ARCHIE SCORE: How to Check Your Selections True Chance of Winning

LUCK OR SKILL?

During your punting journey you might have heard about the Archie Score [AS].

It’s  a very useful and valid way of scoring selections to ascertain the probability of them being based on skill or based on chance.

In other words, do you have an edge or not?

If you came across AS before you might have decided it was too complex for easy reading. Or you were put off by the bit of maths involved.

In this article we will make it easy to understand and take you through baby steps to calculate the AS of your selections.

 

Why Is An Archie Score Important?

How good are your selections? To what extent are they based on skill? Or are they largely based on capricious chance?

The Archie Score will help answer those important questions.

They’re important because the more likely selections are based on chance then the less likely you can have confidence in them.

And, of course, the more likely your selections are based on skill then the more likely you can confidently invest in them with a definite edge.

The AS can be used not only on your own selections but also on selections from other sources – services, tipsters, market order and so on.

 

Archie Score Calculations

In real life the more selections you use in the calculations the mYOU WOULDN’T WANT TOore accurate the Archie Score

But in our simple example below we’ll consider only 6 selections for convenience.

 

Step 1

Firstly, to calculate the Archie Score [AS] we need to ascertain how many winners we might have expected from our selections based on chance alone.

To do this convert your selections’ odds or prices into percentage probabilities. Simply divide 1 by its decimal odds  Thus odds of 3/1 = 1/4.0 = 0.25 = 25%)

Â	Decimal Odds	Probability Percentage
Selection 1	5	0.20 = 20%
Selection 2 Won	7.5	0.13 = 13%
Selection 3	10	0.10 = 10%
Selection 4 Won	2.5	0.40 = 40%
Selection 5 Won	2	0.50 = 50%
Selection 6	3	0.33 = 33%

Not too hard so far.

Step 2

Now we must ascertain how many winners we might expect from our six selections. Simply add up all the probabilities.

We now arrive at 1.66 as our number of expected winners for those six selections.

Step 3

Time now for the actual calculation  to give us the Archie Score:

 

runners x (winners – expectedwinners)²

____________________________________________________

expectedwinners x (runners – expectedwinners)

 

From our example we can easily see that:

• Our runners =  6
• Our Winners  = 3
• Expected winners = 1.66

So we simply substitute our figures in the formula to work out the AS. (In case you’ve forgotten, always work out the brackets first)

6 x (3 – 1.66) ²

_________________

1.66 x (6 – 1.66)

Unless my maths is totally useless that works out to an approximate Archie Score of 1.50  (Or 1.4954 to 4 decimal places)

To work out the likelihood of chance determining our three winners we will now use a convenient lookup table.

Archie Score	Likelihood Of Chance
0.30	58%
0.50	48%
1.00	32%
1.50	22%
2.00	16%
2.50	11%
3.00	8%
3.50	6%
4.00	5%
4.50	3%
5.00	3%
5.50	2%
6.00	1%
6.50	1%
7.00	1%
7.50	1%
8.00	1%
8.50	0%
9.00	0%
9.50	0%
10.00	0%
10.50	0%
11.00	0%
11.50	0%
12.00	0%

 

And, in red,  22% pops up.

That’s a reasonably low chance figure. But it would be far more accurate had we used more selections in our sample, of course.

 

Summary

Look, the bottom line of the usefulness of the AS is this.

The higher the AS, the less likely the selections are based on chance.

 So the more likely they’re based on skill to give you an edge.

Once you know the Archie Score of sets of selections from various sources then you know whether you should start using your own selections, whether your selection software is any good or from which tipster to buy selections.

If the Archie score is under 5 then you need more results to work out whether selections (or a system) are worth following, or if the results are based on luck.

 

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