Saturday, March 15, 2014

Horse Racing: Introductory Analysis

I want to start getting my head around the basic information that could influence outcomes.

I have these race-level fields sloppily copy-pasted from the R terminal. I've bolded the fields that scream to me as being relevant.
"Track"           "Date"            "Race Number"     "Race Type"     
 [5] "HorseType"       "ClaimPriceHigh"  "ClaimPriceLow"   "Race Length"   
 [9] "Record Time"     "Record Date"     "Purse"           "Plus"          
[13] "Available Money" "Valueist"        "Value2nd"        "Value3rd"      
[17] "Weather"         "Track"           "Time"            "Start"         
[21] "2FTime1"         "2FTime2"         "3FTime1"         "3FTime2"       
[25] "3FTime3"         "4FTime1"         "4FTime2"         "4FTime3"       
[29] "4FTime4"         "t_Final"         "2SplT1"          "2SplT2"        
[33] "3SplT1"          "3SplT2"          "3SplT3"          "4SplT1"        
[37] "4SplT2"          "4SplT3"          "4SplT4"          "Run-up"        
[41] "WPS_Pool"        "ID"


Horse Type:

Of the 41 unique strings with horse type information, here's those that occur more than 10x.
Most horses are three or more years old. Most are fillies. This information might need to be coerced into similar groups to be useful but until I know what all of this means, I don't want to lose information.

 I've only seen fillies run since I've been out so I'm assuming this is the norm. The highest frequency entry at the top is vague about whether they are male/female so I'm going to assume female unless otherwise specified.

                                    For Thoroughbred Three Year Old and Upward
                                                                    59
          For Thoroughbred Three Year Old and Upward Fillies and Mares
                                                                    27
                               For Thoroughbred Three Year Old Fillies
                                                                    23
                             For Thoroughbred Four Year Old and Upward
                                                                    23
                                         For Thoroughbred Two Year Old
                                                                    21
                                       For Thoroughbred Three Year Old
                                                                    20
                                 For Thoroughbred Two Year Old Fillies
                                                                    16
                    For Thoroughbred Three Year Old and Upward (NW2 L)
                                                                    15
  For Thoroughbred Three Year Old and Upward Fillies and Mares (NW2 L)
                                                                    14
For Thoroughbred Three Year Old and Upward Fillies and Mares (NW2 L X)
                                                                    12
           For Thoroughbred Four Year Old and Upward Fillies and Mares
                                                                    11


For Claim Price:

As an incentive against running superior horses, horses can be bought at the "claim price" after each race (at least, that's my understanding). This keeps a competitive~ish market. I'm not sure if this name is a relic of days past or not and it warrants further investigation. Most of the races are under 10k with a decent showing from 35-40k.



Race Length:

 For conversion purposes, one mile is eight furlongs. Most races are significantly shorter than a mile. I'd guess that the shorter races have more variable outcomes as it's easy to see that the odds out horses lose their pace in the longer races but compete well in the shorter runs.

                                                        Six Furlongs On The All Weather Track
                                                                                                 111
                                                                   One Mile On The All Weather Track
                                                                                                  71
                                                 Five And One Half Furlongs On The All Weather Track
                                                                                                  68
                                                                                One Mile On The Turf
                                                                                                  47
                                                             One And One Sixteenth Miles On The Turf
                                                                                                  30
                                                One And One Sixteenth Miles On The All Weather Track
                                                                                                  17
                                                              Five Furlongs On The All Weather Track
                                                                                                  12
 
Win, Place, Show Values:

 
  
A more relevant range of interest occurs from 20k down (as the majority of races win values lie in that range). For this price range, win amounts look linear with a favorable slope for 3rd. As the price range goes up, the results skew nonlinear with 3rd offering less % value. Incentive for a conservative strategy, maybe? Worth noting even if I don't have the racing strategies down yet.



Start:

90% of races are flagged as having "a good start for all". The horse in PP1 starts worst most frequently at 2% but this isn't really fair given that the outside PP changes so I would have to compare race group by race group and I don't want to do that right now.



So that's a start. More to come.

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