5 Comments
Aug 9, 2023Liked by BowTiedBettor

Awesome post!

I confess to never having thought deeply enough about the differences between outright winner and places but this spells them out nicely. Very interesting.

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Something I’m not able to grasp. How is an invented modell of 5 horses time performance extrapolated to reality and concrete races, where there can be much more horses, different race distances etc…

Thank you and best regards!

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author
Jul 10, 2023·edited Jul 10, 2023Author

Practical example starting at 22:30 in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOVrZrJ-wtc.

By training your models on previous data, you can come up with estimates for each horse's mean & variance, which, under the normal distribution assumption, fully defines the horse's performance distribution. Then simulate from these distributions ["run" 10 000 races] to come up with precise probabilities.

It's a very, very demanding project though.

What I've personally had more success with it is to analyze those invented, theoretical races *extensively* in order to understand the role means & variances play for different kinds of bets in a horse race. Makes you ask the crucial questions.

- Is the mean really that important?

- Can there be any dependence between the performance of two/more horses? What would that imply for the simulations mentioned above? What does it mean for exactas/trifectas etc.?

- Are the performance distributions of horses necessarily unimodal?

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Okey right. Would you be able to apply this reasoning in any horse race only with the data provided by the bookie? I mean, for instance with the last 4 races position each horse has occupied?

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author

No, absolutely not.

If you're taking the modelling route, need:

- Sufficient database.

- Model.

- Performance, can't take your model 2 hours to run.

Years to build out the infrastructure for such a project (at minimum).

If not, need:

- Domain knowledge.

- Some kind of mental model for how different features of a horse affect its performance distribution.

Wouldn't recommend the first route to anyone (if you're *the guy* won't listen to my recommendations anyway). The second one is doable but takes time.

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