Finding A Profit In Chase Races

One of the most popular articles I’ve written is about stats on the All Weather. So, since we’re now in the jumps season I thought I’d write a version for chase races!

To start I’m going to look at the performance of the top three horses in the betting with data going back to 2007. When we break this down we see:

As expected we get a smooth curve both on ROI and strike rate decreasing the further away we get from the odds rank. However it is worth noting that the drop in strike rate from 1^st to 2^nd on these race types is very large.

We can also see that the PIV is below 1 for all of these ranks. Let’s break down this data by days since last ran.

Again this doesn’t look very promising but we are using very broad ranges and so it isn’t unexpected. We can see again that there is a linear pattern to the strike rate as the DSLR gets further away.

If we take the best PIV for each of these two factors to look for horses who are favourites and have raced within the last seven days, then we find that…

Just using that information and nothing more we are nearly at break even to SP of turf chase races.

That’s pretty impressive!

Now imagine if we take that information we’ve found and apply some common sense factors to it that not everybody’s looking at.

Is it going to be possible to find a profit?

To do this I’m going to use a rating that measures the competitiveness of each horse in the race. Currently I only have this rating for 2013 so I’m going to use the information that we learnt about the general race type and combine it with the top three ranked for my rating.

And now we see something very interesting. If we’re looking at the favourite in chase turf races where the horse has run within the last 7 days. Then my ratings top-rated increases the PIV and Strike Rate but not the ROI.

However the third best rated has a positive edge and has made a 12% ROI this year.

There are of course only 109 selections so far which is not a very big data sample and we’d want to see some more, but we’ve seen how just using two race condition factors and one rating that the majority of people don’t have access to, we can find a profitable angle very quickly.

And don’t forget this is to SP. If you were betting at Betfair then you would have not made a loss on any of them as you can see below.

Those figures are after a 5% commission has been taken into account. But we’ve found we need more data so I’m going to change out the rating I’m using with another rating that I have the entire history for and measures form.

None of this rating made a profit, but all increased the PIV  and runners ranked in the top two are at a pretty much break-even point when betting to SP in these conditions. Again if betting to Betfair or even better BOG, you’d be making a profit on these selections, combined with a very high strike rate.

So we’ve found that in chase turf races favourites who’ve had a run in less than seven days only lose 3% on their bets at SP. This would be break-even to BOG or Betfair odds.

But, more importantly. What this shows is that finding a profitable angle does not have to be complicated. It can be very simple and by combining this general race angle with just one or two ratings that the majority of the betting public aren’t using, you can find yourself making a profit very quickly.