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Re: Horse Betting



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Mark,

You may be interested in the following historical data I collected,
painstakingly, 9 years ago.  See the link below.

This is just one month's worth of Daily Racing Form consensus and
race results data from September to October 2000, but that one month
is still a pretty significant collection (nearly 6,000 races).  It's
all in one big Excel spreadsheet, ready for you to analyze and
number crunch any way you want.

This was a way for me to learn the Java programming language, but   
I also hoped to develop something profitable with the results.      
I wrote a program that downloaded the race schedules, the DRF       
consensus, betting info, and race results, automatically every day, 
parsed all those web pages, performed error checking to discard     
bad horse or race data (DRF pages do contain some errors), and      
combined the results in a spreadsheet.  Writing the software was a  
lot of work (and I haven't used Java since!).  I ran this for DRF's 
1-month free trial.                                                 

Unbelievable how many races happen in a month.  There are 5,780     
data rows in the spreadsheet, one for each race.  Each row          
contains:                                                           

Date 
Track ID 
Number of handicappers involved in the consensus scoring 
Race number 
Length of the race in yards 
...plus for each of the top three scoring horses in the consensus: 
    horse name 
    consensus score 
    pole position 
    morning line odds 
    win, place, and show payouts 

I never managed to do anything useful with it.  I offer it to anyone 
who might find it useful, and hope that if you do discover something 
from this data, that you will share it with me. 

You can download the spreadsheet from 

http://unicorn.us.com/alex/drfconsensus.zip (430K zipped, 1.7M unzipped) 

I hope somebody finds it useful.  And before anyone asks, I don't   
think I have all the software modules anymore.  I've changed        
computers 5 times since then.  I do have all the original web pages 
that the data came from, though.                                    

-Alex 

P.S. The above message is a copy of a usenet post from 2003:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.sport.horse-racing.systems/msg/b5fe59c2f9d73fc1