Eureka! – Revisited

First...

An apology for this morning.

There is one critical period of the day when lots of calculations are being made by Cortex (the central program that generates the ratings.)

This is between 9am and 9:50am and...

This is when the Forecast Price is calculated.

This morning, a security patch was applied to my server.

My hosting complany didn't have time to warn me (it was an important update) and...

Guess when they applied it?

Yes, right in the middle of the Forecast Price calculations!

This morning...

This meant that the ratings initially went out without forecast prices.

I did manage to put a message at the top of the email to explain this and, of course, I did send out the correct ratings about half an hour later.

It took me quite a while to work out what had happened.

One of the side effects of this is that, for those of you who use the Builder, any selections that you have today will have been triplicated.

I am working on sorting this out but won't be able to run the script until tonight.

All will be OK tomorrow morning...

I promise!

RC0 - Good Races/Bad Races

So, a few weeks ago, I wrote an article about how to identify better races to concentrate on.

I won't repeat myself here; you can take a look at the original post at... Eureka?

I've now managed to do some more work on this and, have come up with the following...

I have managed to come up with three different levels of this Good Race/Bad Race thing.

These are expressed as RC0.

RC can be 1, 2 or 3.

RC0 = 1

As an example...

Let's take an 10 horse race where it's pretty obvious that the winner is going to be one of 6 of those horses.

I know that because those 6 horses are the ones that I've found easier to rate;

They have form,

They have had success (going wins, class places and other stuff like that.)

Because of this, the 10 horse race now becomes a 6 horse race.

And it's far easier to pick a winner from a 6 horse race than from an 10 horse race.

This will give an RC0 of 1 (the best.)

RC0 = 2

Taking the above race...

If I can only rate 4 horses from that race, you might think that I've turned a 10 horse race into a 4 horse race and...

To a ceratin extent, I have.

However, there are 6 unrated horses and those are wild cards.

And, as such, a danger.

For races where I can only rate less than 55% of all runners...

I set RC0 to 2 (the second best.)

RC0 = 3

And, strangely...

Taking the above race...

If I can rate more than 8 horses from that race, you might think that I've got it right but....

To a certain extent, I have...

But...

I've actually turned a 6 horse race into a 8 horse race and...

For races where I can rate more than 88% of all runners...

I set RC0 to 3 (the third best.)

Statistics

I've just done a quick query on the Builder and the results are...

Top Rated Horse with any RC0 - Strike Rate = 26.08%

Top Rated Horse with an RC0 of 1 (the best) - Strike Rate = 31.68%

Top Rated Horse with an RC0 of 2 (2nd best) - Strike Rate = 29.31%

Top Rated Horse with an RC0 of 3 (3rd best) - Strike Rate = 23.64%

I think that that says it all?

The Builder

I've added RC0 to the Builder and it seems to work.

Anyway, it gives me the same results that my spreadsheets give me.

From tomorrow, this will only show up on the normal PDF (number 1 on the email.)

RC0 is either 1, 2 or 3.

An RC0 of 1 is best.

Conclusion

I'd suggest that you just watch this new metric until you are happy with it?

Or, perhaps, play around with it in the Builder now that I've added it there?

Please feel free to leave comments here (or email me privately) should you have anything to say.

As always...

My kindest regards