In part one of the 'Framing a market' podcast last week we had pro punter (and former bookmaker) Ben Krahe explain his approach to rating every runner in the race.

This week we have the contrasting view of Rick Williams, our Senior Form Analyst here at Champion Picks.

He operates very differently to Ben so it's good to learn more about another way a professional goes about the business of finding value.

Punting Insights You’ll Find

Some of the methods and people who have influenced Rick's approach

The process of turning raw data into a rated price

When to incorporate subjective assessments

How he decides which races to bet into and which to avoid

Get the Transcript:

David Duffield: Let's have a chat about framing your market and market percentages. How do you explain to people that are semi-serious punters or even just a casual punter, how do you explain market percentages to them?

Rick Williams: Basically I think the simplest analogy is ... How much it's going to cost you to return a hundred dollars, so if you had a hundred percent market and you were to back every horse would cost you a hundred dollars to return a hundred, proportionately, or if the bookie's market were say a hundred and thirty percent, then you were to back all of those horses, it would cost you a $130 dollars to get back your $100. That's obviously where a wider margin help to make themselves some money. We try and keep it up, our market, around 100% and in our favor.

David Duffield: Do you care whether it's 108% market in Sydney on a Saturday, or whether it's 135% on a midweeker. Does that come into your thinking at all?

Rick Williams: Look, I think it does but I guess it's relative to what your rating the horses, and I guess where you sort of might be getting a lot of value for your money if it is 135%, but you do like one, you might want to go to hard in that race, but if you've got a really competitive market such as Sydney where they get down to 108 or 105 to 108 on a Saturday. That's good value and good shopping, so you might want to attack it and spend up there because you're getting good value for your money from the marketplace, and if you're backing horses that you think are value also, then in turn you're getting value again.

David Duffield: So the markets that we put out are framed to 100%, and there might be some that are 99 and a half or 100 and a half depending on some rounding ... I had a chat with Ben Krahe, the harness racing analyst, and he frames his markets to 120% and then uses a spreadsheet to bring that back to 100. A lot of that comes down to pushing the outsiders out to an even bigger price. Do you just work the whole time with a 100% market?

Rick Williams: Pretty much. I mean I’ve got a function where I can make it whatever I want just at the push of a button, I sort of work around that, and I have a couple of prices, so when I sort of create the market, I'll have a price that will come up on a few different factors, and sort of will help me understand. For example, I might have a horse come up 5000-to-1 or something like that on one particular scale, and then that will, I guess as you said, he will penalize the other horses, while I've sort of got those types of indicators in there to tell me rating set A says this is 5000-to-1, rating set B says it's 100-to-1, well we can probably make it longer than a 100-to-1, so there's a couple of different ways to look at it, but certainly the longshots should be longer, generally speaking, looking at the markets.

David Duffield: You've got a hell of a lot of data there to work with. Some of it's publicly available form, some of it's by subscription, like Vince Accardi and then some of it's developed internally like the class, speed and the base ratings. How do you go from the raw data into a rated price?

Rick Williams: It's a process that I first got into through reading a lot of books from Don Scott,