Chase Race Research

I thought that it would be interesting to delve into some statistics about Chase Racing.

Rather than using my own databases I have used Adrian Massey data from 2009. Why have I done this? Because I want to show you that it is possible to do this kind of research without having to spend any money if you want to.

If we break down all chase race by SP rank to start with we get the following information.

We can see immediately a steadily decreasing strike rate, which shows that the market is estimating each rank quite well. The ROI also decreases steadily which is expected. There are a couple of hiccups in ROI for the 3^rd favourite, which is interesting, and also for the 10^th favourite and worse which is most likely due to a lack of data (there have only been 35 winners).

You don’t want to start by using the market for your analysis but I wanted to show you the general performance so that we can refer to it later if we want to.

Below shows the results broken down by the amount of weight a runner is carrying compared to the average in the race. This is an important factor in these races.

The data above shows that 2lb to 4lb more provides the higher strike rate and a comparatively good ROI. From there it begins to decrease. Any horse carrying within 1lb of the average also performs well and it is interesting to note that 8lb to 10lb more produce the best ROI. This would suggest that we should focus on horses carrying from 1lb to 10lb more than average.

If we look at the SP rank again we can immediately see that we are starting to build up some better ROI away from the favourite which is where we are most likely to make our profit.

The above data shows the new set of results broken down by number of runners. It is immediately clear that we are looking for races with very few runners or a huge amount of runners. The 20 or more runners has a very low number of winners and this figure may be subject to change but is worth including for now.

The results of these two simple filters are:

Are these results back fitted? Almost certainly but creating a non-back fitted system was not the point of this article and we have learnt 2 very important things.

1)    Analysis can be done for free within the limitations of the website or software you are using.

2)    In Chase races with 4 or less and 20 or more runners where the selection is within 1lb and 10lb of the average are very worthwhile looking at further.

Remember that there was not much data for races with more than 20 runners and it may well be that these are not good selections. Please do not go out and use this as a system because it will not work but use it as a basis to begin your own study.