The Wokingham Stakes Handicap presents a tricky puzzle on the final day of horse racing at Royal Ascot and with typical field sizes of 25+ runners, in this week’s blog we use our horse racing software to identify a couple of Wokingham trends that canhelp to whittle down contenders in this year’s race.

 

Ok Proform! Tell me what happened last time out?

Before and after an event, Proform captures key parameters for every race and using some clever software and the power of computers, our unique tools make it easy for you to slice and dice the information in different ways.

One feature of our system builder is that it provides different options to display the data from many ‘last time out’ perspectives.

Specifically for the Wokingham, we selected the “by Course LTO” option to see if the recent venue has any significance on the outcome of the race.

Results from our software are displayed below

 

From any grid in Proform you can export the information so you can manipulate the data using different applications, one of which is Microsoft Excel.

click on image to view in different windows

 

The graph above summarises Wokingham results since 1997 and charts the last time out racecourse vs number of Wokingham wins vs number of runners.

So, now that we have visualised the data in a form that aids interpretation, we can deduce:

• 41 horses ran at Winsor prior to the Wokingham, none of them won
• 41 horses ran at Haydock prior to the Wokingham, only one of them has won
• Of the 18 renewals since 1997, winners ran at one the following venues prior to the Wokingham: York (4), Epsom (3), Newmarket (3), Ascot (2), Goodwood (2), Curragh (1), Doncaster (1), Haydock (1) and Chepstow (1)

 

Ok Proform! Tell me how they finished last time out?

Again using one of the many “LTO variables” available in our system builder we can now dig into the data further and display results based on the last time out finishing position for each horse:

In the table above, the column highlighted in red (LTO Course) has been covered previously, but if we turn our attention to the last column ‘LTO Position’ highlighted in yellow, we can see that the majority of Wokingham winners finished in the first four in their preceding start.

Of the two horses that finished out of the frame:

• Baltic King (2006) won the Wokingham after running in the Group 2 Kings Stand at Royal Ascot four days earlier
• Laddies Poker Two (2010) ran off a break of a 600+ days and was well fancied (9/2 F)

 

Ok Proform! Who’s going to win the Wokingham?

The Wokingham like all big field Class 2 Heritage handicaps are the most challenging for punters to unravel given the many factors to consider such as recent form, draw, pace, ability etc.

However as we’ve shown in the paragraphs above, if you are armed with the right tools you (and our subscribers) can use our horse racing statistics and tools to identify certain trends that are not in the public domain and this knowledge can provide a significant insight during your pre-race form study.

So, if we decide to have a punt in the Wokingham at Proform Towers, we will start by looking at where the horse ran in their preceding start and their finishing position to arrive at a shortlist for consideration.

We would then look at the horses not on this list to identify any horses that are capable of defying the statistics, the so called ‘progressive’ horses and then draw betting conclusions from the two lists once we’ve considered the additional factors of Class, Ability, Speed, Pace and Draw biases.

 

Do you want to see more?

Every day on our web site we provide a FREE stats and Race Guide.

As well as providing detailed horse racing statistics with profit pointers, our race cards contain horse ratings for each contestant, unique pace information for every runner plus other time saving features to make pre-race analysis easy.

To download today’s Proform Race Guide for the Wokingham Stakes, click on the link here