Horse Selections Rules Back-Testing Software Tutorial | LightSpeed Stats

Want to know if your horse racing ideas actually work before risking any money?

In this video, I walk you through the Horse Selections Rules Back-Testing tool inside LightSpeed Stats and show you how to test your ideas quickly and clearly.

You’ll see how to create rules, analyse results, and spot what is working and what is not without wasting hours digging through data manually.

This tutorial is ideal if you want to:

•  Build horse racing strategies with more confidence 
•  Back-test your selection rules faster 
•  Filter out weak ideas before using them 
•  Use data to improve your Betfair trading and betting decisions 

If you are serious about horse racing strategy building, this tool can save you a huge amount of time.

Get started with LightSpeed Stats here:
 https://lightspeedstats.com/signup/

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Transcript

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Hello, welcome to another video from lightspeedstats.com. We're going to be listening on the podcast, obviously a podcast for you guys. Um so today I actually want to do a bit of a tutorial on the stats software. We're going to get into a bit of the kind of the meat and potatoes of it today, really. Um, so we're just gonna go straight to it. Um, as we head over to the strategy builder, this is obviously where you're gonna be building your strategies. You want to click the button new strategy. That that's how you start any strategy you create, it will tell you the name it's given it, so it will say strategy created, then it'll say the name, and it will be something new strategy with a number next to it. Alright, if it's your first one, it might just be new strategy. So here it's new strategy seven. So then you just have a look through your strategies until you get to that one. Obviously, if you just started creating strategies, it should be on the first page, and I should create I think it's five that I've got on show on each page here. You can change, by the way, how many strategies show on the page, just go to the rows per page section at the bottom of the strategies and click all, and that will show all of them. Okay, I just find it easier to narrow it down. Um, but we're new to new strategy seven because that's what we've created. Now, what we want to look at today is the horse selection rules specifically, um, because this is really, like I say, the meat and potatoes of what you're going to be using with light speed stats when you create your horse racing strategy to back test. This combined with the betting rules, they're essentially the two sections that work together to create your strategy and run the results. So the great thing with the back testing, obviously, on light speed, is that we can run a strategy and get the results of that strategy instantly, okay? But the first part of that is creating the first part of your strategy, which is the horse selection rules. And here, what you're looking at is the main metrics of horse racing. So things like course, going, direction, country, characteristics, number of runners, class, race type, classifications, whether it's a handicap race or not, race distance, age, total traded on the horse, um, draw, nationality of the horse, obviously, um, and then non-finisher, age, weight. Okay, I can go through these. There's a lot of options you can choose from. Um, but as you can see, when you start to build your strategy and have your strategy idea, you can just pick one of these, which is what I'm gonna do. So, I'm gonna pick, let's go for, we'll go for, I've done class here, let's go for race type. Okay. Now, once you've decided what rule you want to add, just click add rule because the next part's when you're gonna decide what you do with that rule specifically. Okay. Now, here, once you've got the race type on your horse selection rule section, you'll get two options. And one is value and one is comparison, okay? And value is very simple. Value is the one you're gonna use most of the time, it's the one I use most of the time, and it will just give you the options for your whatever you've selected. So if we want the value of the race type, that's just gonna give us the options for race types. Very simple, all weather. We've got here all weather, chase, hurdle, national hunt, and turf. Okay, so that's very simple, right? That's that's kind of how it's done, and then you would just select which ones you wanted. So let's say I selected all weather, I could just select that, and then when I run the results, it will show me all the race results from all weather that fit my criteria, okay. Now, comparison is the one I think's a little bit trickier. I think this is the one that people sometimes don't understand, okay? Which is why I think if you do get confused by it, just stick with value. But comparison is gonna start looking at comparing things within whatever selection you've chosen. So in this instance, we'd be comparing race types, um, but I think a good one for this is because you're not probably gonna be using it for something like race types comparison, but one that I do use it for is BSP. I've done I've done some videos on this, um, but we'll use it as an example for this because it's a really good example. So if you choose BSP, now when you select value, it's gonna give you uh basically ask you what odds range you want to look at, and then you can choose the value. So the value is what are the odds basically. However, when you choose comparison, you're then going to be looking at comparing the betfair starting price to something else, okay. So let's say you're going right, I want to do back to lay, okay. An easy way to think about this is if you're backing to lay, and you're backing, you want the odds to be higher, okay? So you want the BSP to be greater than that is what you would select in the operator section, and then you choose what to compare it to, and we're gonna compare it to the lowest price in running, and we're gonna you could have this as a multiplier, um, and we're gonna go for let's say two, right? So the BSP is gonna be twice the size of the lowest price in running, okay? And then what you can do is if you select this little clock image on the right hand side, you can choose how many races and what percentage of times this has happened. Again, this allows for huge flexibility because you might go, Well, I only want it to be you know half, I only want the odds to come in half as far as double. Okay, well choose 1.5 for that. Again, I've done videos on this um already, so um if you check those out, the ones on daubing um and trobbing and things like that on the channel, then that's worth doing. Either if you're listening uh on podcast, you can do that there as well. But here we can choose the percentage we want. So, what have we got so far? Comparison greater than lowest price in running times two. Okay, but how often so essentially we're looking for a dub there, but how often do we want that to happen? Well, we know that we need at least a 50% strike rate, probably a bit more because of commission, so maybe let's say a 51-52% strike rate to break even. So maybe we choose 60%. We want to look for horses that have gone half the price in running 60% of their last 10 runs, for instance, okay. And that's a very I mean you might want to do five, let's say you do five, because I always choose 10 runs, don't I? So let's say we choose five, okay? But that's very straightforward, and then you have got straight off the bat, you have got your master group rule, okay? You've got a rule for your horse selection rules. Now, at this point, you might want to add some more to this, you might want to already have an idea of what you want for your strategy, other than this. But if not, that's fine, because all you then have to do is head over to betting rules. Um, and I will cover betting rules in the next video I do on these tutorials, but I really wanted to kind of explain horse selection rules to you and kind of go through some of them like we have today, because I think it's important to understand what value in comparison is. Um, if we go back up, I'll do one more little example of this. So let's choose going, okay? We'll add that rule. Now, if we're using going, we're not really going to be using comparison, and again, I don't think comparison is the one you're going to end up using very often. Okay, I probably really only use it myself for bet fair starting price, but obviously, we've got a lot of horse racing traders doing wonderful things with different strategies, they'll be using it on other things themselves. That's why the option's there, but value is the one you're going to use most of the time. So, again, if we're looking at going and we select value, then we can choose the going we want to look at. Maybe we want to look at we don't want heavy races, for example. Um, but when we talk about the betting rules, I'll explain in more detail why you don't really need to do much more than just have the one filter. Um, so what I'm gonna do here, I'm gonna click next. Um, and then what I want to do is click save. Now this strategy isn't complete yet, and we haven't run it, and we're not gonna be able to run it until we've filled out the betting rules, but you can save it. So it's really important to click next and save so that you don't lose the work you've already done. Okay, I've I've had some people and they message me and go, Oh Martin, I had a strategy I built out, but I forgot to save. Have you still got it? No, so you're gonna you're gonna have to save. I mean, it's you know it's pretty obvious to do it once you get in the habit of it, it's very easy to do. But just be aware of that because obviously we don't want to miss anyone to miss out on that. Um, yeah, if if you want to be a member of lightspeed stats.com, you want to test your horse racing strategies and you haven't yet, just head over to lightspeedstats.com and we can sort that for you. If you're already a football member, Betfair Trading Community, you do get a big discount. So get in touch, just email info at betfairtrading community.com or info at lightspeedstats.com to do that. If you want some profitable horse racing strategies, people keep asking me for them. We do have three that we give out. So if you want those, um just say free in the comments and I'll send those over to you. I'll also know if you've listened the whole way because obviously you wouldn't be able to do that otherwise. And if you could subscribe to the channel, um help it grow, uh obviously lightspeed stats.com is the sister site to betfair trading community.com. Um but we want to grow lightspeed stats as the focus on horse racing, um, and it's really taken off. So yeah, thanks everyone for that, and I'll be back with a guide on the betting rules next.