If you have scrutinised our many blog posts which unravel trends and provide betting advice for the principle race meeting on Saturday’s over the past weeks, the thought may have crossed your mind, “how do we do it”?

In this week’s blog post, I demonstrate how we use our horse racing software to analyse the Steventon Stakes at Newbury and how you apply this knowledge to make informed betting decisions.  

Take a moment to watch the 3 minute video below which provides a short summary of how we set up the Proform System Builder to identify previous winners of the Steventon Stakes and then run various reports on the data.

Let me expand upon the tables highlighted in the video.

 

Age

Winners of the Steventon Stakes have been aged 3 (six), 4 (seven), 5 (one), 6 (two) and 7 (one)

Given their sample size of 25 runners, 3yo’s perform above normal.

We derive this from the value of 1.70 in the A/E column for 3yo’s.

In laymen’s terms, an A/E value above 1 indicates a result above normal, a value under 1 is below what you would expect given a normal sequence of events.

Further, if you make the value of 1 represent a normal performance of 100%, then an A/E of 1.70 can be converted to a percentage, and can be restated in much simpler terms:

“In the last 17 renewals of the Steventon Stakes, 3yo’s perform 70% above normal”

 

There is an added bonus!

Our analysis highlights the fact that a betting strategy focusing on this age group is profitable (as indicated in the P/L and ROL columns for 3yo’s).

In this year’s renewal, the 3yo’s in the race are: CONSORT, HALL THE HERO, INTILAAQ and MUSTADEEM 

Contrast this against 4yo’s who are the biggest population (57), have won more races (7), but their collective statistical expectation of 9 (in the Ex Win column) results in an A/E value of 0.77, 23% below normal.

So, given the balance or probability, which age group would you side with?

Let’s continue … …

 

Pace

As discussed in a previous blog post, Pace analysis helps us to understand how the race will unfold when the race starts.

Within the database, based on the post-race in-running comments, Proform stores pace abbreviations for each horse in the database; they can be either

• L for Led
• P for Prominent or
• H for Held Up.

From the table above, we can derive that as a population of horses that like to race held up “H” in the Steventon (54), only 4 have won, a performance 41% below expectation.

Therefore when analysing the pace in this year’s race, if we wish to tilt the odds in our favour we should focus on horses in the race that like to Led “L” or race prominently “P”.

Horses projected to make the running, in this year’s race are: CONSORT, INTILAAQ and BIG BAZ.

 

 

SP Rank LTO

As various studies have shown, an accurate assessment for the chances of each horse in a race can be derived from their market odds.

With this in mind, using our system builder we can slice the data by a horses ranking in the betting market in its prior race and analyse how the horse performed when raced in the Steventon Stakes.

In the table above, if  “1” represents a horse that was the favourite last time out, “2” - 2nd favourite, “3” - 3rd favourite and so on, then horses racing the in the Steventon who were favourites in their preceding race won 7 races from 17 renewals and perform 39% above normal (A/E 1.39)

 

Finishing Position LTO

Similar to SP Rank LTO, we can review the performances of horses in the Steventon based on their finishing position last time out.

Collectively, horses that finished 1st or 2nd last time out won 10 races in total although, horses that finished 2^nd previously outperform those that came 1^st. Given the tools at our disposal we could easily find out why this is the case.

 

Race Classification LTO

When viewing the data based on the race classification of the prior race, we can assess the performance of horses raised or dropped in grade.

The Steventon Stakes is a Listed event, and horses that raced in the same grade as their prior race have won 6 races in total however, this result is not out of the ordinary (A/E 1.0).

Horse’s dropped in grade and therefore running against inferior opposition should win easily right?

From the 10 horses dropped in grade from a prior race at Group 1 level only one has won, a performance 54% below normal (A/E 0.46).

Horses raised in grade from handicap level have won two races and perform 42% below normal (A/E 0.58).

 

Summary

Temping as it may be to just take the information above, identify which horses match the majority of the trends above and bet these, you will find that the gambling god ensure things are never that easy.

For example, none of the horses entered in this year’s renewal of the Steventon finished 1^st or 2^nd in their prior race.

As always when betting you are continually faced with the situation of having to make decisions based on missing, incomplete or conflicting data.

However, we have only identified five factors above and there are plenty of features in our Software and Race Guides that can help you turn a shade of betting grey into statistically significant (and profitable) black or white.

 

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 Steventon Stakes, click on the link here