builder and my reply to George was, as follows...

I can see the logic behind the rise in class - the horse must be improving for it to have risen in class.

I've just done a quick query in the Builder for top rated horses and the results are...

Top Rated horse - drop in class...

Strike Rate = 28.32%
Average SP = 2.90
ROI = 82.13%

Top Rated horse - rise in class...

Strike Rate = 23.33%
Average SP = 3.62
ROI = 84.45%

So, you can earn more (or lose less) by backing horses that have risen in class because they tend to be higher priced (even though the strike rate is lower.)

Having said that, if a horse drops a class then it's got to be running against lesser horses; if that horse has dropped more than one class then it's got to be interesting.

I'll leave it up to you to make up your minds how important that metric is.

Dutching

I think that I may have bitten off more than I can chew when I started talking about Dutching.

I did a lot of thinking about this yesterday but didn't manage to come up with any solutions.

I'm still convinced that the best opportunities are where the top three horses are far above the other horses in terms of confidence of the other horses in the race (which will be shown as the difference in Confidence levels between the 3rd rated horse and the 4th rated horse.)

There's a logic there that can't be refuted.

The research that I have been able to do (bearing in mind that it was a day off) indicated that the opportunities for dutching varied directly with the level of RC1 (the number of horses that I can rate in a race, basically.)

You can get a Strike Rate of 88.71% should you back all top three rated horses (in non Handicap Races) in all races where the RC1 is 95% or better - you'll only get just under one race a day, though.

Much more work need here, I think.

I have, however, re-implented the EasyDutch dutching calculator - you can find it on the sidebar or go directly to it... here

I'm going to continue working on this but I'll probably start a series of posts to detail my results - that sort of stops me obsessing too much about Dutching on the morning email.

One thing that I have ask though, is how do you guys select a race to dutch?

Forget Focus Ratings - even without it do you have any rules?

Today

Only three meetings today and that works well for the ratings.

We seem to do better on quiet days - I'm not sure why, 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