Value has nothing to do with price, only price relative to chances. You can find value in a 1.01 shot. There are people making a living from betting those 1.01 shots on Betfair, in-play betting, but of course they too get burned once in a while.

I think it was in Barry Meadows very mediocre book "Money Secrets At The Racetrack" I read a study suggesting something along the lines that the bigger the price, the less value one would get in average, suggesting that the general tendency in the betting public is to underestimate the favorites chances and overestimate the outsiders chances. Or maybe they're just greedy, I don't know.

This study was pretty old though and I don't know if it would hold up anymore, it feels like "the sharks and syndicates" are betting these favorites down more aggresively than before. Maybe Mathcapper have something on this?

Point is that there are no such rules and a suggested "box" in an analysis doesn't say anything about the chances they ascribe and certainly not anything about the "real chances" a horse would have to win, finish 2nd, etc. I think it's more likely that they "throw" a horse like Ascend in there not because they give him as big a chance as the others mentioned, but because they know he'll be a price and because they think his chances are better than that price suggest, i.e the "value"-concept is already built in to the analysis.

Now from there you could go on to make the point that you think one of the things TG does best is to identify those live longshots, and you could trust them to be able to identify value for you, but you won't know until you run a decent study on it and I really, really doub't that could beat the takeout. You have to identify the good spots from the bad spots, no matter which way you look at it.

And where's the fun in betting on another mans opinion, anyway?