Speed Ratings Laying System

Just over a week or so ago I came up with a simple idea that I thought would provide the basis of a profitable laying system using the Inform Racing speed ratings.

After a full 7 days trial,  a level stakes profit of 18.75 points and a 90% strike rate of success, I am keen to see if this idea will continue as well as it has started.

The System Requirements:

1. Simple to find the bets
2. Enough bets to keep me interested
3. A low enough minimum price to bet at so one loser doesn't wipe out all profits.
4. It must be profitable in the short term to suggest long term profits will be possible.

Using the Historical Meetings feature available to subscribers, which shows all past cards as they were when posted along with with the finishing position, SP and BSP, it is very easy to look over a week or two of results and quickly check out whether a system idea could be profitable or not.

My Initial Idea

We provide a number of different ratings on the race cards and one of these is the Avg rating. Quite simply it is the average rating of the last three ratings for each horse and gives an excellent idea of the recent speed ratings form of each runner.

We also provide a forecast price for all of the horses and it was a combination of these two factors that I used to get what I thought were good horses to lay at low ish prices.

I thought that any horse that was NOT one of the top 3 rated in the Avg column, that was also forecast at 4/1 or less would be good proposition for a lay bet. The ratings suggesting the recent speed ratings form was not that great, however the price it was forecast at was suggesting it did have a good chance.

Knowing the accuracy of the ratings, I would go by these over the forecast price anytime, so I went through a number of past races and saw lots of qualifiers that lost, (winning bets), although there were one or two winners, (losing bets), at rather big prices, so I quickly made a decision on what I would make my maximum price to lay a horse at.

Until I reviewed my full week of betting, I was looking at both flat and jump races, however when you see the results I had, you may decide to stick to just flat and all weather races, or play around with the rules a little when it comes to the maximum lay prices.

My Final Rules

1. A possible qualifier must NOT be one of the top three rated in the Avg column.
2. It doesn't matter how many previous runs the horse has had before as long as it has run at least once.
3. It must have a forecast price on our race card of 4/1 or less.
4. If there are two qualifiers in one race then ignore that race.
5. Bet to a maximum lay price of 7.8.

A Winning Example

Below you can see the results card for the 4.05 Doncaster last Saturday. I have sorted the card by the Avg rating column as I have been when looking for the bets each day, with the smallest rating at the top.

You can see that the actual top 3 rated for each column are highlighted in red so it is easy to find those that are not top 3 rated and scanning down the column you can see that only one horse, Turgenev is not in the top 3 of the Avg column and also has a forecast price of 7/2.

So as long as the BSP is 7.8 or less, this would be a qualifying lay bet.

(You can click the image to enlarge it).

As you can see, the horse went off as the 7/2 second favourite, with a BSP of 5.0 and came down the field, well beaten in 7th place, meaning it was a successful lay bet for this system idea.

It is worth noting that Turgenev's last three finishing positions were 211 which is probably why the horse went of second favourite. However the ratings show that these runs were nothing out of the ordinary, especially the two wins which only scored speed ratings of 74 and 76.

This is where the Inform Racing Speed Ratings provide you with far more information than the bare results may show and give you a winning edge that other punters just won't see.

​The Weeks Results: Monday 22nd to Sunday 28th

There are two sets of results below as I have separated the Flat and Jumps results where I was testing with simple £3 lay stakes, making £2.85 after commission on each winning bet.

As you will see, the flat racing did much better overall with an 18.75 points profit, while the Jump racing made an overall loss of 4.4 points.

I did note that if you changed the Jump racing max lay price to 5.0 or less, you would turn the 4.4 pt loss into a 6.5 pt profit, so this is something you may want to look at perhaps.

I was using the Betsender software and I have downloaded the weeks results into an excel sheet. I was placing the bets 20 seconds before the official off time and because of this, the odds I got and the actual BSP's may be a little different.​

Flat and All Weather results. (Click the image to enlarge it)
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