New season, new maidens

By volume maiden races are one of the most common in PFL. The better your horse the less you should see of them, but for many juveniles, maidens are where careers are forged or quenched.

The first day of the season is always the same, you start the season buoyed by great reveals amongst your foals, whilst the breeds you can't remember making from 3 months ago are ready to hit the track. You have taken a sneaky peek at the morning line (ML) prices and WTF? 21x? 19x? 16x?

Welcome to the world of 16 runner maidens, where ML prices are designed to test your resolve. But, how reliable are they? Why doesn't my favourite win? Why did that outsider beat my horse? What is a good price these days? Let's try to answer some of those questions.

Changes in the odds

First, let's start with the bleedingly obvious. Going from 14 runners to 16 runners maximum means that your naive basic random chance to win has gone from 7.14% (1/14) to 6.25% (1/16). On average, if you only entered 16 entrant races, you would, on average, win 12.5% fewer maidens. Good news is the rake has moved in the opposite direction, but this is not a post about payouts, the AI helpers have that in hand it seems!

Secondly, the best horses in this year's juvenile batch are all running maidens on day one, meaning your chance of winning your very first maiden, is low. Don't get disheartened, the great thing about maidens is that these horses are henceforth removed from the pool, and you can race against other equally crappy horses as your own, whilst those horses go in search of stakes races.

Maidens are very weak races because half of the field is being run at the wrong distance, as owners figure that out, and another chunk are terrible horses that aren't going to be raced much longer. That leaves just a few horses who have a realistic chance of winning each maiden.

Morning Line odds

It's fair to say that the ML odds give you some idea about your new juvenile horse, but they are neither accurate or random, they are somewhere in the foggy area in between. At the time of writing there have been almost 500 maidens run in season 26 with a full 16 horse field. So let's dive into some results.

This grid plots the ml price rank (so 1 = favourite, 2 = 2nd favourite, all the way down to 16) on the vertical axis versus finishing position across the top. There are 489 maiden races with 16 runners in this analysis. Each number represents a horse in a race.

In those races 67 of 489 resulted in the ML favourite winning, 13.7% won. Those numbers give us implied odds of 7.3, that is, if you could bet on ML favourites at an average price above 7.3 you would make money. Not many maidens are bettable at the moment. Don't get upset when your ML favourite horse loses - there is a 86% chance of this happening.

If you squint at the grid you can see a pattern from top left to bottom right - the dominant diagonal representing the weak but visible relationship between ML prices and finishing position. Of the horses ranked 16th (dead last) 8 still went on to win their race, a 1.6% chance. ML gives us some information about our horses - but races need to be run to see who actually wins. Don't be too quick to rush to judgement on your horse just because its not in the top 3 of ML prices. 65% of winners come from outside the top 3 in ML prices.

If we plot these numbers as percentages of the total (divide by 489) we can the relationship between position and ML prices. It's fairly linear, but just because you have a good ML price doesn't mean your horse is going to win. ML favourites only podium a third of the time and rank outsiders still podium around 8% of the time. Bear these baselines in mind before you start screaming at the unfairness of the algorithm.

What is a good ML price in a maiden now?

Given the changes to maidens, good ML prices have changed, and you need to adjust what you would consider a good ML price for a horse you might be interested in. The average ML favourite price in 16 runner maidens is now 9.5. Anything lower than that and you have a stronger favourite, anything higher than that and the race is more open than average. The only caveat I would add to this is SS- horses tend to be treated very well by ML prices, they currently appear with S+ horses in maidens and their average price is 10.2 versus 12.8 for all other grades. So sometimes an SS- might appear stronger than it is (and other times it will romp home). As the SS- population fills out across better subgrades, this will normalise away.

To date, three horses have already been ML favourites in three different maidens, SS- Los Galacticos, S+ Party in the Sun and S graded Solar Battalion. Below are the top 20 biggest favourites this season to date, and remember, the strength of the favourite can also come from the weakness of the rivals (before you start trying to claim these horses should they fall into claimers).

The lowest price we have seen this season in 16 runner maidens is 7.29, and even then, that's still just a 14% chance of winning and an 86% of punching your screen.

This final table looks at the top x% best ml prices so you can lookup any of your horses and see how strong a favourite they are. Broadly, anything below 8 is exceptional - the top 2% of favourites. Below 8.65 is top 10% and below 8.94 is 20% of favourites . This is purely for maidens with 16 runners.

From this short post today we can conclude that:

• There is a relationship between ML prices and finishing position

• That relationship guarantees nothing concrete - so don't go judging your horses purely on ML

• ML favourites win 13.7% of races and podium 33% of the time

• 86% of the time your ML favourite horse is going to lose this type of race

• ML rank outsiders win 1.6% of the time and podium 8%

• The strongest favourite to date has posted 7.29 as the lowest price

• Anything below 8 is extremely good and below 9 is pretty good

Join the fun and put these insights into practice at PhotoFinish.Live and if you are considering starting your own stable please consider using my referral code: PADDOCK or just click on this link: https://signup.photofinish.live/?referralCode=PADDOCK

Please remember this is a web3 game where you spend your own money. Nothing I write about should be considered financial or investment advice.

Other blog posts:

• Betting review of Season 25 majors: https://aipaddock.com/horse-players-review-of-season-25-majors

• Generating more wins: https://aipaddock.com/generating-more-wins

• Breeding winners https://aipaddock.com/breeding-winners

• Season 23 juvenile review https://aipaddock.com/reviewing-the-graduating-class-of-season-23-juvenile-horses

• Finding good claimers https://aipaddock.com/how-to-find-good-claimers-in-pfl

• Not gambling advice: https://aipaddock.com/getting-to-grips-with-betting-in-photofinishlive

• Breeding in season 21: https://aipaddock.com/getting-ready-for-breeding-in-season-21

• Saving the LTF archetype: https://aipaddock.com/there-is-gold-in-them-thar-hills-a-campaign-to-save-ltf

• Season 19 retrospective: https://aipaddock.com/season-19-by-the-numbers

• A race selection process flow: https://aipaddock.com/selecting-the-right-races-for-your-horses

• How good is your new juvenile: https://aipaddock.com/how-good-is-my-new-juvenile-horse

• Tips for breeding strategies: https://aipaddock.com/charting-the-uncharted-in-breeding-within-pfl

• Know your odds of breeding success: https://aipaddock.com/know-your-odds-before-you-roll-the-dice

• Further down the rabbit hole of ML: https://aipaddock.com/deeper-down-the-morning-line-rabbit-hole-we-go

• What can ML prices tell us: https://aipaddock.com/skill-luck-and-morning-lines

• Finding the optimal distance: https://aipaddock.com/understanding-optimal-distances

• Understanding breeding: https://aipaddock.com/understanding-the-most-successful-breeding-horses-in-pfl

• What are subgrades: https://aipaddock.com/what-are-subgrades-and-how-do-they-work

• Fastest horses: https://aipaddock.com/who-are-the-fastest-horses-in-the-game

• Racing profitability: https://aipaddock.com/how-much-profit-do-you-make-racing-horses

• Trueskill pvp ratings: https://aipaddock.com/which-horse-is-the-goat-in-pfl

• Breeding: https://aipaddock.com/trying-to-understand-breeding-in-pfl

• Evaluating horses: https://aipaddock.com/how-good-is-my-horse

• Understanding performance: https://aipaddock.com/understanding-the-true-performance-of-your-horse

• Do stars matter: https://aipaddock.com/how-much-do-preferences-matter

• FF Rating vs Finish Time: https://aipaddock.com/the-difference-between-ff-rating-and-finishing-time

• Are horses getting faster: https://aipaddock.com/are-pfl-horses-getting-faster