How Much Should Track Condition Change Your Prices?

Recorded August 2025 for Are You Making These Rookie Betting Mistakes on Rainy Days?. Any figures mentioned are from that time.

Track condition is one of the hardest things to weight properly when you are pricing a race. A horse can hold elite figures across the board, look terrific on almost every metric, and still be close to unbackable once the surface turns. The market usually gets there in the end, but it often takes a while, and that gap is where a specialist can find value. The trick is knowing how heavily to factor the going in, and that is a genuinely hard question to answer.

Why ratings models can flatter a wet-track horse

Some of my ratings are built to do one job and not another. My cam rating does not currently factor in weight or track condition. It is a complex algorithm and I am always looking at ways to improve it, but as it stands those two things sit outside it. My class speed weight rating does factor form in, so it behaves differently. That is why a horse like Fangirl can top the cam rating and then not appear at all in the class speed weight ratings for the same race. It is not a fault in the horse. It is a question of what each number is measuring.

Fangirl does well on a lot of metrics. Normally she would come up short in a race like that, and she started favourite in it the previous year. But her heavy track record is five starts for no placings. So the honest question is how much of that overall profile you carry across to a heavy ten.

Check the heavy track ratings, not the overall figures

The way I handle it is to stop looking at the headline numbers and go and pull out the runs on heavy eights, nines and tens specifically. For Fangirl, her general ratings sit at elite level, around 98, 102, 103, 101. Her five heavy track ratings are 97, 87, 66, 84 and 90. That is well below par. Even the 97, which is comfortably her best heavy run, came when she ran seventh in a very high class race. The rating is high because the race was strong, not because she performed. She did not win or place off it.

So the pattern is clear enough once you separate the runs out. The overall figures tell you she is a top horse. The heavy figures tell you something different about how she goes when the ground turns.

The form lines coming out of heavy tracks

There is a second layer to this, and it is the one I am still working on. It is not just about form going into a heavy ten. It is about form coming out of one. If a horse has been racing on heavy nines and tens and then steps back onto a slow five or a good track, do you throw that form out completely or do you keep some of it in? You can pen those runs entirely, which is a legitimate approach. Or you can try to get better at reading them and keep learning. I would rather do the second.

My suggestion is simple enough. Before you settle on a price, go and look at what a horse has actually rated on the going it is about to face, not what it rates overall. The two numbers can tell very different stories.

Every race on the card, rated, with Kingsley's selections and the speed maps behind them. Your first day is free, no card needed.

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From the full video: Are You Making These Rookie Betting Mistakes on Rainy Days? | Max Bet Ep 5

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