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Old 01-08-2018, 03:13 PM   #1
SG4
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Does this type of stat exist?

I was wondering if any kind of stat or program exists to give jockeys something of a performance expectation rating. What I mean by this is say a jockey is on the 4th betting choice in a race & they finish 2nd, I'd give them a +2 score that race, or if you're on a favorite and finish 5th they'd get a -4 for that race. Wonder if an average score would help identify riders who may be over/underestimated by the betting public, or could possibly help identify upcoming apprentice jockeys as ones to watch.
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Old 01-08-2018, 04:09 PM   #2
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Originally Posted by SG4 View Post
I was wondering if any kind of stat or program exists to give jockeys something of a performance expectation rating. What I mean by this is say a jockey is on the 4th betting choice in a race & they finish 2nd, I'd give them a +2 score that race, or if you're on a favorite and finish 5th they'd get a -4 for that race. Wonder if an average score would help identify riders who may be over/underestimated by the betting public, or could possibly help identify upcoming apprentice jockeys as ones to watch.
I love doing this kind of stuff. You need a database to do it, but once you have that it isn't too tough. I've never seen this one publicly but I've done similar myself. It is well worth the time and effort.
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Old 01-08-2018, 04:16 PM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SG4 View Post
I was wondering if any kind of stat or program exists to give jockeys something of a performance expectation rating. What I mean by this is say a jockey is on the 4th betting choice in a race & they finish 2nd, I'd give them a +2 score that race, or if you're on a favorite and finish 5th they'd get a -4 for that race. Wonder if an average score would help identify riders who may be over/underestimated by the betting public, or could possibly help identify upcoming apprentice jockeys as ones to watch.
I think equibase list an average odds per winner in their jockey stats. I think average odds per mount would be a better indicator. At all tracks there a the top few jockeys that are usually on the favorites. Of course they have the highest win percentages. The top jock at a track with an 18% win percentage is not near as impressive as some bug boy riding all 30/1 shots with a 10% win percentage. The stats don't tell all, its what kind of horses the jockey gets to ride.
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Old 01-08-2018, 04:27 PM   #4
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I like this idea a lot.

If I have some extra time, I'll write the query and do the calculations for NYRA for 2017 and post the results later in the week.
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Old 01-08-2018, 04:41 PM   #5
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I like this idea a lot.

If I have some extra time, I'll write the query and do the calculations for NYRA for 2017 and post the results later in the week.
Recommend anything over 5 counts as 5, odds rank and finish...gets rid of a lot of the noise.
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Old 01-08-2018, 05:03 PM   #6
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And this stat could also be created for the TRAINER....or the jockey/trainer combination.
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Old 01-08-2018, 05:59 PM   #7
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Recommend anything over 5 counts as 5, odds rank and finish...gets rid of a lot of the noise.
I just ran this on my DB using the above and limiting to jockeys with at least 50 starts(should probably be 100). Not ready to share as the totals seem out of line so there might be a small issue but it really highlights the overbet and underbet jockeys. I'm sure it would do the same with trainers or any other connections.
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Old 01-08-2018, 09:02 PM   #8
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It sounds great......then along comes Kent Desormeux
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Old 01-08-2018, 10:36 PM   #9
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I have to think back to how I programmed this. Riders that are almost always favored or second choice are going to have a lower rating most of the time...they have nowhere to go but down.
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Old 01-08-2018, 11:38 PM   #10
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Originally Posted by SG4 View Post
I was wondering if any kind of stat or program exists to give jockeys something of a performance expectation rating. What I mean by this is say a jockey is on the 4th betting choice in a race & they finish 2nd, I'd give them a +2 score that race, or if you're on a favorite and finish 5th they'd get a -4 for that race. Wonder if an average score would help identify riders who may be over/underestimated by the betting public, or could possibly help identify upcoming apprentice jockeys as ones to watch.
Hey SG4

This sounds like a good idea public 4th finishes 2nd is a +2 but a public 1st choice finishing 5th is a -4.

My Jockey data isn’t where it needs to be but I can do this for Trainers at NYRA but I would use the Morning Lines since the odds are subject to change while the race is actually running as we’ve all seen

http://www.paceadvantage.com/forum/s...d.php?t=142423

Also, I would imagine a public 1st choice finishing 1st = 0 which would indicate that the outcome was expected so they wouldn’t earn a score for that situation

They would only earn a positive score if they finished better than what was expected and I guess you can add up the scores to see if they are performing above or below expectations

I will look into that I’m all for anything that goes away from using earnings as a criteria to rate Trainers

Last edited by TheOracle; 01-08-2018 at 11:41 PM.
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Old 01-09-2018, 01:10 AM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SG4 View Post
I was wondering if any kind of stat or program exists to give jockeys something of a performance expectation rating. What I mean by this is say a jockey is on the 4th betting choice in a race & they finish 2nd, I'd give them a +2 score that race, or if you're on a favorite and finish 5th they'd get a -4 for that race. Wonder if an average score would help identify riders who may be over/underestimated by the betting public, or could possibly help identify upcoming apprentice jockeys as ones to watch.
Sounds much like the Wong Index. Named after jockey Tommy Wong. Fonner published them at the end of the 2017 meet.

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Old 01-09-2018, 09:28 AM   #12
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I have to think back to how I programmed this. Riders that are almost always favored or second choice are going to have a lower rating most of the time...they have nowhere to go but down.
It should be possible to tweak the model a little to correct for that.

I'm not saying this is the solution, but if you look at all favorites and determined average finish, then any finish above that would be a positive and any finish below that would be a negative.

You could do the same for 2nd choices, 3rd choices etc..

That way, even if every horse you rode was the favorite, you wouldn't have to win to avoid a negative rating. You'd just have to do average. And you could still get a positive rating if you won more than your fair share.

It you wanted to get crazier you could make adjustments for field size and actual odds.

If you are riding a 2/5 favorite in a 4 horse field that's different from riding a 3-1 favorite in a 12 horse field.

The one things I recall about this kind of thing is that it gets a little tricky to do ranking in Access, which is where I do most of my work. I might have to export to Excel. I think it's a little easier in Excel.
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Old 01-09-2018, 10:40 AM   #13
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Originally Posted by classhandicapper View Post
It should be possible to tweak the model a little to correct for that.

I'm not saying this is the solution, but if you look at all favorites and determined average finish, then any finish above that would be a positive and any finish below that would be a negative.

You could do the same for 2nd choices, 3rd choices etc..

That way, even if every horse you rode was the favorite, you wouldn't have to win to avoid a negative rating. You'd just have to do average. And you could still get a positive rating if you won more than your fair share.

It you wanted to get crazier you could make adjustments for field size and actual odds.

If you are riding a 2/5 favorite in a 4 horse field that's different from riding a 3-1 favorite in a 12 horse field.

The one things I recall about this kind of thing is that it gets a little tricky to do ranking in Access, which is where I do most of my work. I might have to export to Excel. I think it's a little easier in Excel.
Yeah, there are a lot of tweaks you can do. For simplicity, I did something like this.

=MIN(OddsRank+1,5)-MIN(FinishPosition,5)

That makes it so you get a positive for a win.
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Old 01-09-2018, 12:25 PM   #14
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You can tweak something like this a lot of different ways.

In the end, no matter what tweaks are made -- hopefully, what you end up with is a number that measures performance vs. expected performance.

In his book Precision, on page 80, CX Wong wrote about a stat called Cumulative Probability or F(x) and presented a formula for calculating it.

It takes a little programming to calculate it, but I've found that Cumulative Probability or F(x) does a decent job of measuring performance vs. expected performance in a statistically valid way. (All of the values generated end up being between 0 and 1 and any value >= 0.50 suggests the rider, trainer, sire, what have you, etc. outperformed expectations.)

Imo, the way to get bang for your buck or separation between yourself and the other players who you are competing against in the pools with a stat like this doesn't necessarily come from the tweaks, although doing that can provide a degree of separation -- but rather from applying a stat like this in a conceptually unique way vs. the way the other players you are competing against in the pools are applying it.

For example, in the DRF podcast for his new book Betting with an Edge, Mike Maloney talked about the value of knowing whether or not a rider likes to be inside or outside.

I'm not saying that knowing an inside rider from an outside rider is the be all end all of things (it's not.) But the database testing I've done suggests that knowing that and measuring performance produces better results than ignoring that and measuring performance for rider alone.

Imo, if you can give a stat like this some thought, and get creative about what is or isn't reflected in the odds:

And from there measure performance for rider, trainer, sire, what have you, etc, vs. expected performance given the situation...

I've found at that point you are more likely to actually HAVE something.

I hope I managed to type most of that out in a way that makes sense.


-jp

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Old 01-09-2018, 12:32 PM   #15
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Here's a quick sample of the kind of thing you can do in 5 minutes.

This is Jockey performance for riders that had a minimum of 25 mounts on favorites at AQU, BEL and SAR. This covers about 2 1/2 years. Doing it by rank will take a little longer. Something like this could also obviously be broken up by track, distance, surface, running style etc...

The average for all NYRA jockeys was 2.83.

So anything lower than 2.83 would be positive and anything higher would be negative. You can also see the average odds of the favorites the jockey ride to make an adjustment there.
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