A few years back the Daily Racing Form, with much fanfare, introduced the Andy Beyer’s Speed Ratings into its past performance charts. In the interim these ratings have grown quite popular, and have led your scribe to speculate as to their effectiveness. More importantly, however, we wondered what (if any) was their influence on the odds??? To what degree was the public’s betting action being tempered?

Our fault is that speculation such as this usually leads to action. In effect, we stop guessing. We do a bit of research and strive to replace question marks with positive answers. That process is what led to the following findings.

As an aside, and as an interesting observation, let’s first mention that long before the Form adopted the Beyer figures the only ones it published were its own much- maligned ratings which consisted of a speed figure combined with a "track variant." At that time we made a test. We combined the Form’s speed figure with its "track variant" and used the resulting highest number in each race to determine a selection. Example: Horse A had a speed figure of 88, and a track variant for that race of eleven. The final figure would therefore be "99." If no entry rated higher Horse A became the choice.

Our survey was confined to 6-furlong events. It encompassed three major circuits and a total of 504 consecutive sprint races. We confined our investigation to sprint races due to fact we were aware that overall the ratings were not productive, and we were attempting to see if they could be bettered. The only "rule" followed was that the top-rated horse must have raced within 14 calendar days. If it hadn’t, the race was passed. In case of a tie we skipped that race also.

Somewhat surprisingly this ultra-simplified approach produced an overall 12 % flat- bet win profit. The implication was that the underlying weakness lied with the longer races. Unfortunately we never verified this but it does conform to our impression that speed rating are best when related to sprints.

Now, back to the Beyer figures. Specifically we wished to see if those favorites, who were Andy Beyer’s top-rated horses, did better than the public’s favorites who were not tops in the Beyer ratings. Again we resorted to a simplified approach and made few distinctions. The top rated Beyer figure in EVERY race (except turf races) was the selection if it wound up as the post-time favorite. We then used these results to compare with the results of post-time favorites not pin-pointed via a Beyer top rating. The results follow:

Compared to favorites overall the Beyer favorites did very well with a 40% win average compared to about 33% for favorites per se. The loss of 13% was less than the approximate 16% loss that favorites show overall. The low average payoff reflects the public’s heavy betting on the Beyer choices. This disadvantage is offset by the high 40% win average.

NOTE: HANDICAPPING HINTS NO. 7 , due about June 15th, will compare the results achieved by the public’s choices that were NOT Beyer’s top rated selections with those that were top rated.

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