Horse racing odds are of tremendous importance, and as you would expect, there is a pretty rigorous process that is behind creating said odds. Most people assume that odds are not all that difficult to understand – surely they just give the best odds to the best horse, right?
Well, things are not that simple. In this article, we are going to be covering how bookies create odds for races, as well as touching upon what it is that makes creating odds so difficult.
Data Analysis On a Scale Like You Wouldn’t Even Imagine
Despite popular belief, bookies do not create the odds by simply taking a look at the competitors and ranking them by who is most likely to win. No, the process of creating odds is much more scientific than that, and the real answer to how bookies create odds is through complex data analysis.
Complex data analysis is no joke. Unless you have a major in analytics, you are not likely to have seen data analysis on a scale that can be seen when bookies create odds, and the amount of data that said analysts have to decipher is truly mind-blowing.
Bookies gather all of the relevant information they can about the competitors in question such as horse speed, the rider’s skill, past performances, personal factors that could affect the race, as well as so much more.
Fortunately, most of the hard labour is done by computer programs whose primary purpose is to organise all of said data into digestible chunks – but that’s not to say things are easy by any means.
Bookies often hire highly qualified data analysts to make use of all of this newly acquired information, and only then do the odds begin to look like how you see them on the screen.
This is only one part of the process – we didn’t even mention how all of the variables for each racer/horse also have to be compared to all of the other competitors – something which can get incredibly complex in its own right.
The process for creating odds is not as simple as you might think, and in truth, it is a combination of complex programs, highly-educated specialists, as well as disciplined leaders that makes the odds for races work.
The House Edge Also Applies To Sports Betting
Something that is not widely known about horse racing is that bookies can actually alter the odds slightly in order to incentivise/disincentivise people to make certain bets on any upcoming races.
Bookies have a huge incentive to ensure that all horses have a roughly equal number of bets on them, and sometimes the only way to do this is to slightly alter the odds in a way that makes some horses more/less favourable.
Don’t worry; this has very little effect on the overall odds. The odds that are put out by bookies are extremely close to what the actual statistical analysis would have shown, but slight alterations can be made in order to achieve certain effects. Moreover, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it – it’s just one of those things that are out of our control.
Trying to play around this fact would be akin to searching up what is blackjack 5 card rule and trying to only win by using this strategy – it’s just not going to happen.
Fluctuations Are Commonplace
The number of horse racing variables that go into the equation when creating odds is truly insane. Furthermore, there is a further layer of complexity added due to the fact that things are always subject to change, and this is exactly why odds might change heading towards the run-up to a match.
For example, if one of the horses that are featuring in the upcoming race happened to have lost in a different race just a few days beforehand, this would be factored into the odds, and said horse’s chances of winning would go down in correlation with how bad their performance was.
Fluctuations are commonplace with odds, and bookies have to make sure that every little detail is factored into the equation to make sure the odds are always as accurate as possible.
Were you surprised to find out just how difficult creating odds can be? If so, you are most definitely not in the minority. The process of creating odds is incredibly arduous and is not just based on some professional horse bettor’s intuition, and if you were under the impression that odds virtually write themselves, then we hope we have been able to banish this falsehood.
Data analysis is no small thing, and when you factor in the scale that bookies have to conduct analysis on, it becomes impressive that we are able to get any odds at all.
