Is This Race Better For The Backer Or The Layer?

Which races are better for the backer or layer is a question that I have been asked many times. It is time that we start to de-mystify this question and look at some of the statistical facts behind which race types may provide better opportunities for the backer and the layer.

I have limited the horses that I am looking at to SP odds of 10/1. This is an average of 13.5 on the exchanges and a level which I think most of you would be comfortable laying up to as long as good bank management was also involved.

We are going to try and find the good races for backers and layers by using a very simple method. Above you can see a breakdown of racing results by classification over the last 13 years. I have highlighted those that have a low ROI and those that have a high ROI. The high ROI is highlighted in blue to signify a possible classification that could be good for backers and the low ROI is highlighted in pink to signify a possible classification for layers.

There are just two classifications for layers that immediately stand-out and those are NHF and Conditional Jockeys. We have three stand-outs for backers in Grade 1, Group 2 and Group 3.

We shall begin by looking at the backers possible choices. If we split these 3 classifications in race types we get:

The three race types highlighted above show significant better ROI than the other two. It is interesting to note that NHF has the worst ROI by far (although the number of runners is also small for both the other two categories which will be part of the cause) and we have chosen that race type for layers to concentrate on.

So now we have a bit more of a focussed area for backers to concentrate on we can look to see which type of runners may be worthy of more consideration. I have made an arbitrary choice that any ROI of less than -10% will not be considered. If we have a look at weight rank in these races then the top two weighted horses are below this threshold.

Some other factors to consider would be DSLR and Distance To Winner last time the horse raced:

Here we can see that horses running again within 7 days of their last race have actually made a profit as have any after a layoff of between 57 and 150 days.

I have always said, and it has been written by authors such as Quirin, that a horse can be considered to have a good race if it has run within 3 lengths of the runner, particularly in races over 7 furlongs (I would reduce to 2 lengths in shorter races). With the above results we can see that those horses that ran a very competitive race, within 0.5 lengths of the winner, last time out are profitable on their own. This also goes for those runners who have never raced before.

Interestingly runners who ran a poor race and finished more than 5 lengths behind the winner have a quite high ROI and one that could probably be made into a profit with some more investigation.

A quick recap shows that some possible good races to look at for those of you who are interested in backing would be:

• Grade 1, Group 2 and Group 3 races on Chase, Hurdle and Turf

You should concentrate efforts on handicapping those runners that have one of the following conditions:

• Top two ranked in the weights
• Running within 7 days of the last race or between 57 and 150 days of the last race
• Are on their first race
• Ran within half a length of the winner last time out

That should be enough to get you started finding some contenders to analyse for back selections. I shall follow this up in another post looking at the laying selections.