When I first started Focus Ratings, one of my customers was a lovely old boy called Albert.
Sadly he is no longer with us but, he seemed to take real joy from his betting.
He only bet to 25p stakes and he mainly used to do Lucky 15s and accumulators.
He would always email me with the previous day’s results and that day’s selections.
Sometimes he did really well; on one occasion a 25p accumulator came in and he won £1680 which he promptly spent taking his son, his daughter in law and their 2 kids to a sort of center park type two week holiday. I suspect that Mrs Bert was allowed to go as well.
I still remember the sad day, sometime in 2015, when I received an email from Bert’s son asking if I could close Bert’s account; Bert wouldn’t be betting any more.
I also remember the email I received one day, with Bert’s selections for that day’s assault on the bookies.
It stands out for me as he mentioned that the last horse was a bit of a punt – he just needed an extra horse for his accumulator. He felt that the horse in question was worth a punt as it seemed to be improving – its form read 55331.
Now, it must have been a quiet day for me as I took a look at that horse and found that, although the form suggested an improving horse…
It got its 2 5th places in Class 5 races, its 2 3rd places in Class 6 races and it got its win in a Class 7 race.
In fact, the horse wasn’t improving at all – at least the trainer didn’t think so – perhaps the trainer was just trying to keep the owner happy?
Anyway, that got me to thinking…
“Surely there must be a way of presenting the form of a horse to show the class of those form elements.
Perhaps form should be displayed in this fashion – 5(5)5(5)3(6)3(6)1(7)
To indicate the class that each result relates to.”
However, life got in the way and I never got around to doing anything with this idea.
Until, that is, the Autumn of 2017 when I created Advance Ratings (you can read about how I did that here… How I Created Advance Ratings).
Now, Advance Ratings is a purely form driven ratings systems that assigns values to form results based upon the value (in terms of prize money paid to the winning horse) of each result.
And, as race class is based upon the value of the prize money – that’s sort of the same thing.
Now, Advance Ratings works incredibly well for GB and IRE racing.
The formula that it uses also works perfectly for Compass Ratings for Hong Kong racing.
And, the same formula is used for high quality international Graded, Group and Listed races for Spotlight Ratings.
But, it is a bit of a faff to work out.
That got me to thinking if it would be possible to create a ratings system that was so simple to use that the ratings could be worked out on the back of a beer mat.
I did some more thinking, poured myself a glass of wine and came up with a Really Simple Ratings system that anyone can use to rate horse races themselves.
I’ve got a horrible idea that I’ll be sharing that system with you sometime soon.
In the mean time, I just wanted to remind you (and I really don’t want to teach Granny to suck eggs) that, when looking at horse form, you should really take the class of each of those form elements into account.
Class really does matter.
My kindest regards
Keith
