OZmium Sports Betting and Horse Racing Forums - View Single Post

Hi Mike367,

From the Q&A so far in this post, it shows something that we have been saying all along. Unfortunately to most punters detriment, they have very little factual understanding about the real statistics behind their punting decisions. Some tend to accept a few good or bad results as the norm without knowing the implications of the long term trends.

RP is right, you asked for the paper favourite. This is in most cases is based on the AAP newspaper fed prices. It is NOT the favourite or a reflection of the true opening price. It is nothing more than a subjective/predictive rating that has been adopted in order to provide something to the masses to facilitate TAB turnover. Obviously it does have a bearing on what horses are likely to be fancied, but as its free, and available in every paper and most form providers, it is over bet.

These days you need a database (the most successful punters have one Mike) so you are competing against a fairly large handicap if you don't and can't answer questions like the one you asked for yourself. Those that don't use a database rely on years of experience and/or they use a pile of newspapers, cut-outs, index cards or rely on their memory and/or spreadsheets that they collect data in. Some may say that they don't use a database, yet all of the above are in some way or another a form of a information collection/storage etc similar to a database. Whilst we accept that this is a cost effective option for some, it is also time consuming to the point that any time/money calculation would show its cost to exceed that of a good quality database.

You can get our database for research purposes (Axis Historical) for just over a $1 a day ($396/annually). That's peanuts for what it delivers! It contains an extensive historical record of predictive ratings and all the research tools you could need. Given our propensity to improve the product, we are constantly adding more features and intelligence that our clients enjoy for no additional cost. See our website for full details.

OK, to answer your question, the Top rated paper favourite over the last 22,000 races has delivered approximately a win strike rate of 25.9 % and a place strike rate of 54.8%. Interesting isn't it when the reality sets in! Without really knowing what you have, most operate under misconceptions that the strike rates are much higher, all based on unqualified assumptions.

By the way we had to use a competitors product to get these as we don't maintain the records of the newspaper favourite. Why ?

Our predictive rating (Intelligence Rating )(IR) over the long term delivers a strike rate of Win 26.8% and Place 58.3%. However for those that may want to, we can enable our clients to import up to 5 external ratings in order to be able to completely analyse their performance across common variables and those that are proprietary and not known by the masses.

All the best