By Garry Robinson

A couple of months ago, Tabcorp came to an arrangement with Techform to provide ratings for all gallops meetings on Austext. Now Austext is available almost Australia wide, and by tuning into pages 560 and up you can now get a rating for just about every runner in Australian galops meetings.

There are exceptions, of course, and these include races where there is little revealed form, hurdle and steeple races and ratings are not available generally for horses with overseas form, although I note that the Melbourne Cup was an exception.

I took the liberty of carefully researching Techform ratings, which until then were only available for private subscription. I spoke to George Kenway who is one of the originators of the method and got a rundown on how the ratings are assessed.

The method uses sound logic. For example, there are bonuses for track and distance winners. There are bonuses for horses carrying weight within their right range and other bonuses for strike rates and prizemoney earned. The strength of the system is its objectivity. It sticks to the facts and is not swayed by such things as favourite trainers or jockeys and so on.

George suggests that users fine tune the ratings for themselves. The method takes no account of Jockeys, track conditions or barriers. These things aren’t known when the ratings are generated two days before the race meeting. As a matter of interest, the rating is generated when the horse’s run is first logged into the RSB’s computer system. (The RSB keeps a record of all runs in all races in Australia)

In the case of jockeys, we would know that if today the connections have put up a senior jockey, the horse may be expected to improve. We can also look at the horse’s barrier. If it has drawn wide and the next rated horse has drawn well, perhaps that is the horse we should be looking at.

George’s advice is this. Try not to be too clever, simply watch the odds.

We were able to obtain a record of last year’s Techform performance, and that is tabled below.

A major review of the National Ratings database has recently been completed. The review was necessitated due to changes in race venue, strengths and quality of field during the past five years and to incorporate the introduction of Sunday racing. This review is anticipated to result in further improvement to the TECHFORM strike rates.
 

Further information may be obtained by contacting:

Eric Jamieson
Racing Services Bureau
Phone: 03 9258 4700
Fax: 03 9258 4715

On face value, the results, which are for every top rated horse, look very good. George Kenway felt that the results for country and provincial venues could be even better. When you note that there were 3563 top rated horses from a variety of venues you would expect that the figures would hold up even though the strike rate for Melbourne metropolitan races could be as low as 13 or 14% and as high as 31% in some months.

Our survey was for all race venues and over a period of one month in which there were four hundred and forty races assessed. We were disappointed in our results as we recorded only 101 winners for a strike rate of 22.9%. More disappointing was the loss on turnover of 19.6% at TAB odds indicating an average dividend of $3.50. Remember though, that we are looking at all races.

A better result was obtained when the top rated horse had a rating of 3 or less on our scale.

The strike rate was a more impressive 33.6%, although the odds were less. To arrive at this figure we simply added up every horse’s ratings above 90 and divided into 10. For example

Horse A rated 100

Horse B rated 96

Horse C rated 92

Add up the three figures above 90 i.e. 10 + 6 +2 =18 10/ 18 = 1.8 so this horse is a 3 or less.

Be aware of races in which there is a top rated horse scratched. In this case, if the highest horses has say 95, then make him the 100 horse and add 5 to each other rating and then work out as above.

Remember, our survey was for only one month and by careful screening of the selections for value you may find Techform Ratings profitable, which isn't bad for a free service.