Enjoying your punting Baco. Definitely on the right track as practically all of us are never going to get rich at this game.

Baco wrote:
"A horse that has a greater pay out odds than it’s chance odds is value. If a horse has a 20% chance of winning (4/1) and is available at odds of 6/1 (14%) represents value of +6%".

And that's nailing the 'value' problem. Unlike Casino games when all the variables are known and odds can be precisely worked out because all variables are known, we the punter are dealing with a few known variables and 647 unknown variables ['is the horse going to have a 2kg dump before he starts and wreck my weight calculations?']. 'True odds' are a myth and a bit like trying to work out our odds of making our 80th. birthday. Too many unknown variables!

Value is certainly no myth, but working it out before a race is an individual concern and estimation from the few facts we are lucky enough to know. Sometimes we will get it approx. right but mostly we won't. The easy way to work out if we have been getting value is to work out our average winning SR and compare it to our average collect. A 5/1 SR for a punter requires a better than 5/1 average collect. If we are not getting it we are losing and obviously our ideas about bet value ain't quite up to scratch are they? That's practically all of us.