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Giga Kick and The Monte Carlo Machine
Adam Blencowe, dashing handicapper of much acclaim, runs the numbers on Giga Kick ahead of The Goodwood at Morphettville.
"He's meeting Group 3 winners, as a Group 1 winner, on level weights and he meets the three-year-olds at level weights.
"It just wouldn't happen in any other race. Even at weight-for-age level we'd be giving them four and five kilos, so we're just so well weighted."
Giga Kick's trainer Clayton Douglas has cleverly pinpointed this Saturday's Goodwood at Morphettville as a prime opportunity for his star.
That opportunity is well described by Brad Bishop in his much loved ongoing series, A Closer Look, which you can read here.
Giga Kick has a peak rating of 126 while "the best rating put up by any other runner in The Goodwood is 115" and he is getting weight off them.
Bookmakers go odds-against. Find your bank manager, your loan shark, your rich uncle who keeps cash in a rusty old tomato tin buried at the back of the garden and won't miss it for one Saturday afternoon. Just get what you can and lump it on!!
Or wait a second. Douglas has another point to make, and it's a good one:
"He's still got to go out and do it, absolutely, and it's been a while between runs but, in saying that, it's been well-thought-out and I'm pretty happy with where we've got him."
Giga Kick may be pitchforked in but that counts for little if he doesn't stand up – he's still got to go out and do it.
The market knows this, and it knows it remarkably well.
How often should we expect Giga Kick to produce form at or above a level that would (likely) make the most of this gilt-edged opportunity?
This is a question that can be (reasonably) answered by Monte Carlo Simulation.
There are still assumptions in play here, not least regarding that level (what it is and what that means) and the performance of other horses in the race who could step outside the bounds of their past. Not all horses have the same potential, or have they had the same opportunity - and opportunity has its cost, as the economists among you will know.
But this is just quick working example around Giga Kick, so let's not get bogged down any more than we already have…
For our simulation we calculate a mean and standard deviation from Giga Kick's ratings with an exponential decay rate applied as we know that the order of things matters. We are placing a lot more emphasis on recent ratings.
Drawing from this distribution at random 10,000 times we get a range of values from 91 (which no weight conditions are going to help him overcome!) to as high as a 134. A rare occasion when Giga Kick goes full Winx – get to Morphettville just in case!!
Since the 2022 Everest, Giga Kick has run above 120 in four of ten appearances but these simulations have him clearing 120 just 24.28% of the time – a result of the decay rate and below average ratings in his past five runs.
Giga Kick clears 115, the best of the Goodwood rest on established ratings, in 52.14% of simulations. About a $1.90 chance if we ignore everything else but that is not recommended.
This example is presented as mere food for thought but, for the sake of putting a bow on this, let's build in a 10% buffer to protect us for what we know we don't know – and even those dreaded unknown unknowns…
52.14% becomes 46.93% - around a $2.10 shot. All that faffing about and there is the market, sitting there, waiting for us…
Remember, betting is hard!
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