Jockeys and ROI

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*The Going in Circles Digest is pleased to share the work of excellent writers who provide educational, informative and passionate prose about a wide variety of horseracing topics. Today’s guest writer is Julian Brown who has written about handicapping for American Turf Magazine among others. Julian has owned horses under the name of Black & Tan Stable that raced in the mid-Atlantic region and also moderates The Handicappers Insight a private Facebook group for serious handicappers.

Jockeys and ROI

By Julian Brown

Horseplayers look for handicapping factors that show consistent profitability, but very few jockeys have positive ROI’s over any meaningful period of time. And general bets like “leading rider” never show a profit no matter how you frame the research. So a focus on who's riding who can be distracting to effective handicapping without the proper tools to rate jockeys. Most punters reluctantly accept whoever is riding a pick and accept the ride and results that ensue.

Aspects in the calculation of ROI make it particularly useless in regard to jockeys. To illustrate, let’s say a bug rider wins 10 races out of 100 and a bet on each mount loses 20 cents on the dollar. The problem with ROI is that 90 of those races don’t contribute to the ROI figure other than not counting as a win. Seems like a waste of good data. So if our bug rider has ten second place finishes on 15/1’s out of those 100 races, the fact that s/he’s very effective and/or severely underrated by the bettors is not reflected in ROI. As Barry Meadow noted in “The Skeptical Handicapper,” after many hundreds or even thousands of races, "luck" evens out and ROI becomes reliable but, at that point, what is it measuring? A jockey’s effectiveness can change over thousands of races, but most importantly, the public’s perception adjusts to the rider’s success or lack thereof.

About 10 years ago or so Turfday.com went out of business after many years of providing helpful jockey ratings in addition to great data on all aspects of racing. Turfday rated all relevant handicapping factors from “A” to “F” and didn’t get trapped in ROI land. Turfday's ratings were efficient and nimble and could quickly lead to paramutuel success, unlike ROI, which is clumsy and takes a long period of time to be relevant, if ever. If a trainer, stallion or rider was hitting the board with 20/1 longshots, that ability would show up in Turfday's ratings. The jockey, trainer, and pedigree ratings were the most powerful advantage I have found in my forty years of handicapping races, and I stopped playing for a couple of years after Turfday abruptly shut down one morning. (After Twinspires and YouBet merged, the data Turfday needed to formulate its ratings became too expensive for its business model.)

When I returned to playing, the jockey ratings were the hardest part of the handicapping puzzle to replace. So I created a rating system of my own based on my understanding of Turfday’s methodology, using an Excel spreadsheet. Eight years later, I’ve never automated those ratings while spending an hour a day creating and updating them. It’s not vital to the handicapping puzzle to consider the rider but doing so in a subtle way provides a parimutuel advantage.

For example, many riders excel at a particular type of race or track. Jorge Ruiz is a huge parimutuel advantage in turf sprints at Laurel. Irad Ortiz tends to be overbet in routes but not in sprints. Miguel Vasquez will again be underrated by the bettors in dirt races at the upcoming Championship Meet. Jose Ortiz moves all his horses up on the turf at Belmont, but generally is bet down on the turf the rest of the year. There are advantages that reward a patient player because most experienced bettors will still find it useless to focus on jockeys.

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