Yes. That's weight ratings. For example, my weight ratings had Alinghi rated on 76.5 kgs yesterday!!! That was 12.5 kgs ahead of the rest of the field.

Read my previous post and you'll get an idea of what I mean.

Tenacious, if you are just starting on this wonderful punting trip you may not be aware that most people rate horses in Kg (forgive me if I'm telling you what you already know). This is (probably) because in handicap races if a horse is better than those it is running against they tend to pile more weight on it's back to slow it down. Hence it seems traditional to say one horse is 5Kg (or whatever) better than another horse. Seems to me it would be more logical to say horse A is 1.5 lengths better than horse B but that's neither here nor there.
What this means is people go through the form awarding bonuses or penalties in Kg for each factor that may affect the outcome of the race. Like if you think barrier 1 is a big advantage give the horse in barrier 1 + 1Kg and maybe the horses in barrier 10 onwards -1Kg. Same for other things, like top jockey +1Kg, bad jockey -1Kg. What you end up with then is a list of weights against each horse. The top one may be 60Kg with the others having weights down to the bottom one at 52Kg for example.
These are the weights that people are now trying to convert to prices for you.

KV

T.S.
If you use TAS TAB ratings,these are yesterdays Ratings and you will need to add Todays Rating eg. Distance (change),WT carried,Jockey,Track.etc.
These would have to be allocated in WT And somehow added to past rating to give a present rating to then price.
Hoping this helps in some way

Ray.

Yeh OK i got it. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion! I assume "weight ratings" are just one way of rating, what are some other ways to 'rate' horses? Also, fair enough you add and deduct weight for each factor but should all horses in the race start at some base weight and if so what should it be?

Cheers

There are many different ways you could do it. Have a try on paper for a while and see which method works well.

Here's a couple of suggestions:

This first one's pretty basic. First, find each horse's rating on the Unitab website:
http://www.tabonline.com.au/
Now divide that rating by 2 to get a score out of 50. Then add bonuses or penalties of up to 2 kgs for the 5 different factors that you personally consider the most important. Things like Jockey & Trainer, Barrier, Recent form, Consistency, Days since last start, Record at track and distance, Record in these track conditions, Going up or down in weight, class, distance, etc etc. You'll end up with a rating figure of up to 60 kgs.

Here's a more traditional weight ratings method you could try. You can find your base rating for each runner by using either the Ozeform site or the Tasmanian TAB site. Personally, I prefer the Tas TAB site:
http://www.tastab.com.au/racebet/fo...num/default.asp
In each horse's form they'll give you a rating for each run in the form of a number like 540 or 655. I simply slip a decimal point in there to make it a weight rating like 54.0 & 65.5. These are the weight ratings I use to find my base rating for each horse. But that's the hard part. Actually choosing which run or runs you should take the ratings from to get your base rating. You could simply take the horse's last run, or perhaps it's best run from the last two, or perhaps it's best run this campaign or perhaps it's best run at this track/distance. Or perhaps a combination of a couple of those. It's up to you. Anyway, once you have your base rating, you can again add bonuses and penalties depending on certain factors. Then the final move is to subtract the amount of weight the horse is carrying over the minimum weight in today's race. After all that you'll end up with your final rating figure.

Hope all that helps in some way.

Hey Sportz - like all the info there etc. I've sort of mucked around with different ratings methods , from websites etc. , the question I had for you if you will answer , is how do you get the ratings etc down onto your PC to start with ( I'm presuming you use a PC to do the number crunching ) I have tried to get some from different sites before and found it really time consuming. Not sure if you work etc. or punt full time , so maybe you do have the time.

Any info would be great.

Cheers

Mick

Yes, it is time consuming. I actually have a spreadsheet which I use for rating the main meetings on Saturdays, but for smaller meetings like today, I just use a notebook. After you've done it for a while, you start to get a bit quicker. The secret though is not rating each and every race. NO WAY would I think of doing that. Just too time consuming. Besides, I tend to concentrate on just certain types of races anyway, so why bother rating all of the others. In fact today, I rated just ONE race all day:

NEWCASTLE R7
4 PATEZZA (71.0) $3.60
6 COOL FRONT (69.5) $5.00
5 SIR DEX (67.0) $9.00
3 Nips (66.5) $10.00
2 Sportsman (66.0) $11.25
7 Gabfest (65.0) $15.00

So, why not think about which races you prefer to bet on and only rate those. I prefer Open races between 1400m and 1800m because I find that's the type of race I do best in. I do rate other races too, but those are the ones I really like to concentrate on. On a regular day, I'll normally rate around 1-3 races only and even on big days like Saturdays, no more than about 8-10.

Thanks for that. I've been curious as to how everyone else does their thing. As mentioned I've also done similar things and had a spreadsheet setup , just wondered whether you had some you beaut way of doing it.
I may not be too far off your logic with race types. For me it was no maidens , and anything else where no horse was first up. Just found it hard to gauge first up records. Bit more exposed for sure helps , so it was middle distance and up for me.

Already decided on the races I'm thinking about for tomorrow. I'm definitely looking at Ballina R7 and maybe also Hawkesbury R7 or Wangaratta R5. The Unitab and Tas Tab ratings are up, so I'll start looking at those races now.

I tried mucking about a bit with Hawksbury race 7 - think I had in order
No's 2,4,1,6 - so the 5 winning was disappointing. Mostly because when I looked at the form myself I didn't think it could win. So I thought my ratings were a chance : - )
I only quickly thought up some penalties and bonuses last night and used an average of the ratings from the tassie tab site , and dist beaten etc.
Will need some more tinkering , but quite like the theory , just have to figure out what I think is the most important factors. Out of curiosity , did you rate that race Sportz , if so , what did you get.