[AusRace] FW: From the archives - 14 observations on the punt

[Tony Moffat]

Subject: From the archives - 14 observations on the punt


Originally posted by butthead 2004 (whoever you are)

Punters,

Here are some thoughts after a couple of years working with a professional
rating service.
I apply rules based filters to these ratings for most eastern states races -
10,000+ per year.

Criteria for a successful selection strategy has evolved to
 At least 150 selections over 12 months
 Remove the best result from every 20 winners
 Produce 10% POT flat stakes (and this is now eked to 1-2%)
And I still don't understand that.

Fourteen observations on the punt

1. The market is efficient - like the stockmarket, there is no strategy that
is better than the market over a large number of selections (although there
may be people who hedge and arbitrage the betting market - bookies?)

2. Like the stockmarket, the real players use information that is not
available to the wider market and not reflected in machine generated ratings

3. Machine produced ratings perform best with races 1000m-1800m and are
biased to horses that run on the pace.

4. 2yo, jumps, firstup, greater 2000M are not harder than other forms of
racing but seem to require specialist skills.

5. Ratings perform as well in metro, provincial and country racing

6. It is easier to pick horses that will lose than horses that will win

7. Plus 50 units is as good as it gets for any reasonable selection strategy
- 150+ selections over a  12 month period - maybe for any selection
strategy. 
Perhaps plus 100 units is as good as it gets for anyone anywhere except the
exception.

8. Strategies with large numbers of selections - >10% of available races
tend to 0% POT over time with a plus/minus 15% over any 12 months.

9. Personal selections add at most 5% to any rules based selection strategy
over time

10. The easiest strategy appears to be based on identifying a couple of
hundred true favourites a year

11. Most identifiable true favourites are widely identified and are the late
mail and firm into favouritism if they aren't already.

12. Reasons true favourites don't win -10% over-rated/20% bad day/30%
jockey/40% others under-rated

13. Money management - best price/cost averaging across TABs is worth 5% and
using a bookie maybe worth another 5%.

14. There are many many other selection strategies that may or may not
Perform

Posted by butthead originally

Q1: how would you correct for 12
(a) can't add too much to the top price
(b) adjust the next 4 against their value in a 100% book?
(c) drop the fav and dutch the next 4 -
People do this you know

Q2
About 10 - the easy tag is given freely here, what really happens is waiting
for the 3 or so (more or less) real F each day
Identified out of ROBERTA or Principle of Maximum Confusion rules (see
archive) although this is not based around form, even Inracing Knowles
Gamechanger
has the requirement to include the 1F and 2F in that bet, and the better way
might be Biggs P63.

Q3
 Regarding 8 -Selections (+3 in each race) over a large number of races (10%
of available races are mentioned here) reduce to 0% POT over time with +/-
15% over any 12 months.
This is disappointing. The rake is increasing also, Shatin, was on 122%
yesterday with millions of theirs in the pool (is it still 1:5.5 HK$?). Some
weeks ago they had 14 runners with 7 over $200 win

Cheers

Tony


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