Advent of Alpha Day 13: Games Horses Like to Play

How much time do you spend thinking about how a sporting event is going to play out before it starts? Perhaps if you’re thinking about first goal times or scorers, you might think about early domination. But do you then think about reactions to those goals?

It seems obvious in hindsight how each action caused a reaction, which then caused a further reaction. The drama of sport is in the sequence of to and fro, back and forth. The fact it isn’t scripted makes it all the more interesting - it is why sport is interesting.

If I were to ask 100 people in the betting ring at a course about what they think is about to happen in the next race, I expect less than 5 will think about what the horses will do: who will lead, who will settle into the back, how jockeys will position their mounts.

But when analysts say a horse likes to front-run, or it’s a hold up horse, these aren’t just vague pieces of jargon. They have specific meaning based on what has happened in the past.

Horses are encouraged to run, but they can’t be forced to run. You’ve probably heard the phrase “you can take a horse to water, but can’t make it drink”, and you can definitely take a horse to a course but you can’t make it do something it is not interested in doing - horses “plant” at the start all the time.

Horses don’t know they’re in a competition. The experience of a horse race to them is that they think they’re in some sort of game in a pack. Some horses like to lead the pack and hate to get overtaken. Some horses are happy to run for a while with the pack, and then slowly overtake the others, and get their kicks that way.

It’s the mood of horse, the type of horse they are, that indicates their motivation.

When was the last time you thought about a horse having motivation when deciding what to bet on? How many in-play models take a horse’s motivation into account?

And trust me, if a jockey gets this wrong, a good horse will lose races it would otherwise win. For example, the history books will tell you that Kauto Star didn’t win his fifth consecutive King George VI Chase because of a low-grade infection, but I think that might be gently hand waving away further analysis because his usual rider (Ruby Walsh, injured that day), probably wants to stay friends with AP McCoy. “Champ”, who rode him that day, did so far more prominently than normal and the horse clearly started to lose his motivation 2 fences out from the finish. This is a famous example, but it’s not rare.

I think the alpha here is that most people when looking at form are not looking at the whole picture, and when trading in-play are limiting themselves to price action. I regularly see favourites that prefer to be mid-field or further back racing prominently and their price not move at all. Quantifying this could be a lot of work, not least getting the numerical data in the first place, but if you have some the date lying around, it likely has nuggets of value in it.

And of course the same is true of other sports - there are definitely teams and players who can come back from behind more easily than others. Sometimes that’s about raw ability, sometimes it is about motivation. My point is that nobody ever seems to talk ahead of time about how an event will likely play out based on the mindset of the participants, especially when those participants can’t talk.