Strength of Race (SoR)

When I would use traditional past performances, I started realizing that other than the top 3 finishers in a past race offered me no value other than the italics. I had no idea how strong the race was.

Now everybody knows about class handicapping -looking to see if a horse is making a step up or a step down in class. A lot of times people just look at the last race the horse ran in to see if it was for more money or at a higher class than this race. When I used traditional past performances, I never got much value out of seeing the top three finishers in a past race. Just seeing the italics that indicated a horse won next time out was about all the useful info they provided, but even that didn't tell me anything about how strong that race really was.

But our SOR - or strength of race - metric doesn't just look at the results of a horse's last race. Our metric looks at the strength of the competition of all the horses in the last five races each horse ran to come up with a score. The higher the number, the tougher the competition. This does NOT consider the current race, so it doesn't know if this is a step up or down in competition from past races. But in comparing horses in this race, the higher number means the horse faced stronger opponents in past races than the horse with the lower number. Typically, horses who have raced against stronger opponents than their current field should outperform their past results.