The Going Really Gets Me Going!
(But is that about to change?)
One of my biggest bugbears in racing is the reporting of the ground by the courses.
It must drive all punters nuts right? In this day and age, it cannot be difficult to measure what the going is and to report it accurately and in a timely manner, so that all of us betting people know what to expect and to make our decisions based on decent information.
It seems though, that the most important thing for a lot of the courses is to ensure the field sizes are large enough and they are therefore prepared to give incorrect going descriptions (to avoid non runners due to not ideal conditions), which can only have a detrimental effect on the bets placed by people like ourselves who focus on the Firm to Heavy posted by the Racing Media, as provided by the individual clerks at each track.
Very often, the times taken to run the races bear no resemblance to the reported going prerace and even the going posted with the race results.
The evidence for that is abundantly clear when using a software tool such as Proform.
In my book, Proform is an outstanding product, that I personally could not do without when making my decisions on my selections, either manually or via my many systems created using the Proform database and System Builder and my own bespoke software.
Proform records the Officially stated race going for every race at every meeting and calculates the Actual going based on standard race times for each course and distance.
The percentage of races where they differ is significant and very disappointing. In fact, in my opinion, it is totally shocking.
In addition to the commonly used going descriptions (Firm, Good To Firm, Good, Good To Soft, Soft, Heavy and Standard, Fast, Slow for the All Weather), Proform has allocated a numeric Going Value (referred to as Going Adjustment (GA)) for each race and has recently made that calculated value available to all Platinum members, to be used throughout the software and to be exported to a .csv along with the rest of the Proform database fields.
The bands for these numeric values is relatively small, so for example, from Good to Good to Firm we are only talking about a difference of 4 points. However, where this data will be invaluable will be at the other end of the scale. From Soft to Heavy can be 12 or more points difference and therefore enables us to identify those horses that act on extremely heavy to even bottomless ground, which in my book is a huge advantage when we know we are talking extremes.
It has been possible for me to now export the GA for every horse in every race and to add it to my database (in my case, I go back 2 years) and so now I can narrow the going to a smaller band.
If the going is Good/Good to Soft in places, perhaps using a range of numbers from the Middle of the Good band to the Top of the Good To Soft band will be better than just selecting those past races with the regular values when I am checking previous form.
Even better still though, by using the times of the first race at a particular meeting (either by timing ourselves or using those published online shortly after the race finishes), we can use a Proform tool to calculate the actual Going Adjustment for the rest of the races that day (assuming we do not have adverse weather conditions to change things) and then we can use the software to find horses that have performed well within a range of that GA for the upcoming races.
How good is that!?
Several of the Proform members published some of these stats during Cheltenham (there is a very helpful and friendly Telegram community for members) and they highlighted a good few winners and would have helped with several forecasts and tricasts too!
Having seen the power of this new metric, I am going to work out how I can incorporate it into my software and see can it improve the selection process for Winning Systems members.
It seems like forever now that the weather has been awful and therefore the racing ground has been Soft or Heavy for months on end and despite the fact that is has been depressingly wet since the middle of last year and that spring has not yet sprung in 2024, I am secretly hoping that the ground remains on the poor side, so that I can get used to my new weapon and will be ready to use it in anger whenever my new systems are ready.
In the meantime, I have written some quick queries that I may use to post and highlight certain findings and possible selections on my blog.
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Kieran O’Hagan
