Does anyone use 'Racing and Sports' neural ratings ?
(I can't believe they are free.)
Anyhow they have the right-hand column 'set' when you first bring them up.
Those prices are about right ???
What adjustments need to be made ? How do you do that ?
I am aware of the 'key' as I have run off a copy for future use.
But what do the 1-5 columns mean and what do you use to know what to do ?
Is there an explanation on the site ?

regards,
zoom

Basically the 1-5 means how much importance you want to place on each criteria. 5 being the highest, 3 being average, 1 being the lowest, and 0 meaning that you want to completely ignore that criteria.

You can use the ratings as they are if you wish. They have them all set on 3 which means that all criteria are basically given equal importance. That's except for the WT category which is set on zero. WT means "wet track". The ratings are set for a good track, so if it's a wet track, you have to adjust that WT rating accordingly. Basically, you can adjust all the settings depending on how important you think each criteria is. They have an explanation on the site about each of the categories:

CP - Career performance assessment based on weight/class
CF - Current form measured by class/weight
TIM - Revolutionary time assessment
JA - Jockey ability
TA - Trainer ability
JT - Jockey/trainer combination
BP - Barrier position (course & distance)
WT - Wet track performance
Crs - Course suitability
D - Distance suitability
$ - Prizemoney earned
DLR - days since last run

So if for example you think that Jockey ability and prizemoney earned are very important, you could set those two categories at a higher level to all the others. If there's some that you don't even want to consider, you can set them at zero. The idea is to play around with it for a while and see what works best for you.

There is a new section called HCP. This allows you to add your own bonus points or penalties to the score and the price will be adjusted accordingly.

As for the pricing method, you can change that from 1-5 as well. The higher the level, the more it is skewed in favour of the higher rated runners. Therefore, the top rated runners will be rated at a shorter price. A rating of 1 will give a more open set of prices.

By the way, on the left hand column you'll see a series of ticks. If you uncheck one of these boxes and press "submit" you'll take that horse out of the pricing. This allows you to take scratched horses out of the equation, or only price the top 5 or 6 horses if you wish.

Thank you SPORTZ,

An excellent response !!

I had thought that what you said would be the case.
I was wondering if members had experimented, hopefully advantageously, with the neurals. Let's put the wet track aside for a moment.
What would prompt someone to alter the "weighting" to different columns/criteria ? Is the punter saying "I know more than the neural constructors" or "their formula is wrong" ??
My friend has put together a column system on a spreadsheet.
He uses very similar criteria to neurals. After all "Practical Punting" have been talking about these known criteria for years. He "weights the columns - some are out of 20 or 10 or 15 etc etc depending on the importance he puts on that item. They add up to 100. So does neurals do the same ? Are all columns of equal points ?
regards and thanks, zoom

I think simply because you can. It's a bit of fun after a day's racing to go back and look at the neurals and say, now what would have happened if I set these ones higher and these ones lower. What would the result be? And it's amazing how by tweaking things a certain way, you can improve the results. Of course, doing that with just one day's results doesn't mean that you'll be on to a future winning system, but if you continue to experiment with it over a longer period of time, then you can come up with something good.

Also, different people like to concentrate on different things in the neurals and want to have certain types of horses ranked highly in the ratings. For example, I ALWAYS set the Barrier category to zero. That's because I personally don't mind horses coming from wide barriers as the slightly lower strike rate is usually offset by higher dividends. On the other hand, some other punters may be dead against horses starting from wide barriers so they might set the barriers category to 5.

Also, you asked about whether the categories are scored evenly. Well, pretty much, except for a few anomolies. The CP, CF and Tim categories all tend to produce higher scores than the others. On some occasions, one horse's score for one of these 3 categories is so far in front of the rest of the field, that it renders all of the other sections pretty meaningless. You might want to experiment with setting these 3 categories to one and the other categories to three or something like that. You may even want to take them out of the equation completely. On some occasions those 3 categories can lead to some good priced winners though.

The main thing is to have a look at it, experiment and see what you can come up with.