Horse Racing Strategy Clinic
-
Struggling to create your favourite strategy in the software?
Worried your strategy is too good to be true, based on the backtesting results?
Not sure whether your strategy rules are meaningful or if you might be backfitting / p-hacking them?
Looking for ideas on how to make your strategy better?
This is the place for you!
Click the export button in the Horse Selection Rules and upload the resulting JSON file here and we can all help out!
-
Hi Adam. I was trying to create a back strategy looking for horses that ran below their handicap last time/handicap has been lowered focusing on higher quality handicap races with decent prize money (theory being you know the horses will be trying). My thinking is that a lot of money in these higher quality races will be placed on the favourite/tipped horses by pundits leaving some of the "outsiders" to provide value. Obviously this approach won't be for everyone as there will be long losing runs but wondered if you had any comments on my first stab? Is there any way of testing how it would have performed if the selections had been backed each way? Thanks!
-
@Andy-Donnelly Seems like a sound basis for a strategy to be fair, the horse will quite likely be over-valued!
-
@Adam Thanks again for confirming how to create that strategy (post the fixed youve applied).
Just created the strategies for each course characteristic. Backtesting looks very promising. Particularly on sharp courses. No other parameters need to be applied, just set an odds range, thats all. Most course types are profitable.
Will forward test for a bit, and hope they match back-testing. Very limited danger of backfitting here, so feeling hopeful!
-
@Andy-Donnelly said in Horse Racing Strategy Clinic:
Lay horses that won their last race, but have never won on a track with the characteristics that there next race has.
You should be able to do this now.
Let's say you're looking at "Easy" courses, you would set it up like this:
The first rule filters on horses that won their last race.
The inner rule group filters on horses that also lost all of their previous races over "Easy" courses.
The important bit is the "inherit restrictions" option, which applies the "Easy" filter to the inner finishing position filter.
The slightly annoying thing with this is that it will also apply the "Easy" filter to the upcoming races, so you'd need to duplicate the strategy once per course characteristic.
-
I started answering this, then realised I'd missed the "favourite" part.
If you set up the "Finishing Position" rule as shown in this screenshot, this will give you horses that have won 40% of their last x races.
However, we don't currently have way to specify the favourite in this type of rule. It will literally filter the results and only trade horses that meet that criteria.
It's a good suggestion though and I've added it to the roadmap. I think we'd want to make it so you could specify your own criteria, like "course win %", "course & distance win %", etc.
-
Hello
Is there a way to filter the courses by the favorite win %. As in I want to bet on a race where at that course the favorite wins 40% of the time. At the moment I have to goto racingpost to find it for each course. Thanks
-
@Andrew-Gray You know what Edison said... "I haven't failed. I've just found 1000 methods that don't work" or something to that effect!
-
@Adam Thanks for that Adam btw...
I changed to single price and yes lo and behold, it turns into a massive loser
Oh well at least I can chuck that idea in the bin now!
-
@Adam said in Horse Racing Strategy Clinic:
@John-Folan There have been no updates to the software for a while. I can look into it if you log a support ticket with some more detail; it sounds more like a tech support request than a strategy clinic thing tbh.
Weirdly it’s righted itself. Finally back trading this weekend.
-
@John-Folan There have been no updates to the software for a while. I can look into it if you log a support ticket with some more detail; it sounds more like a tech support request than a strategy clinic thing tbh.
-
@Adam Not sure what button you have pressed , but my Dob and Trob strategies in my bunker are now showing overall losses. I've not touched them before I went on my nice extended holiday.
Read the first post on both threads.
Horse Trading Resources
https://forum.betfairtradingcommunity.com/topic/1111/john-s-horse-trading-resourcesBfBotmanager
https://forum.betfairtradingcommunity.com/topic/2915/bfbotmanager-automation-discussion -
@Tony-Hastie It's saying that stalls 4 and 6 are the ones you would have made money on in this strategy, but there's not really enough of a sample size to base any decisions off here, with only about 20 trades on each stall.
This also doesn't mean that stalls 4 and 6 are the ones with the draw bias. The lower stalls are definitely the ones with a bias at Chester over 5F (stalls 1-4 all have a positive draw bias). But people know this already, so that's why if you're purely basing your betting decisions on this fact won't make you money, because the prices already reflect the bias. It needs to be combined with other factors.
You can start your strategy off by filtering on the positive draw bias at Chester over 5F, assume that everyone already knows about this bias, and then start thinking "what can I find in the software that the average punter isn't going to know about, or can't easily figure out?", so you can find some value / an edge that others don't have.
For example, some people are probably not going to realise that stall 4 has such a positive bias, which might be why it shows a profit before adding much else in. You could also look at different goings, or try adding pace into the mix as some courses also have a pace bias.
-
@Tony-Hastie if you are really stuck with it you could always just choose the stalls that work best for the strategy and forward test them
-
@Martin Thanks Martin. Yeah, I understand what Adam said. I just seem to be finding it difficult to relate to a strategy
-
@Tony-Hastie taken from what @Adam said on the horse racing thread yesterday.
You're usually going to be backing a stall with a draw bias greater than 1 and laying a stall with a draw bias less than 1.
What this means is every 1.01+ is saying it is a potentially value back
Everything 0.99 or less is a value lay -
@Adam Thanks for your draw bias explanation it was very helpful. But having been tinkering all night Im still having trouble joining the dots. Attached is my tinker effort, using a well known draw bias track and distance. Chester, 5f. Am I right in understanding that this strategy is telling me that stalls 4 and 6 are the ideal stalls to run from? And the ideal draw bias is 1.1-1.59? Or am I way off? Let me down gently...Draw bias tinker.json
-
@Andrew-Gray The main issue is that you're using the "Price Range" bet type instead of "Single Price".
This is like saying you're sitting there waiting for the price to hit that exact value, at which point you will somehow time it perfectly and manage to get the bet matched at that price. It also means the horse has to trade at EXACTLY that price, because there's no range, so if it traded at 42 at one snapshot and then the next price traded was 46, it will be missed.
The "Single Price" bet type does exactly what you're expecting; it's like placing a bet at a specific price and letting it sit there waiting to get matched. If the price goes past your specified price, your bet will still be matched at the price you requested.
The other thing is you're using the official start time, but the BSP won't be known until the actual start time. Probably not a huge issue in this case as it's only going to be a couple of minutes off at most and it's unlikely a horse would trade at 40+ and then have a BSP of 10-20.
