The BTC Horse Racing Thread

[A Former User]

@keith-driscoll said in The BTC Horse Racing Thread:

@jonathan-jones The night before It is pretty much correct for picking favs less than 2/1

Cheers. Was wondering when it would be safe to run the filter for the daily qualifiers.

[John Folan]

Lots of racing cancelled today and tomorrow. Nice they are putting the welfare of the horses first.

[Keith Driscoll]

@jonathan-jones The night before It is pretty much correct for picking favs less than 2/1

[A Former User]

Question on One of the properties in the filter: What is the 'Forecast Price Rank'? When is it set? With it saying 'Forecast' i assume its based on something before the race but how long before?

[John Folan]

A nice winner in my new trobs at over 9’s. Queens highway won but went off too short for slow horses. Ennistown won at 12.5 so was a non qualifier for my classic trobs. Plus my 23.0 winner for the flat pace. I had a nice result for my short odd lays in the 12:00 as well.

Not the worst of days I must say. Horse software is definitely providing dividends.

[John Folan]

Winner on the Flat Pace at 23.0. Went off at 18.97 so a nice bit of extra value there. Patience pays off again.

[John Folan]

Todays

Classic Trobs: Dob, Trob or Win if odds are between 3.5-9 Nothing Matched yesterday

Flat Pace. Back to Win or Place if Win Price is between 2.0-25.0. 4-14 Runners only. Avoid Soft, Heavy and Firm Going. S**t Saturday

Slow Horses. Dob any over 6.0. Multiple selections per race are what makes this profitable. Just think Pokemon.

I'm also watching these to see how they perform. They are a variation on my Classic Trobs with less filters.
Trob or Win(Not worth Dobbing) any between 2.0-20.0 Near the Off. Four traded yesterday with Two trobs and a win.

[John Folan]

@darryll Doubt it. Software just shows you reached a price where money traded.

[Darryll]

@john-folan Thanks for the recommendation, I shall give that book a search and thanks for the advice regarding trobs. As I'm a proper newbie I want to find a strategy which will throw up a good volume of trades to place each day just so that I can get in to the practice of recording results in a spreadsheet and analysing. Perhaps trobs will be a better place to start than LTF.

Do you happen to know how the software tracks the amount traded? For instance, say I was putting £100 or £1,000 stakes on. Would it be able to identify partially matched trades and include that in the results breakdown?

@keith-driscoll said in The BTC Horse Racing Thread:

@darryll You've over-filtered. I'd bin something like that, not enough data to work with. I only filter courses that have at least 500 results, otherwise you may be introducing randomness, rather than a long-term trend. Not sure if Adam will add more past data, another 18 months would be great. Plenty of data for the AW.

Thanks Keith. Yes, I wasn't happy with the small sample size.

[Keith Driscoll]

@darryll You've over-filtered. I'd bin something like that, not enough data to work with. I only filter courses that have at least 500 results, otherwise you may be introducing randomness, rather than a long-term trend. Not sure if Adam will add more past data, another 18 months would be great. Plenty of data for the AW.

[John Folan]

@darryll Have a read of Roger Kemps LTF book on Kindle Unlimited(it’s free there). He explains that different courses are better under different runner numbers and different distances. I started messing with it but I was just creating more work for myself when I didn’t need to.

The thing you also may have to remember with trading these is when everyone everywhere does the same thing it sucks the value out. If 1000 people have the same lay price in as a target they will all be sitting there waiting to be matched. Some will get matched and some won’t. Probably just need to be a little creative with the price you ask for. That’s why I prefer a trob to a dob. Not many people do those which is mad as it’s been proved again and again they are generally more profitable by a significant amount.

It can be a minefield and I’m sure it’s no accident the two strategies I’ve found that work best off the software is a straight lay and straight win one. But hey? WTF do I know? Someone will prove me wrong and if it makes me money I will be quite happy about that

[Darryll]

@adam Ah, that seems obvious now. Thanks!

After listening to Martin's podcast about LTF I gave it a go and had 2+ bets matched per race for a total of 13 winners and 5 losers. Which I think is a 72% strike rate. Here are my results.

28/06

6.10 Roscommon - 2 bets
6.40 Roscommon - 4 bets
7.10 Roscommon - 2 bets

29/06

2.20 Thirsk - 2 bets
2.50 Thirsk - 1 bet
3.15 Musselburgh - 2 bets
3.25 Thirsk - 2 bets (bets affected by rule 4 and reduced to 1.44)
3.50 Musselburgh - 2 bets
4.00 Thirsk - 1 bet
4.20 Musselburgh - 2 bets
5.40 Tipperary - 2 bets
5.50 Bath - 1 bet (bets affected by rule 4 and reduced to 1.13)
6.20 Bath - 1 bet
6.40 Tipperary - 2 bets
7.00 Kempton - 1 bet
7.10 Tipperary - 2 bets
8.00 Kempton - 2 bets
8.30 Kempton - 2 bets

After this experience I thought this was pretty good and was looking forward to doing it regularly so I was confused to find it to be a badly losing strategy. So what I did then, and I'm just saying this because I would like you to confirm that I'm going through the process of filtering correctly, was to break the results down by course and then sort the columns by ROI. I then identified that

Tramore
Thurles
Laytown
Wetherby
Musselburgh
Epsom
Roscommon

are the only courses with positive ROI. So I then added the rule to only include these courses. Which did return an overall positive ROI of 11% However the strike rate is 37% which is way off from my 72% Granted, my sample size is tiny but is that anything to raise an eyebrow over?

The other thing which was a little concerning is that the total amount of trades is 236. Over the past 16 months it seems like this strategy isn't going to throw out many trades in the future. As well as being a small sample size in itself and therefore it's reliability questionable.

I'd appreciate your comments in return.

[John Folan]

For anyone wondering, the flat pace is doing nothing out of the ordinary. This is the monthly breakdown since last year and there has been a losing month before along with a couple of barely profitable ones. I use the word barely with tongue in cheek as a 5 or 10 point a month strategy isn't to be laughed at. Just got to be in it for the spectacular months.

I like a mix of high and low variance strategies. I tend to have more low than high because then the wild swings don't give me such big meltdowns. Higher variance seems to give bigger profits so stupid not to include them. This is my Short Odds Lays. Profit for July doesn't include the two points I made yesterday, but as you can see the monthly profit is more stable but overall there is less of it.

Slow horses. Again boring but steady. I really like these.

Set your trading style according to your appetite for risk (and your blood pressure :winking_face:). I like slow and steady generally, but I do like to have a couple of high variance ones on the go. I'm also anti risking more than a point or so per trade which is why you won't see me laying the correct score or laying horses over 3.0 as a rule. But what works for me might not work for you. A good mix is not the worst starting point. Although if you are just getting going with trading a nice low risk steady strategy while you find your feet is probably exactly what you need.

[John Folan]

Classic Trobs: Dob, Trob or Win if odds are between 3.5-9

Flat Pace. Back to Win or Place if Win Price is between 2.0-25.0. 4-14 Runners only. Avoid Soft, Heavy and Firm Going

Slow Horses. Dob any over 6.0. Multiple selections per race are what makes this profitable. Just think Pokemon.
NONE TODAY

I'm also watching these to see how they perform. They are a variation on my Classic Trobs with less filters.
Trob or Win(Not worth Dobbing) any between 2.0-20.0 Near the Off.

[Adam]

@darryll That sounds correct to me.

The results are showing you which horses were successfully traded in your strategy. It's not going to show every horse in the race because you wouldn't be able to match bets at 1.5 on every horse, otherwise you'd be a very rich man.

With lay the field, you're usually looking to match 2 or more runners in the race at a price < 2.0.

[Darryll]

@adam said in The BTC Horse Racing Thread:

@darryll If you don't want to restrict which courses you use, you don't need to use the "Course" strategy rule.

Basically pick the rules you want to use to restrict your selections, e.g. you might have an idea of how many runners you want there to be, what distance the race is, maybe the favourite price, etc.

Then in your betting rules, for lay the field you'll probably want to choose "offer price" as the bet type (which is like queuing up bets on all qualifying runners and waiting to see if they get matched). Enter the price as 1.5 and have your entry time slider from race start to race end.

Here's an example (you can import this into the software): 0_1657876816759_LTF example.json

Thanks for this Adam. I don't seem to be having much luck. Or it seems that something is awry.

When I click on individual trades in the results breakdown and sort by race time, I'm only seeing 1 or 2 selections per race. Therefore it doesn't look like it is reporting the results for laying the field, but just 1 or 2 selections from a race. Please could you take a look and let me know if you see the same?

Here's the file - 0_1657921659827_rules_export.json

[John Folan]

Bit of Classic Trob Action today.

Classic Trobs: Dob, Trob or Win if odds are between 3.5-9

Flat Pace. Back to Win or Place if Win Price is between 2.0-25.0. 4-14 Runners only. Avoid Soft, Heavy and Firm Going

Slow Horses. Dob any over 6.0. Multiple selections per race are what makes this profitable. Just think Pokemon.
NONE TODAY

[Adam]

@darryll If you don't want to restrict which courses you use, you don't need to use the "Course" strategy rule.

Basically pick the rules you want to use to restrict your selections, e.g. you might have an idea of how many runners you want there to be, what distance the race is, maybe the favourite price, etc.

Then in your betting rules, for lay the field you'll probably want to choose "offer price" as the bet type (which is like queuing up bets on all qualifying runners and waiting to see if they get matched). Enter the price as 1.5 and have your entry time slider from race start to race end.

Here's an example (you can import this into the software): 0_1657876816759_LTF example.json

[Darryll]

Hi guys. I'm new here. Please could somebody help me to input a 'lay the field' strategy in to the horse racing software?

In order to do a base strategy do I choose 'all courses' and then choose a lay stake of £1 @ odds of 1.5 starting at the off until the end of the race?

That's what I tried, I'm just not sure if I've done it right.

[A Former User]

@chris-osborne I did wonder about that. I dont think it increased that much though after 2021.

Thing is i may of figured out why in this case. This strategy uses 'traded rank' and i have tried using that on something else and it isnt working as expected. The other strategies using just 'traded rank' are returning no data at all for 2022 (apart from 18 days or so in April) so that might be a factor here too (i notice a tiny blip in the April values on the above chart so pretty sure its not a coincidence).