Newcomer angles in ProStats

Three ProStats filters focus on horses with little or no form: rank the newcomers in a race, filter by how many career runs a horse has, and by how experienced the rest of the field is.

Debutants and lightly-raced horses are the hardest to weigh up, and often the most mispriced. ProStats has three filters built exactly for studying them.

The three filters

• Newcomer RTR Rank, our rating of the newcomers in a race, ranked among themselves. Set it to 1 to 1 and you're looking only at the highest-rated newcomer in each race, ignoring the experienced runners. This answers "when our model likes a first-timer best of the newcomers, how does it do?"
• Career Runs, filter horses by how many runs they've had, from 0 (a genuine newcomer) up to 10+. Set 0 to 0 for debutants only, or say 1 to 3 for the lightly-raced.
• Max Runs in Field, filter on the most experienced horse in the race. A low value finds races where nobody has much form, all-newcomer or nearly so; a higher value finds a newcomer up against seasoned rivals.

Combine them and you can ask precise questions: "our top-rated newcomer (Newcomer RTR Rank 1 to 1), making its debut (Career Runs 0 to 0), in a race where the most experienced rival has had at most three runs (Max Runs in Field 0 to 3)."

Why career runs, not the official count

Career Runs counts the runs we have ratings for. A horse imported from abroad with races we don't hold will look like a newcomer here, which is worth remembering when you read the number: it reflects its form on RatingTheRaces, not necessarily its entire life history.

Building a system

Set the filters, run them across our full database and save the ones that hold up as a system, just like any other ProStats angle, see What is ProStats?. These filters, and everything else ProStats offers, are part of a Professional account.