The man from Dicheat.

You don’t need a computer to recognise that trainer Paul Nicholls has a strangle hold on this race with 6 winners from 12 runners, a 56% better than expected performance. Although, 4 of those wins were by the great Kauto Star, two by Silviniaco Conti.

Last year’s winner Cue Card bids to retain he crowd against last year’s runner up Silviniaco Conti and with an eye on the Cheltenham Festival in March, this match up makes for an intriguing sub plot in the context of this race.

 

The Jolly?

Horses that were favourite’s last time out have won on 9 occasions from a population of 24 runners, 27% better than normal.

However race favourites performed slightly under par with a 22% worse than expected performance.

How do we know this?

For the statistics geeks; in theory, given the winning starting prices of the 4 favourites 10/11, 11/10, 4/5, 4/6 (3 races were won by Kauto Star) their combined probabilities should have resulted in 5.11 winners.

For everyone else who is not statistically inclined (or wondering how you can get .11 of a winner), our advice if you fancy the jolly is not to pile in with your house keeping money.

Based on historical trends, the market leader could romp home. However, if it wins, the pay-out won’t be much and there is always the risk that luck could play its hand in a shock result.

 

Been around the block

Side with runners who can go the race distance.

Of the 11 renewals, 8 winners ran over 3m+ in their previous race returning a profit at Betfair Starting Prices of £12.02 to a £1 stake, 20.04% return on investment.

 

Prominence

History indicates that horses which ran prominently in their last race won 8 times from a population of 38 runners, an 18% better than expected performance.

Delving a little deeper, 4 of those of those wins are attributable to the front running Kauto Star.

Betfair Chase winners Kingscliff (2005), Snoopy Loopy (2008), Imperial Commander (2010) and Cue Card (2015) also liked to run prominently.

As we mentioned earlier, if we rely on historical data for the Betfair Chase from 2005 to 2015, unfortunately we inferring trends from a smallest sample size given the dominance in the race of Kauto Star, Silviniaco Conti and Cue Card.

Therefore, to obtain a bigger data set to analyse in respect to pace, we expanded our database query to include results from other non-handicap races over 3 miles at Haydock and filtered the results by runners who also ran prominently last time out.

The outcome was a 14% better than expected performance from a larger population of 107 runners (18 winners).

In summary, any runner that ran prominently in their recent race prior to the Betfair Chase should be given an extra “tick”.

 

Betting Market

The front three in the market have accounted for 9 wins from the last 11 renewals.

As you can see from the table below, within this population and hinted at earlier, the price of the winner is toward the short end of the market.