Calculate fabric prices

Before moving on to the main part of the discussion on how to calculate scarf prices, I would like to discuss betting forecasts. I have received several emails asking how to make tissue prices and betting forecasts. Now I am sure that everyone is asking how to price fabrics and not bet forecasts. There is a difference, but not many people know about it, so I thought it was important to start by explaining the difference. A tissue price is a price or probability that you have given the horse based on his handicap (either manual or computerized) that you believe represents the horse’s chance of winning the race. If you can get equal or higher odds, this would represent a value for your bet. Some manual handicappers create their knitting price for a horse that already incorporates a minimum required edge, so the knitting is the minimum probability that it would accept and already has some built-in edge. When you talk about creating a fabric for a race, you mean you want to put a price on each horse in the race and this would generally mean having a 100% book unless you specifically decided to give it a spin. . On the other hand, a betting forecast is what you will get from Racing Post, Sporting Life, or most other sites that offer information on horse racing. This is a forecast of what they expect the starting price for the horse to be. In other words, it is a forecast of how the general public will bet. As I hope you can see, there is a huge difference between the two.

How do we create prices for fabrics for our horses? There are actually only two ways to do this and the first is very simple to explain. Use your knowledge and skill. SIP that’s it. This is mostly used by people doing handicap races by hand or at least making the final decision based on their own analysis. The best way to start is by reviewing your records (or you can start now if you wish) and start giving all of your contenders a percentage chance of winning the race. You will then need to convert this into odds and when you have made enough horses you will start to see if you are correct by looking back at all the horses you gave, say 20-25% and seeing how often you actually won. If you really won 10% of the time then you need to go back and re-evaluate how you are giving them your percentage as it is way off. If you get the actual winners between 20% and 25% then it is good to evaluate the winning chances of the horses and now you can start using your bandanas to find overlaps and increase the value of your bets.

The group of people who will use this first method is likely to be much smaller than the group who will use the second. This is because the first method takes a lot of practice until you are good at assessing the horses’ luck of winning accurately and even then you are probably in a specialized type of race. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the second method is going to be less time consuming, as it won’t. But with spreadsheets like Excel that perform a number of database tasks these days, it will be much easier to analyze the information than it would be otherwise. The process of creating a fabric consists of calculating a power rating for each horse. It is important to note that different types of breeds will likely require different information in the power rating to create an accurate fabric price. Power ratings and ratings calculation is for another article. I will assume that you have a final grade for each horse, regardless of how you did it. All calculations will also assume that the higher a horse’s grade, the more likely it is to win the race, as this is the most common way to compile a final grade for a horse. Creating your scarf price is pretty simple. I will give our horse a rating of one to four as follows:

Horse 1-80

Horse 2-65

Horse 3-30

Horse 4-5

We want to convert these grades into the horse’s chances of winning the race. The first step is to add the qualification of each horse, which gives us:

80 + 65 + 30 + 5 = 180

To get the probability that the horses will win the race, we simply divide their rating by this figure. This would give us:

Horse 1 – 0.44

Horse 2 – 0.36

Horse 3 – 0.17

Horse 4 – 0.03

If you add up all these probabilities, then they will come to 1. It is possible that they will sometimes go more or less than 1 and this, if it is a small amount, is usually due to rounding the figures up or down. We then convert these probabilities into probabilities by dividing 1 by the probability of the horse in question. If you want to read about how to convert probabilities to probabilities, see the article ‘Converting probabilities to probabilities’. We now have a fabric price for the horses in this race of:

Horse 1 – 2.27

Horse 2 – 2.78

Horse 3 – 5.88

Horse 4 – 33.33

If you were looking for value, then these are the minimum odds you would accept. Always remember that if you place your bets with Betfair, a commission of 5% will be charged, so the odds shown are not what you will receive after your commission. That’s it, it really is that simple to calculate the price of a tissue. Getting accurate power ratings is the hardest part. There are also many more complex shapes that can be used to make them more precise. An example of one would be to use a Monte Carlo simulation with the probability distribution for each horse so that horses with a greater variation in performance have lower probabilities. However, an accurate price for the fabric can be obtained by having a good potency rating and using the method described here, and this must be achieved before attempting to refine it.