Can You Be Successful From Last Time Out Winners?

When it comes to picking winners, punters are enamoured with the form guide and what better way to make money than to back a horse that won its last race? Around 50 years ago, race lovers apparently made substantial sums of money from backing Last Time Out Winners.

It transpired that horses in National Hunt races were being turned out rapidly and winning their subsequent races. Given the relative lack of information about racing in those days, it took the bookies some time to figure out what was going on. Eventually, they discovered what was happening and adjusted their odds accordingly.

In the modern era, it’s more difficult to get anything by the bookies given the extraordinary amount of information at their disposal. As a consequence, you would expect this relatively simple method of picking horses to be unprofitable but is this really the case? Read on to find out.

Days Since Last Ran (DSLR)

As usual, I looked at statistics from 2012-2016 when checking out the performance of last time out winners in their next race. Given the propensity for trainers to quickly turn out horses after a win in order to get another victory before the penalty catches up with the horse, I looked at DLSR which of course is also days since their last win.

1-7 DSLR

As you can see, betting on quick turn outs in Flat races is likely to be a disaster while you would make a small profit on National Hunt events and a miniscule loss on AW. Let’s look at other DLSR statistics.

 8-30 DSLR

Those results would make your bank manager weep. Let’s take a look at 31-90 DSLR and see if the outcome is any better.

31-90 DSLR

Once again we see a sequence of hideous results. It’s obvious that you’re only likely to make a profit by looking at last time out winners that had their win in the last 7 days. For the rest of this article, I will be focusing solely on horses within the 1-7 DLSR bracket in National Hunt and AW races only since there seems to be little merit in checking out Flat races.

Number of Runners

I thought this might produce some interesting data since you would, in theory; expect better results in races with fewer runners.

Unsurprisingly, you’ll end up doing much better by looking at races with 10 runners or less. With these 1-10 runner races in mind, how did National Hunt fare against AW?

You make a profit on each but it is almost nothing over National Hunt races. With AW events, the 5.58% ROI is pretty reasonable. I’ve taken the liberty of looking at a year by year analysis of the above AW results.

In 3 of the last 5 years we’ve seen a pretty decent profit and so far in 2016, we’re looking at a remarkable ROI of almost 35%!

The next logical step is to analyse the results from each individual AW track. Please note that data from Chelmsford City is only available from 2015. I decided to look at data from 2014-2016 below.

The ROI for Lingfield, Southwell and Wolverhampton is fantastic and we can seemingly eliminate Kempton and Chelmsford City from the reckoning. To date in 2016, your ROI at Wolverhampton would be 38.76% and at Southwell it would be 105.55%. At Lingfield it would be just 6.65%.

There have been 20 bets that fit the criteria at Southwell this season and 13 of them have won for a Strike Rate of 65%! Additionally, 10/14 favourites have won at Southwell for an ROI of 65.07% while 6/10 favourites have won at Wolverhampton for an ROI of 50.9%.

Conclusion

When it comes to making a profit from Last Time Out Winners, the following criteria need to be met:

• Last ran 1-7 days ago.
• All-Weather course.
• Races with 1-10 runners.
• Focus on Southwell & Wolverhampton in particular.

While the overall profit on AW tracks is reasonable over the last few years, it seems to have gone to a new level in 2016. Whether it is just a temporary state of affairs is hard to tell. However, it is a potential profit maker for the time being and is well worth investigating further.