One of the factors available to BetMix users is Avg. Best 2 of last 3 speed. This factor looks at the last 3 speed figures earned by the horse, tosses out the worst number, and averages the other 2. If a horse earned speed figures of 72, 68, 73 in his last three starts his Avg. best 2 of last 3 would be (72+73)/2=72.5. Why do you toss one? Because it gives the horse the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he had trouble in one race or was experimenting with a new distance or surface and that low number might not be representative of his true ability.
It goes without saying that fast horses win races. This factor should be used heavily in your mixes. Let's take a look at the first 7 days of the current Gulfstream meet to see how important the Avg. Best 2 of last 3 speed factor is.
We are not going to use Maiden Races in our stats, simply because some of those horses haven't started yet, or if they have they might not have run 3 races. This factor is more predictive when looking at horses who have a few races under their belts.
If you look at non-maiden races at Gulfstream to date, and only turned on the Avg. Best 2 of last 3 factor, how accurate would that factor be at predicting the winner?
We took the top two ranked horses from each race to see how well we would have done betting horses with the best speed. We bet a fictional $2 win on the two fastest horses in each race, so we are betting $4 per race.
Dirt Sprints: 18 races 11 winners (61%) bet $72.00 won $70.00
Dirt Routes: 8 races 4 winners (50%) bet $32.00 won $31.60
Turf Sprints: 4 races 3 winners (75%) bet $16 won $26.20
Turf Routes: 13 races 6 winners (46%) bet $52 won $42.40
Overall: 43 races 24 winners (55%) bet $172 won $170.20
We can see that 55% of the winners at Gulfstream in non-maiden races came from the top 2 best speed horses in the race. Betting on each of them would have resulted in a loss of $1.80. From this limited sample we can also see that speed is more important in sprints than routes and betting the fastest horses in just the sprint races would have resulted in a profit of $6.20.
If you use best speed as the foundation of your mix and start adding in other handicapping factors available in Betmix, then you can start creating very profitable handicapping angles that will result in higher win % and profits.
Best of luck at the windows!
