It's been a year since m,y last post on Monte Carlo modelling of horse races. The reason for the gap is that I realised, through quite a bit of experimentation, that my methods for predicting the "true odds" of a horse race really weren't fit for purpose. A lot of the time, my odds predictions were quite similar to those from the bookies. But the cases where I predicted a horse should have much shorter odds (i.e. the "value bets" did not win as often as I expected. Essentially there was very little profit to be had. None, in fact, beyond random outbreaks of good luck.
I concluded that, for horse racing, there was a lot of information out there that helps understand how well a horse is likely to perform. Maybe a lot of it is on "back channels" known only to the inner racing community. But, I concluded, at a minimum, you really needed to look back at a horse's history and see how it fared against each horse it raced, and to know how good each of these other horses were. That, I concluded, was too much like hard work (at least for now). Too much bespoke web scraping to be written for one thing, and life is too short. What I did do, is dream up an analysis method that could genuinely work. Its based on established methods, although it has elements that I don't believe have been tried before. But I decided it would be much easier to operate this on a more restricted field of runners. Like a football league, where a small set of clubs face each other in a very well defined, exhaustive set of fixtures. The Premier League, will be my case study!
The good news is, having tried this, I KNOW I have a method that is at least pretty cool. As I planned to do with the horse racing, I will provide more details about the method, and some of my odds predictions for upcoming games. More posts to follow!
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