Every Topic,

The only thing I can smell at the moment is smoke so cant help you on the rat front :smile:

Seriously though I suspect that the issue with NSW is probably just to do with the delay in updating the web site details. They probably put the Closed message up as soon as the race jumps but dont update the divs/pool details until the final calculations are complete. The final pool is generally not finalised until just after the jump as the TAB outlets do have the ability to cancel bets placed just before the jump - eg. punter puts ticket through automatic reader just before jump and the machine reads the $1 bet as $100 - the operator can override the bet amount or cancel the bet for a certain time after the bet has been logged even if race has jumped so final pool is not available until all transactions have either been confirmed or cancelled. These "in process" transactions probably explain the change in prices. For Supertab the problem is even worse as they have 4 different TABs processing bets that must then be added together to get the final totals.


GeneralGym,
Not sure I agree with your point on bookmakers prices - the TAB price is amazingly accurate in the long term as an indicator of winning chances. There is no doubt that in some races bookmakers prices will be more accurate but in others the TAB will be better. I had a quick look at some figures for last year that may be of interest on this subject. What I did was looked at all the horses that started at a particular price, calculated the expected strike rate and compared that to the actual strike rate. For example in a 12 month period there were 1418 horses that had a TAB price of $1.90, $2.00 or $2.10 (I grouped three prices together to smooth out any irregularities). With an average price of $2.00 you would expect a strike rate of around 42.5% (0.5 * 0.85 tab margin) - the actual strike rate was 45.3

For the prices from $2 to $10 the results were:

PRICE ExpSR ActSR
$2.00 42.5% 45.3%
$3.00 28.3% 28.4%
$4.00 21.3% 20.0%
$5.00 17.0% 16.7%
$6.00 14.2% 12.9%
$7.00 12.2% 11.2%
$8.00 10.2% 11.3%
$9.00 9.4% 9.5%
$10.00 8.5% 8.1%
$20.00 4.3% 3.7%

As you can see the actual strike rate is remarkably close to the expected rate up to $10.00

With regards to your point on allup betting it is generally fairly irrelevant on most races. The proportion of money in any pool from allups is almost always insignificant as very few people place allup bets and the ones that are placed are generally on favourites which means they have little impact on the tote prices. The other factor that minimises the impact of allups is that they generally go into the pool as soon as the previous race is declared (so around 30 minutes before the jump time) so there is plenty of time for the prices to equalise to correct prices before jump (eg. if big allup goes in on horse 1 and drops the tote price to $2 when it should be $4 then punters will avoid that runner or bet on the other "value" runners until the prices equalise).

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"Computers can do that????" - Homer Simpson