Mark Holder "stats a waste of time "

Not read it but don't have to in order to agree with him   

https://www.racingpost.com/news/opinion/comment/most-racing-statistics-are-a-total-waste-of-time-for-punters-take-it-from-someone-whos-made-their-living-out-of-the-game-ahYud5Y9YDVf/


Most racing statistics are a total waste of time for punters - take it from someone who's made their living out of the game

Of all the things I’m grateful for, the fact my parents brought me up to be respectful and polite is top of the list. Never would I have dreamed of calling their friends by their first name; they were either Mr and Mrs Hall or, if they were particularly close friends, Auntie Beryl and Uncle Tim. In fact, it wasn’t until I was closing in on my teens did I realise that neither Beryl nor Tim were related to me in any way. I found it all very confusing if I’m honest.

My courtesy has, hopefully, extended to people I disagree with when it comes to racing and betting. I would rather nod and say nothing than get into a full-scale debate of why I’m probably right.

However, there is one area where I do struggle to hold my tongue, and it’s when I must listen to anyone droning on, relentlessly, about irrelevant facts, systems and statistics. What I find staggering is that some people waste so much time working on them when they could be doing something more useful, like collecting deciduous leaves or spotting drain covers.

There’s just one very simple question we need to ask ourselves when considering the relevance of any fact or statistic: will it make the horse go faster? If the answer is yes, then it’s worth considering; if the answer is negative, then we should hastily move on.

I have made a living out of my betting for more than 30 years but I'd be significantly better off if I’d been given a pound for every time I heard a runner must have a great chance given that his jockey has “only gone there for one ride”. So what? The horse certainly doesn’t care; and are they saying that a professional rider would sooner stay at home, slumped on the sofa watching Escape To The Country, than do their job?

The same can be said about a trainer being present at the course where he has runners. I can say with a degree of certainty that the horse won’t be thinking, ‘The boss is here, I’d better try a bit harder’. It’s immaterial and nonsensical to believe it has any bearing on a horse’s performance.

Trainer stats at a particular course are usually irrelevant. While there are some courses where certain trainers will tend to introduce their better horses, these will normally be in maidens and novices, but why would we want to bet in races full of unknowns anyway? There are more than 13,000 races run in Britain and Ireland each year, so there is more than enough to concentrate on where the form of the participants is known and we may find an edge.

There are occasions when a trainer’s course record may be relevant if we can ascertain why they do well at a specific venue. Donald McCain, for example, has a great record on the hurdles track at Bangor. Is it because it’s local to him, or that he lays his horses out to run well there? No. It’s because he understands (or at least his jockeys do) that on a track where the horses are on the turn almost throughout, racing towards the inside rail is a huge advantage.

You will rarely see one of his runners more than one horse width from the inner. On the chase course, which is less tight, McCain doesn’t enjoy anywhere near the same success. (If you ever see a horse run well having travelled wide on the hurdles course at Bangor, they are almost certainly worth bearing in mind for the future.)

A jockey’s record at a particular track is something I would consider. A rider who understands the nuances of a course can make the horse run faster (or less slowly). Again, it helps to try to understand why a jockey does well. Is it because they conserve their mount’s energy at an important part of the race, or is it because they understand where the more favourable part of the track is? Figuring out why something works is often a way to finding subsequent edges where events have conspired against a particular horse, so better may be expected.

A trainer’s past history in a particular race is unimportant. Just because they have a decent record in a contest it won’t make their horse (unless it’s the same horse returning) run a stride quicker. Yet, once again, I’ve lost track of the times where a pundit has informed us that such and such “has a great record in this race”. So what? It cannot possibly have any bearing on how today’s runner performs.

When the big races come around there will always be an array of ‘experts’ who inform us today’s race has never been won by a horse carrying more than a certain weight, and that runners of a particular age have a better record. Well, that’s all very interesting to those who care, but punters who want to win should ignore it. These stats only work until they don’t.

Give me enough time and I will find a race in the calendar that has produced a vast level-stakes profit over the past 20 years had you bet every grey five-year-old gelding trained by a female who was once assistant to a Lambourn trainer who rode fewer than 100 winners over jumps and owns two Jack Russells. It’s not that difficult to find a system that worked well in the past; it’s just they don’t tend to work in the future.

In this space two months ago I wrote: “While I know what works for me, it doesn’t preclude other approaches from being more successful.” And I meant it. But any method that doesn’t work around sound data is doomed to fail. There is no prospect of continued betting success based on anything that doesn’t affect a horse’s performance.

So, when considering any stat, always remember to ask yourself: will it make the horse go faster?

Does Mark Holder still run a tipping Service , was a member twenty years ago and it was informative but hard get on at the prices .

Nick luck winding THE SHOE up about his stats last week
trainer in his best suit
trainer looking worried smoking a ciggie
trainer enjoying an ice cream
trainer pacing up and down looking nervous
etc etc
I suppose there as good as anyone elses stats

"There are lies, damn lies, statistics & then there is form!" From the Sayings of Dr Slicer, available at all not very good bookshops nowhere in the country.

remember when holder said that hcap marks are irrelevant in hcaps...comedy gold

I think he phrased it badly

#No1 STAT

Trainers are creatures of habit.

for me some stats are usefull some are not , i dont use em much  i try to  keep  it as simple as i can ,i dont read too much if anything in  form write ups  , i find they can put you off more bets than they put on ,how many times you been put off a horse in the past by a write up .........prob one for handicaps ,needs to find plenty ,stable jockey prefers the shorter priced stablemate etc. each to their  own  i dont use times or those stride patterns too confusing and jumble my  head ,no 2 races are the same,different pace  different tracks different going different positioning ,

If stats tell you that a horse drawn  16 in a 5f sprint at Chester wont win. You would do well to listen ( or withdraw the horse if you train it ) As they do.

trouble is with your 1st 2 examples everyone including the markets no that and act/lay accordingly, those looking for/creating systems are searching for ones few have heard of used and markets haven't adjusted for,99.9% of systems are out there dissected to the 9th degree .hence Blake,the captain etc obviously been reimbursed for throwing this stride length,turf trac,opta etc,etc down everyone's throat

Wondersobright is right when holder said that hcap marks are irrelevant in hcaps...comedy gold.
Hard to believe a professional punter would say that?

Maybe thats were John went wrong when e went training?One decent jump is not worth 7lb.

Some stats can be useful if used in conjunction with some other angle you have into a race. But, yeah I don't believe you should go overboard with them.

A lot of the example being used here are not stats. They're form characteristics for individual horses. The discussion on statistics is surely about profiling characteristics of different horses over a set of results.
Form has relevance, stats don't. That's the point.

The vast majority of punters and people on here do not understand how to interpret stats

The problem is that those 'stats' are lies.

How can we possibly know how many suicides are linked to problem gambling, let alone how many are solely caused by it? Gambling is only mentioned on one coroner’s report a year, on average, which is presumably an under-estimate. In the absence of better evidence, OHID’s predecessor Public Health England turned to a study from Sweden which looked at 2,099 hospital patients who were diagnosed with pathological gambling between 2005 and 2016. Sixty-seven of them died, including 21 who took their own life. The authors noted that the suicide rate among this cohort of pathological gamblers was fifteen times higher than the suicide rate of the general Swedish population.

Upon this sliver of evidence, everything else rested. In 2021, Public Health England simply estimated how many problem gamblers were in England and then multiplied the number of expected suicides by fifteen. This produced a figure of 409 suicides a year which anti-gambling activists then put on T-shirts.

...

You don’t need to be intimately acquainted with basic statistics to see the problem here. People who are being given medical or psychiatric treatment in hospitals are inherently different to people who are not. If you are admitted to hospital, there is already something wrong with you. If you are admitted to hospital and asked to take a survey to diagnose gambling disorder (or any other psychological problem) then you are very likely to be at the higher end of the risk spectrum.

Sure enough, there was a lot wrong with the 2,099 people in the Swedish study. Between 2005 and 2016, 65 per cent of them suffered from “injury, poisoning, and other consequences of external causes”. 60 per cent had an anxiety disorder. 51 per cent suffered from depression. 41 per cent had a substance-use disorder. 29 per cent had an alcohol-use disorder. 19 per cent had a personality disorder. 19 per cent intentionally self-harmed. 12 per cent were bipolar. 9 per cent had schizophrenia. In the context of all this human misery, a suicide rate of one per cent does not seem too surprising and it is absurd to assume that all the suicides were the result of problem gambling. For many of these unfortunate people, gambling may have been the least of their worries.

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-gambling-suicides-myth/

Yes Screaming. So, expect this Labour Government to follow South Korea's lead on this very shortly!

As for Swifty, it looks like he's swallowed everything the problem gamblers grifters are pushing. NOTHING is as black & white as what they push for their grift.

Apologies, Swifty. You're previously been on the side of Common sense so I was surprised by your post. I got the wrong end of the stick...something I do statistically very often  lol