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Originally Posted by raybo
I have not read Fiero's book, but I've heard that one should only consider "actual" win contenders. While that's probably true, it doesn't address my problem, that being assigning win probabilities and their associated decimal odds to all horses in the race. There must be a way to scale the ratings in order to obtain more realistic probabilities and odds.
Sure, it would be easy to consider only those horses with at least a 10% probability, regarding assigning odds, however, there can be horses below that 10% that are decent bets, especially when you consider the price you're likely to get. Lots of people have automated methods of assigning realistic odds to every horse in a race. I guess that is my real question, how do they do it, without ending up with something unrealistic like this example?
I mean, really, in my example, there is a horse with a 105 rating, another with a 104, and another with a 101, with the next one way down at 89. And yet, all 4 of those top horses are only a couple of percentage points apart. The spread should be larger than that, IMO.
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As a proponent of Fierro's book, I must admit that your dilemma is a common one for me. About 90 percent of the time I am able to get a field down to 4 or 5 contenders. That other 10 percent is as difficult as peeling an onion to find the differences. The onion gets sliced super thin and is almost transparent. This is something that you already know. There is value in the 6th and 7th contender sometimes. Hard to prove, but I know it is there.
Reality is the only thing that matters. Let your records show you how to manipulate and assign odds. This is complicated by the different distances/categories. At some distances/ tracks my line is a wreck and recognizing this is a way to make money at this game.
