The Effect Of Headgear On Horses

There are a lot of differing opinions about whether the use of headgear affects a racehorse for the better or for the worse. In this article I am looking to uncover some statistics that will begin to make this clearer.

To start it is important that we get an initial overview of how runners with headgear perform in general.

As you can see it does not look good! In 2009 there were 28760 runners who wore headgear and only 9.33% of them won their races producing a massive loss. There are very different types of headgear though and we need to split this up to see if they were all producing similar losing figures or if there were some that performed better.

I have removed any headgear where there were less than 30 winners in the last year. Interestingly 1^st time blinkers seems to produce very high losses based on ROI, as do tongue/cheek combination.

Is it possible to find a profit by just using headgear?

I am going to focus the rest of this article on horses wearing blinkers as they have the largest amount of runners and the best ROI in the data sample that we are using.

As you can see splitting the horses wearing blinkers by race type produces some very interesting results. Hurdle races are only losing -0.04% of every 1 unit bet, which is effectively break even to SP. This was easy to achieve without beginning to dig seriously into the data!

It would make sense to focus on hurdle races from now on, although this is not to say that the other races cannot show profit from headgear based strategies.

The most obvious place to start with is by seeing how horses perform in hurdle races based on their SP rank.

Well we are already into profit by flat betting any runner that is the favourite in hurdle races and is wearing blinkers. This is likely be back-fitted unfortunately so let us look at how this performs in 2010 so far.

As you can see this is not so good. Have we back-fitted or is it just that we haven’t had enough runners yet? These selections would have been just above break-even at Betfair SP. I would suggest that this is most likely back-fitted to the data though and we want to take a look at another area.

How do we choose an area to investigate? There are many ways but I would suggest the simplest, common sense. It is very easy to get so involved in assessing data and trying to be clever with it that you forget to use common sense. I have been a culprit of this many times myself and, after taking a break and coming back to it, realise that if I had just spent a moment thinking about the most logical methods then quite often I would have got the result I wanted faster.

My suggestion is that a lot of the time horses finding success in wearing blinkers are likely to be coming back after a longer lay-off. There would have been time to run them off-track to see how they perform wearing blinkers. Of course this will not always be the case and is a very simplified principle but it may be enough to help us find a profit.

We have very interesting results here that show horses who have been laid-off for between 43-150 days and come back wearing blinkers on their next race have been profitable.

If we take a look at this over 2010 to see how badly this has been back-fitted we get:

Horses wearing blinkers in a hurdle race who have not run for between 43 and 150 days made a significant profit in 2009 and have also done so in 2010 to SP. The profit to Betfair SP will be even higher.

I am not suggesting for a moment that you go off and start betting on these horses as a method this simple is likely to be highly volatile and may make good profit for a few years and then lose for the next few.

What can I use it for?

This is a basis to assessing these runners. You can automatically put these horses in as possible contenders where you may not have before. Once marked as a contender further handicapping will reveal whether the horse has the likely class, speed, form etc….. to be able to compete in the race. If this is also a positive then you may find yourself with a good priced winner on your hands.