Horse Profiling – Find The Preferred Race Conditions For Every Horse

It is very easy to see when a horse has a good overall strike rate or has won twice over a certain distance but this information is not nearly enough to make a decision on whether the horse will be competitive today.

Most horses have an absolute set of preferred race conditions and knowing what these are will almost give you an unfair advantage over other punters and help you win much more often.

Knowing Horse X has won on Good ground and Soft ground between 7 furlongs and 1 mile 1 furlong on two or three occasions is all very well but there can be so much more detailed information you need to know if you are going to drill down into the horses real favoured conditions - and then only back it when you know that all the planets are aligned.

For example;

What time of year does the horse run into its best form?
What field sizes does a horse prefer?
Does it like 7 furlongs in big fields when it is Soft or does it prefer 1 mile 1 furlong in small fields later in the season when the ground is better?
Can the horse perform well in top class races or will it only be competitive in lower grades?

You can look at a list of the form for any runner but all you will normally see is the date the course, distance and going and finishing position. If a horse has run 30 or 40 times, you will be there forever trying to find out what combined conditions are best for this runner or another.

Using the Inform Racing system builder for horse profiling.

The Inform Racing system builder will not only allow you to test your own system ides however simple or complex and then find any system runners for you running today, all in a matter of seconds.

It can also be used to profile any number of horses that you are interested in. Very quickly and very easily indeed.

Below is an example of just how potent and fast the Inform Racing system builder can be in finding a horses preferred conditions.

We took a horse with an already decent 35% strike rate and then found the exact racing conditions where it has won 7 times out of 8, giving an incredible 87% strike rate!

The steps below will take just a few minutes and give you the real possibility of building up your own list of profiled runners to back, just when things are right.

Step 1

Login to Inform Racing and click the Daily Stats Table link on the Meetings page. This brings up a page of statistics as below showing the win and place strike rates for a number of form criteria, all helping to highlight horses with a chance today and a great place to start when horse profiling.

(All images can be clicked to enlarge them if need be).

(Incidentally, if you click the race time for any runner on the Daily Stats Table it will open up that race card for you in a new window so you can take a look at the overall profile of the runners, form and speed ratings).

For the profiling, I find it is best to look for horses that have run in at least 20 races so there is a decent amount of form to go on and I personally like to use the win percentage from the Code Wins column, which means you are looking at how a horse has performed in the specific race types which are Chase races, Hurdles, Flat Turf and Flat All Weather races.

You can see that the horse I have highlighted in yellow is Judicial and this horse has an excellent strike rate already of 35% from 31 previous starts. If you take this win percentage blindly you may think that the horse already has a good chance, but let us see.

Step 2

Open the Inform Racing system builder and run the full date range back to 2011, (just to ensure that you will see all of a horses past runs). Add the horse name and the race type (FLT) and by clicking the 'Apply Rules' button you will see the same 35% strike rate.

Step 3

Below the Results and Summary on the system builder you will see a breakdown of results for a number of form categories - currently there are 22 breakdown categories - and now you can look for the most positive ones to help to filter in the better form.

Looking at the form breakdowns for Judicial I decided on;

Class 2 or less races
A distance of 5f
Good to Firm or Good ground
Then for this one I also added that the horse must be top 3 rated by Lto1, Master and M+A speed rating columns, as when it wasn't the horse didn't win very often.

You can stick to just racing form, speed ratings form or a combination of both for your horse profiling.

Step 4

Now add your new filters to the system builder as shown below, hit 'Apply Rules' again and see the form results for this horse now that you have filtered out the form and conditions that don't suit.

As you can now see, when running in class 2 or lower, over 5 furlongs on Good to Firm or Good ground, when top 3 rated in the speed rating columns Lto1, M+A and Master, Judicial has an 87.5% strike rate winning 7 times out of 8 races!

The race that Judicial was running in the day I looked at the form, was a Class 1 race and the horse wasn't top 3 rated in the Master column. There was also an issue with the number of days the horse had been off the track, something else I noticed using the form breakdowns.

Knowing what we now know about the favoured conditions for Judicial, you would have known it would not be a going day and as it turned out the horse eventually finished 8th of 9 runners at 9/1.

However many would have looked at the overall 35% win rate, its 38% win over the distance and the fact the horse was forecast as 3rd favourite at 6/1 and chanced their arm on a horse that was very unlikely to win.

Conclusion.

Horse profiling using the Inform Racing system builder is almost like having a 'cheat card' for each horse.

You spot a horse with a good strike rate, take out the 'cheat card' by looking at the form breakdowns and then decide whether the conditions are right today or not.

Can you imagine how many bets you will save by holding back when a horse looks for all the world to have a chance but you know that 6 furlongs in a class 2 race, after a 90 day lay off on Good ground for example, is just not what the horse is looking for.

The horse runs poorly of course but it is brought out again two weeks later, running over 6 furlongs again but in a class 3 race on Soft ground and you pounce!

When you find a horse you want to keep an eye on, just save the system builder file under the horses name in a folder on your PC for 'Profiled Horses' and when it runs again, open the system rules and take a look to see whether the conditions today are right or not.

Over a season you should be able to collect together a good number of horses for your profiling 'stable' and then you will be armed with a very potent betting weapon for the years ahead.