Reviewing the graduating class of season 23 juvenile horses

With season 23 almost in the books for PFL, its time to take a look at the leading juveniles from this season. Who should you be keeping an eye on for the 3YO majors next season? Who could be new stud options in a couple of weeks? Who do you need to keep an eye out for in the claiming races? All will be revealed right here, right now.

New Season; Fresh Hopes

Season 23 saw over 11k new juveniles hit the track and race for the first time. All those hopes and dreams crushed by a 10th in the first maiden never to be raced again eh? But the breeding report said it was the second coming of Desert Orchid. At least it got the coat right (Desert Orchid was famously a grey, but I digress).

With this analysis I have tried to create a bunch of high value metrics for each horse and made them all available in the most concise format I could muster. There is some new terminology that I need to introduce (groan) and explain to get the most value out of this information.

Here is a breakdown of some important metrics within the game that you won't commonly hear people refer to, either because they don't want you to know, or they don't know themselves. Some 3rd party websites may have different variations of some of these metrics - but these are the ones I use. Some of these metrics are very useful in real-life horse racing and there is no reason to believe they aren't useful here too.

Glossary of complicated terms

This data is available to you in a new section of the website: https://aipaddock.com/juveniles. You can conduct your own analysis there (once you have read mine, of course).

Some of the metrics included in the data are self-explanatory but some are more difficult to explain, so here goes:

• profit: winnings - entry fees (Derby only)

• roi: (prize money / entry fees) - 1 (Derby only). Remember you can also win crown, its just not measured here.

• quantile: a normalised score that represents where the horses finish time falls between 0.0 (top 1,000th) and 100.0 (bottom 1,000th). So a score of 5.5 means your horse's best time was in the top 5.5% of times for that combination of direction, surface, conditions and distance. If you really want to look at times - go check out gap data's time rankings which are far more comprehensive than this. The score you see here is the best score the horse has attained this season.

• horses_beaten: the percentage of horses that this horse faced and beat. So if a horse wins a 10 horse race, it has a score of 100%. If it comes second, it beat 89% of horses. The formula is 1 - ((position - 1) / (number of runners -1)). So 1st place is 1-(0/9)=1=100%. 2nd place is 1-(1/9) = 89%. Look, trust me, higher is better. The number here is the simple average across all races. Why do I use this? It rewards 2nd place in a 10 horse race more than 2nd place in a 4 horse race. If we used average finishing position, then horses that only enter small field races would have an unfair advantage.

• ml_beaten: the same thing, but using Morning Line (ml) prices. the favourite is treated like the winner above, so it will have beaten all horses (100%) if its the favourite. If its the ML favourite every race it would have a score of 100%. Not foolproof, but tends to be a good predictor of performance. But, as we have discussed before, some horses underperform their ML and some overperform.

• the number of wins by race types: maidens, allowances, restricted stakes, graded stakes (grade I, II and III) and claimers. why is this important? we want to get a sense of how good a horse might be and a horse who has won a stakes race could probably win another one. if a horse has run 20 times and won 4 claimers - that's only impressive to Betelgeuse, the rest of us should not think we have found a genius 4 win horse - just something that could get to the top of the claimer leaderboard

• the minimum claim price: if the horse ran a claimer, what was the cheapest claimer it ran in. This is to help us enjoy missing out on great horses that were available in claimers, and congratulate our fellow stable owners through gritted teeth. Well done. As we will see below there were some great juveniles this season that we at one time or other, available in the claimers.

• trueskill rating: I am sure you are bored of me and my trueskill ratings. Trueskill is a bayesian pvp rating system that captures something of the underlying ability of the horse without knowing anything about the horse apart from its finishing position and the finishing position of others. If you play online shooters and get placed in different rank lobbies - there is some sort of trueskill system working in the background trying to match you will similar skilled players. That is what trueskill is doing here - trying to rate the skill of the horses purely by their finishing position and that of their better or worse rivals. Its like the ELO system in chess. If an A horse is unbeaten in 10 races it could very well have the highest trueskill score. That doesn't mean it wouldn't get thrashed by every S grade it ever met, it just means it beat what was in front of it.

• trueskill rankings; the global and archetype trueskill ranking for this cohort of juveniles.

Okay, deep breaths, you still with me? Now we can actually move onto the interesting stuff...

This data was taken before the end of year juvenile finals, so the values are subject to change. (If I waited until the end of the season, everyone would be focused on Foals Day!)

Prince of Adams tops the most profitable horses (purely on Derby) with a profit of 114k from 19 races, even more impressive given this was achieved in the ultra competitive RDF archetype. 3 S grade horses were in the top 10 demonstrating that you don't need S+ or above to make money racing. Hopefully we won't lose any of the 7 females to retirement before they get to race in majors next season.

Which grade of horse has the lowest win rate? 10 Derby to people that said SS-. With a win rate of 11.4%, SS- horses do indeed have the lowest win rate of any grade. Due to the small cohort size and the slightly different racing options, we can maybe forgive these 2yos for not finding their feet yet. Remember profit doesn't include crown payouts so take with a pinch of salt.

When it comes to archetypes, you can see the continued split in population sizes. Of the two smallest archetypes, LTF has the lowest win rate and RDS has the highest. This might suggest (not me) that the weather gods favoured soft this season. What it does suggest to me is a small archetype like RDS might have some room for expansion given how well its horses are doing against the competitive and maybe saturated RDF. Regardless, ROI is approximately the same.

The juicy insight comes from looking at claimers. Many great horses ran in claimers this season. All of the below horses raced in at least one claimer this year and generated a minimum of 10k Derby racing profit.

Due to the revamping of claimers, there are always great bargains to be had, and that's why app's like https://www.photofinishgiddyup.com/ are great for setting alerts and automating your workload when it comes to sniping the odd champion that dips into this level of racing. The last blog post had some tips for what to look for in claiming races to snag a bargain.

There is a separate page for regular trueskill ratings updates. Below are the top 20 as of 12th January.

I am sure we will see several of these horses competing in the majors next season. Or in the breed barn. Or in some claimers. Or, heaven forbid, in the marketplace. The data behind all of these charts is available on a new page on the website. We'll see if this is a regular thing or not, but for now you can search and filter this data here. Happy hunting.

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:

• 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