As a bettor you do not care a lot about the ability of jockey.
If your interest in horse racing is limited to its gambling alone,
the skill of the jockey must be completely transparent to your approach and at no point it should become a central topic in your research and handicapping.
When it comes to jockeys (as in any other handicapping factor) what really matters is not their absolute skill or their classification as better and worse but how these are perceived by the betting public and how this perception is reflected in the betting pools.
Take as an example the following data set which comprises of all the jockeys who have more than 100 starters at more than 8- 1 since 2017 in 'AQU', 'BEL', 'SAR', 'GP', 'SA', 'DMR', 'LRC':
https://gist.github.com/deltalover/4...ee96ed8c6f71b6
Using this table it becomes obvious that Irad Ortiz (ROI 0.79) is certainly inferion to let’s say Aby Medina (ROI 1.08) for betting purposes. My objective as a bettor is not to decide which of the two might be more talented, smart or fit; it is enough to know that the betting crowd is commiting a huge error when estimating the chances of this two, meaning that it is overestimating the ability of Ortiz while simultaneously is underestimating Medina's.
