The Impact of Last Time Out Run Style

21 July 2026/in Dave Renham/by Dave Renham

An Investigation into Last Time Out Run Style

In the last couple of weeks, the Geegeez Query Tool has been upgraded with many exciting new additions, writes Dave Renham. To read about these changes click here.

One of the new options means we can now analyse how the run style of a horse last time out potentially affects their next race. The Query Tool includes a set of ‘Last Run’ (and 2^nd Last Run) variables, including LTO Pace score, which tells us what run style the horse displayed on their most recent start.

Run style is a topic I have written numerous articles about before; this is simply because it is still an area that is under-researched compared with most others. Furthermore, it is partly misunderstood by some, but most importantly it has the potential to give us punters an edge.

To recap, then, run style data on Geegeez is split into four sections - Led, Prominent, Mid Division and Held Up. Here is a quick explanation of which type of horse fits which type of pace profile:

Led – horses that lead early, usually within the first furlong or so; or horses that dispute or vie for the early lead;

Prominent – horses that lay up close to the pace just behind the leader(s);

Mid Division – horses that race in the middle of the pack but in front of the rear ‘quarter’;

Held up – horses that are held up at, or near, the back of the field.

Geegeez assigns points in regard to which position a horse adopted early in its race. Leaders get 4, prominent runners 3, horses that ran mid-division 2, and those held up score 1.

Up until a couple of weeks ago, these pace or run style scores could only be found in the Geegeez Gold Racecard or within the Query Tool under ‘current run’. Now, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, we can get LTO run style data from the last run, and for that matter, the second last run as well. In this article, I am just going to focus on the last run, but I no doubt will be expanding this research to the last two runs in future articles. Let’s crack on.

So where does early pace give us an edge? Essentially, there is an edge in flat racing to horses that lead the race early. Indeed, horses that track the pace also have an edge over those that race midfield or near the back early. This edge is stronger in some races rather than others, but if we look at all UK flat handicaps from 2021 to 2025, we can see how strong this edge actually is. Below is a table detailing the performance of the four main run styles in all these races:

Run style	Runs	Wins	Win %	BSP P/L	BSP ROI
Led (4)	29517	4750	16.09	11718.13	39.7
Prominent (3)	48896	6296	12.88	2751.8	5.63
Mid Div (2)	59892	5939	9.92	-5237.5	-8.74
Held up (1)	68385	5692	8.32	-12133.5	-17.74

Across the four run style groups the win and ROI percentages correlate positively, with leaders outperforming prominent racers which in turn outperform mid div runners which outperform hold up horses.

This front running advantage is stronger over shorter distances. The table below helps to illustrate this as it shows the performance of front runners in handicaps across different race distances:

Distance	Runs	Wins	Win %	BSP P/L	BSP ROI
5f	4309	879	20.4	2994.78	69.5
6f	5702	938	16.45	3165.97	55.52
7	5110	785	15.36	2128.17	41.65
1m to 1m2f	8998	1372	15.25	3187.7	35.43
1m3f+	5334	768	14.4	224.9	4.22

Again, we have positive correlation across the metrics once more.

Of course, it is all very well knowing this, but taking advantage of such front running bias is another matter. It is not as if we have clairvoyance that we can unleash before each race to tell us which run style will be employed by each horse. However, past run style is a solid indicator of future run style as the data I am about to share will show. Let me start with a graph and underneath I’ll explain what it represents:

The graph shows the percentage of runners that employed a specific run style based on the run style they showed LTO. Thus, the orange line highlights the percentage of runners that led early in the current race, the blue line is for those who raced prominently, the green one is for those who were mid division, and the hold-up horses are represented by the brown line. We can then match these up with the four LTO run styles shown on the horizontal axis at the bottom. Effectively the graph produces four vertical lines with four coloured dots, where LTO leaders’ line up down the left, moving across until we reach LTO Hold up horses lining up vertically down the right.

Starting with those that led last time out, we can see 33.8% led again next time, 30.5% raced prominently, 20.8% raced in midfield and 14.9% were held up. So LTO leaders are more likely to lead in their next race compared to any showing any of the other three run styles, and there is an almost two in three chance they will lead or race prominently if they led last time.

If we move over to the right of the graph and look at the data for horses that were held up last time, we can see that only 6.5% of these horses led next time, while 15.9% raced prominently, 29.1% raced in mid division and a whopping 48.4% were held up again.

These LTO hold up stats are particularly powerful, showing that nearly half of all horses that were held up on their most recent start show that same style next time. Also, with less than 7% of LTO hold-ups leading next time, when we are trying to predict the front runner of a race, we can fairly confidently dismiss horses that were held up LTO. Overall, this graph highlights that LTO run style can have a significant influence on run style next time in terms of what position they will take up in the race early.

Let me now look at horses that led LTO to see whether we can improve the 33.8% figure for those who went onto lead early next time too. One general finding is that horses that drop in distance lead less often next time out. The table below looks at all handicaps between 5f and 1 mile across the period of study showing the percentages for each run style group focusing on LTO leaders and the distance they raced LTO compared with the current race.

Distance Change	Led%	Prom%	Mid Div%	Held Up%
Same distance	36.3	30.9	19.9	12.8
Down in distance	27.2	30.7	23.3	18.8
Up in distance	37.8	28.3	18.8	15.1

As the table shows, horses that led early last time and now move up in distance led again 37.8% of the time. Sticking to the same distance the figure is 36.3%, but LTO leaders dropping down in distance from their last run find it much harder to lead, their percentage sinking to 27.2%.

The highest percentage I found for horses that led LTO which went on to lead again in their subsequent race came when focusing on LTO winners. This group led 42.7% in their next run.

Moving now to horses that were held up LTO, let me look to see whether the distance they raced last time has a bearing in terms of the likelihood they will be held up again next time. For this, I restricted the previous run to being a handicap too as that seemed to make sense. Here are the percentage splits:

This graph shows that most distances run LTO produce very similar figures to what we saw earlier. The LTO 5f stats have the smallest figure at 44.4%, while once we get to 1 mile 5 furlongs or further it sneaks above 50%. It seems therefore, as the saying goes, 'a leopard doesn’t change its spots'.

There is one more set of LTO hold up stats I want to share. If we focus on horses that were held up LTO in a handicap, aged four or older, the run style breakdown in their next race looks as follows:

We see that over 51% of older horses that were held up last time, were held up again next time. This slightly higher percentage makes sense as older horses are more likely to have developed a preferred running style. 3yos, and more especially 2yos, have less experience and fewer races under their belt and so are more likely than older horses to switch run styles race to race.

Having dug a little into how the last time out run style potentially affects a horse’s run style in their current race, let me share the bottom lines for each LTO run style. The focus again is on UK flat handicaps spanning the five years from 2021 to 2025, and for this subset I am including LTO runs that were also in UK handicap races (flat/AW).

LTO Run style	Runs	Wins	Win %	BSP P/L	BSP ROI
Led (4)	25447	3130	12.3	229.58	0.9
Prominent (3)	42895	5167	12.05	291.78	0.68
Mid Div (2)	51331	5657	11.02	-2254.62	-4.39
Held up (1)	59098	5851	9.9	-2890.95	-4.89

As we can see, horses that showed a led or prominent run style LTO produced the best strike rates, and both nudged into profit. LTO mid div runners won more often than LTO hold up horses, while both showed losses of between 4p and 5p in the £.

Therefore, based on these numbers, a more prominent sit early in a horse’s previous race does seem to improve its chances next time out.

I want now to restrict the qualifiers to horses aged four or older as I feel this should improve matters based on the fact that cohort are more likely to replicate a run style from last time out. These are the results:

LTO Run style	Runs	Wins	Win %	BSP P/L	BSP ROI
Led (4)	16897	2053	12.15	641.29	3.8
Prominent (3)	28485	3321	11.66	178.43	0.63
Mid Div (2)	35332	3783	10.71	-1568.39	-4.44
Held up (1)	41267	3954	9.58	-2636.54	-6.39

The win rates and ROI%s combine once more to suggest that LTO front runners have been the best value, followed by LTO prominent racers, then LTO mid div, with LTO hold ups bringing up the rear... sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun!

Also, if we now split this ‘older runner last time out Led group’ into those that led in an all-weather handicap LTO compared with those that led in a turf handicap LTO we see an interesting split:

LTO Surface	Runs	Wins	Win %	BSP P/L	BSP ROI
AW	7628	867	11.37	40.12	0.53
Turf	9269	1186	12.8	601.17	6.49

4yos and older that led early in a turf handicap LTO have performed significantly better than those which led in an AW handicap LTO. I am not sure why that is the case but it a worthwhile nugget to be aware of.

Before wrapping this piece up, it is important to note that a few big priced winners have not skewed the results. If we look at 4yos and older priced 8/1 or shorter when racing in a UK handicap after running in a UK handicap LTO we see the following:

LTO Run style	Runs	Wins	Win %	BSP P/L	BSP ROI
Led (4)	8483	1647	19.42	236.48	2.79
Prominent (3)	14177	2648	18.68	130.73	0.92
Mid Div (2)	16613	2973	17.9	-209.92	-1.26
Held up (1)	17567	2985	16.99	-702.84	-4

The same pattern emerges once more, with the strike rates dropping from top to bottom (led to held up) and the profits/returns following the same pattern.

So, what has this digging helped uncover?

Well, even something as simple as looking at the run style of a horse last time out when contesting a handicap can give us a bit of a steer in a couple of ways.

Firstly, it can help with establishing a horse's most likely run style next time. We saw that horses that led LTO have led again next time a touch above once in every three races; whereas horses that led LTO adopting an early position near the back of the field next time (held up) occurred only around once every seven runs.

An additional point to note is that LTO early leaders in races of 5f to 1m have been more likely to lead in their next race when either racing at the same distance to last time or if upped in distance.

There were even stronger numbers when looking at horses that were held up LTO. This cohort showed the same held up style again in their following race roughly half of the time, whereas only about one in 15 of them went onto lead early in their next race.

Secondly, I found that horses which led or raced prominently LTO had an edge over LTO hold ups / mid div runners from both a win strike rate and a returns perspective. Additionally, horses aged four and up that led LTO had the best figures, particularly if the LTO race was on turf.

Well, that’s all for this one. The natural progression from here is to look at the combination of run style in the last two runs, and that will be coming soon. Until next time...

- DR

Combining Pace and SR Ratings, Part 2

14 July 2026/in Dave Renham/by Dave Renham

A four-week trial of combining Pace with SR Ratings, Part 2

This the second in a double header where I am sharing a very simple ‘system’ which I tested over a four-week period from May 1^st 2026 to May 28^th 2026, writes Dave Renham. Before reading on, it would make sense to read the first piece if not done already and that can be found here.

Not everyone is a fan of systems, but my racing journey was enriched by reading books and articles by the racing systems ‘king’, Nick Mordin. Hence, although I don’t tend to use rigid systems per se when selecting my bets, there are systematic elements that I do lean on within the whole process.

It should be noted that in order to find these system selections, a Geegeez Gold membership is required as that includes access to some of the key data needed.

To recap here are the ‘system’ rules:

UK Handicap races only
Race Distance 5f to 1m1f
The Percentage of Rivals figure (PRB) for the ‘led’ group on the pace tab for the specific race conditions must be 0.60 or higher
Horse must have one of the top three pace scores for the race
Horse must have one of the top three SR ratings for the race

Note that if there were two joint third rated pace horses then both would potentially become a qualifier if either or both of their SR rating positions were also in the top three. If there were three or more joint thirds, then I would count the two with the highest most recent race pace scores. In terms of SR rating joint thirds, I need to include them all as I have no way of splitting them. Also, if a horse had only three previous pace race scores, I would use their pace average figure to compare with the four race averages that most horses have. In this case, the horses with the three highest averages across either three or four past races would count. I did not consider horses with one or two past scores.

I mentioned in the first article that I am only using handicap races, as they give us the most reliable results for this type of idea.

In that first part I shared the results for weeks one and two. Again, just to recap, these are below with profit/losses based on BSP (Betfair SP) less 2% commission.

Week 1

Week 2

First two weeks combined

So, all in all, the first fortnight delivered some positive early findings. Of course, the sample size at this juncture was still relatively small. However, a further positive after these 49 races was that there had been 11 second places as well.

Time to move into week 3.

Week 3

The results for the third week were as follows, with winners highlighted in red. There were four qualifiers where the PRB ‘led’ sample size was small and those horses have an asterisk next to their name:

The last two days of the third week (20^th and 21^st) saw an excellent run of results with six wins from just 13 qualifiers. Previous to that there had been four winners from 29 showing a small loss of £3.88. The overall figures for the week ended up like this:

We saw the best weekly strike rate to date, but there were less near misses with only three second places (five thirds). Hence, there could be a valid argument that this week was a tad lucky, with so many winners. However, as we know it is better to be lucky than good. Although even better to be lucky and good!

I was three weeks in now and the overall results read as follows:

All three weeks were consistent with win rates around the 20% mark and solid profits each time. Will we see a similar pattern in week four? Well, let’s find out.

Week 4

The results for the final week are shown in the table below with winners once more highlighted in red:

The final week of the four-week experiment went with a bang rather than a whimper with ten winners from 29 runners. There were five seconds, too, so over half of the qualifiers finished in the first two. The profit and loss figures are shown below:

A huge profit and returns across the seven days of over 242 pence in the £. Yes, this bottom line was helped by a BSP winner priced 38.53 in Partisan Hero, but even if we take that winner out, after commission, profits still stood at +33.56.

With the four weeks up, I can now share the final totals:

This has been a pretty amazing run of results across the 28 days to create such figures. Of course, we cannot get too carried away, as 120 bets across four weeks is essentially a snapshot. However, it is a snapshot that makes me want to expand my research to other weeks and months and see what they bring.

So far, I have shared just the results without doing any additional digging into the underlying numbers; I'm sure there are some extras for us starting with the average PRB figures for the system qualifiers week by week. The graph below shows the splits:

When analysing PRBs we need to appreciate that the average figure for all runners in all races is 0.50. This is the benchmark to judge against. Anything above 0.55 is usually seen to be positive and once we get to 0.60 and above then we have a strong positive. Therefore, for three of the four weeks to have average figures for all qualifying horses of over 0.65 is exceptional. Even week 3’s figure of 0.58 is very decent. These findings give me much more confidence in the small four-week sample I have looked at.

PRBs are a useful metric because in many respects they expand sample size by considering all runners in each race. For the record the overall average PRB for qualifiers across all four weeks was a very strong 0.65.

I want to focus now on the 30 winners and see which run style they employed in the individual races where they came home in front. Being in the top three of the racecard pace figures for their specific races means I would have expected a led or prominent style in the race to be more likely than a mid-division or hold up one. The graph below shows the splits in terms of percentage of runners within each run style group:

As predicted (and hoped), we see that most of the winning qualifiers had a led or prominent style; in fact, five from every six winners did. This helps cement further how effective the four racehorse pace figures in the Geegeez Racecard are in terms of helping to predict run style.

Finally, I wanted to look at the results based on their actual ranking within the SR rank and pace ranks. Hence top rated in both would count as a 1,1 in the table below.

Of course, as we have nine combinations the sample sizes for each are very small. However, what was interesting was when I split the results up comparing those where at least one of the two rankings was top (e.g. 1/1, 1/2, 1/3, 2/1 and 3/1) compared with those that weren’t. Here are the splits:

Those with at least one top ranked position did much better. Again, the important caveat is that the samples are quite modest. However, there is a big difference between the PRBs for each group with the 'top ranked' group averaging 0.67 and the other at 0.59.

That's enough for this two-parter but I hope, if nothing else, the performance of this Geegeez Gold system, albeit over just four weeks, has provided food for thought. Personally, I will be doing more digging into this system, that is guaranteed!

Until next time...

- DR

More on Combining Pace and SR Ratings

7 July 2026/in Dave Renham/by Dave Renham

A four-week trial of combining Pace with SR Ratings, Part 1

Back in May of 2025 I wrote a couple of articles looking at 5-furlong handicaps with the focus being the scores for each horse found in Geegeez Racecard pace tab, writes Dave Renham. In the second of those pieces, which can be read here, I looked at a set of results based on the top three horses ranked in terms of pace scores in their specific race, when they also appeared in the top three of Peter May’s SR ratings for said race.

The findings were extremely promising over the whole year for horses in the top three of both as the table below shows:

Considering these results came from combining all UK courses, some of which do not strongly favour horses that race close to, or on the pace, I think the results were even more impressive.

In this article I will revisit that idea but before getting to the meat and bones, let me briefly discuss the pace tab and SR ratings, especially for new readers.

The pace tab shows the running styles of the horses for a maximum of their last four races. Each past running style is given a score of between four and one. The breakdown is as follows:

4 – Front runner / early leader

3 – Prominent racer

2 – Raced in midfield / mid division

1 – held up near or at the back early

Past number crunching has noted that early leaders / front runners have a strong advantage over other running styles at some of the shorter distances. This front running bias does not occur at every ‘shorter’ course and distance, but at a significant number.

The one tool that should be able to help us is the Geegeez Gold pace tab. Logic dictates that the higher a horses’ pace score total, the more likely it is to lead and, if it leads, then over time such runners are at an advantage offering us punters good value. Let me share an example of a 5f handicap race run on 25^th June of this year focusing first on the pre-race pace ratings:

The first point to note, before we look at the pace totals for each runner, is the performance of early leaders over this course and distance (C&D).

The most important number for me is the PRB figure of 0.64 for early leaders/front runners (the ‘Led’ group). That suggests front runners have had a significant edge over this C&D in the past. Hence, this is the type of race where, if we can predict the front runner and back it, we should make good money over time. I will come back and discuss the C&D PRBs later in the piece.

In the image above I have ordered the runners by their pace scores and we have two in double figures, namely Iris Dancer and Mr Cool. Pre-race it seemed likely that one of these two would lead. Here is how the race panned out:

Iris Dancer did indeed take an early lead and made all the running. Mr Cool was pressing the lead early but eventually finished fifth. The race followed the most likely pattern and the most likely result. Now, of course, there will be plenty of times when a race does not pan out like this, but the odds should generally be in our favour.

Just before I share my new research, I want to briefly talk SR ratings. These are derived from a neural network developed by Peter May. They are much more than a measure of speed; they include a number of form considerations making them a sort of composite of, in Racing Post terms, RPR (Racing Post Rating) and TS (Topspeed) - both of which we also publish in the daily racecards. Crucially, though, the SR figures are not published on every racecard in Christendom, and so fly under the radar considerably more.

Now, going back to that previous race, let me change from ordering the horses by pace rank to SR Ratings:

Here we see Tarlac top rated on 61, Penny Mountain second on 58 and Iris Dancer third on 56. Hence, based on my previous research article looking at horses being in the top three of both the pace rankings and the SR rankings, the winner Iris Dancer, was the only horse to appear in both top threes.

So, onto today's new research. I thought it would be interesting to come up with a very simple ‘system’ similar to what I did in that original article and test it over a recent four-week period. I chose the first four weeks of May of this year, 2026, to do the testing.

Here are the ‘system’ rules:

UK Handicap races only
Race Distance 5f to 1m1f
The PRB figure for the ‘led’ group on the pace tab for the specific race conditions must be 0.60 or higher
Horse must have one of the top three pace scores for the race
Horse must have one of the top three SR ratings for the race

It should be noted that if there were two joint third-rated pace horses then both would potentially become a qualifier if either or both of their SR rating positions were also in the top three. If there were three or more joint-thirds, then I would count the two with the highest most recent race pace scores. In terms of SR rating joint-thirds, I need to include them all as I have no way of splitting them. Also, if a horse had only three previous pace race scores, I would use their pace average figure to compare with the four race averages that most horses have. In this case, the horses with the three highest averages across either three or four past races would count. I did not consider horses with one or two past scores.

As before I have stuck with handicap races as they give us the most reliable results for this type of idea, but I have expanded the distance consideration from 5f only to races of 5f up to and including 1m 1f. The other main difference is that I am only considering C&Ds where the past data indicates a significant front running bias (PRB of 0.60 or more). For the record, I have excluded any rare three-runner races as all three horses would always qualify in those races under these rules.

OK, let me share my findings. For the rest of this article, I will look at results across the first two weeks, and next week I will share weeks three and four, as well as some thoughts on the four-week trial as a whole.

Week 1

There were 29 qualifying horses in week one and the table below gives each individual result. In the table I have added eight columns – date, course and horse being the first three, then the fourth column gives the PRB figure for ‘Led’ runners under the race conditions for that C&D race (i.e. based on the going and number of runners grouping). Column five gives the finishing position of the horse, then their Betfair SP, SR rank of the horse, and its pace rank.

The results for this first week were as follows with winners highlighted in red:

For the record, I have asterisked (*) Nakatomi simply because the sample size for the pace ‘led’ PRB figure came from a very small sample. Most of the PRB ‘Led’ samples came from a very decent number of horses which adds confidence to the overall findings.

Here is the summary for week 1:

A very positive start, although with the caveat that there were only 29 qualifiers. Having said that, there were six horses that finished second and a further four that finished third. Therefore, over half of the qualifiers finished in the first three.

Week 2

After a great start could the momentum be maintained in week two? The first race in week two where we had qualifiers was the 3.40 at Chester on 8^th May. Note that the ‘Led’ PRB for these races conditions (6f, Good going; runners 11 to 14) stood at 0.67 so it comfortably matched system rule three.

I will share both top-rated runners using the SR ratings and then show top rated pace runners to help clarify the selection process. Ordered by SR ratings first:

We had three joint third SR ratings, which actually is extremely rare, but it did mean I had five potential horses that could become a qualifier. Onto the pace rankings now:

A clean top three here, with Rosenpur and Miraculous appearing in both lists, hence they were both qualifiers. The race result was thus:

I haven’t given all the finishing positions as we were only concerned with Rosenpur (who won) and Miraculous who finished fifth. An excellent winning BSP for Rosenpur of 9.54 compared with the ISP of 6.5 (11/2). Also, we should note that Rosenpur led early and made all the running.

Week two had started on the best possible note and below is a table with all the results from that week including those two.

A quieter week with 20 qualifiers and the weekly summary was as follows:

Four winners from 20 this time and, as with Rosenpur, the other three were good prices (BSP 7.5, 7.27, 12.74), hence the excellent profit figure and ROI%. There were also five more horses that finished second.

After two weeks therefore the overall figures read:

We see a very impressive set of numbers here, but I do appreciate it's from only 49 qualifiers. Having said that, the winners do not seem to have come out of the blue because along with the ten winners, there were 11 second places, too.

This incredibly simple system, for which Geegeez Gold members are able to work out qualifiers on a daily basis, has started very positively. Will weeks three and four continue this trend? All will be revealed next time... until then...

- DR

A Look at Summer All-Weather Racing

30 June 2026/in Dave Renham/by Dave Renham

All-Weather racing in the height of summer

In this article, I will be looking at horses running on the all-weather (AW) in the months of July and August, writes Dave Renham. Data have been taken from 2017 to 2025 UK AW races and profits/losses calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP), less 2% commission on any winning bets.

Naturally, the focus for most in July and August is the turf with some big meetings including three of the biggest of the year at Newmarket, Goodwood and York. However, away from the limelight, has all-weather racing during those months offered punters an edge in any way over the past few years? Let’s start digging to find out.

Market Rank

I want to look first at the betting market focusing on market rank or position in the betting. I am using the BSP ranked positions for this:

The value has been with those second in the market, a cohort that secured a blind return of just over 3p in the £. Indeed, when focusing on non-handicaps only, this group enjoyed 175 winners from 694 runners (SR 25.2%) for a profit of £76.38 with returns of 11p in the £.

In terms of favourites, we can see they suffered overall losses of 5.5p in the £, and it was non-handicap market leaders that struggled the most. Such runners won nearly 41% of the time (285 wins from 697), but their losses were steep: £69.45 (ROI -10%).

Digging into this group a little more, if we look at the record of 2-year-old favourites in non-handicaps we can see that they performed very poorly. They managed 122 wins from 377 runs (SR 37.8%) but at a loss of £59.45 (ROI -18.4%). Narrowing the 2yo non-handicap favourite data down further to 2yo maiden races, favourites endured a dreadful time of time of it with just 21 winners from 78 runners (SR 26.9%) for significant losses of £32.81 (ROI -42.1%).

It is also worth noting that horses sent off sixth or bigger in the betting performed quite poorly, losing close to 20 pence for every £1 staked.

Regular readers know that I like to concentrate on 'non-rags', so let me split the results by those that were BSP 16.0 or less versus those BSP 16.01 or more:

This perhaps should not come as such a big surprise based on the findings shared earlier about horses sixth or bigger in the betting; a good chunk of such runners would have ended up in the BSP 16.01 or more group. In fact, if we focus on an even bigger priced cohort, those BSP 30.0 or longer, that would have lost over 32p in the £.

Clearly July and August has been a time where not many big priced winners have popped up on the sand. Thus, hereafter, I will be focusing on horses that were priced BSP 16.0 or less only.

Sex of horse

Let's now look at the record of male horses versus female ones. The splits below are based on the results of races open to both sexes. It makes no sense to include male or female only races in any such comparison:

There was well over twice as many male runners, which is the norm, and they recorded a better win rate, also the norm. In terms of returns males edged that, too.

The difference between the sexes widens a little when we look specifically at mixed age handicap races. The breakdown was as follows:

Well, it certainly widens in terms of returns with males having a slightly bigger upside here. From an A/E (BSP) index perspective, a metric that measures value, males in mixed handicaps have offered better value as the graph below shows.

A figure above 1.00 indicates value and male runners have edged above that hitting 1.04.

Age of horse

For this section I have ignored two-year-olds as there is little point comparing them to other age groups.

The biggest takeaway from here is the very poor performance of older horses: losses of just over 33p in the £ has been very poor. For the record, 3yos have a similar record in 3yo only races compared to those open to 3yos and older ones.

Position Last Time Out (LTO)

Let us see how the most recent run has affected performance based on last time out finishing position.

LTO winners nudged into a very small profit, while horses that finished second produced huge profits. Their A/E (BSP) figure stands at an impressive 1.12.

Race type LTO

I wondered if a run on the AW last time or on the turf would make a difference, and when I looked at the strike rates there was a difference of just over 1.5% as the graph below shows:

Does this strike rate difference affect the profit and loss figures? The table below reveals all:

The answer is an emphatic ‘yes’, thanks to a difference of £462.41 between the two to £1 level stakes. The difference in terms of returns was a smidge above 8p in the £. Clearly, based on these numbers, a run last time on the turf is preferable.

We saw earlier that both last time out winners and last out runners up were profitable over the period of study. When those most recent firsts or seconds were on turf, the figures improved further as the table below shows:

Not only have the strike rates improved but the returns have, too. The ROI% increase for LTO winners was around 4% while for last time runners up it increased by nearly 10%. The A/E (BSP) index for this cohort of runners up stands at a very healthy 1.22. Hence, any horse that finished first or second LTO on the turf needs close scrutiny this July and August when running next on the AW.

Trainers

On to trainer performance now. Below is a table containing all trainers who had at least 100 runners on the AW in July and August (2017-2025) priced BSP 16.0 or less. The table is sorted by win strike rate:

There were more trainers in profit than in loss in this table (19 of the 28), with several showing good returns. Let me share a few observations:

George Boughey

Over the last two years Boughey's record reads 10 wins from 36 (SR 27.8%) for a profit of £34.90 (ROI +96.9%). He also did well when his runners started second in the betting market. This cohort won 35.7% of the time (10 from 28) for a profit of £15.64 (ROI +55.9%).

John+Thady Gosden

Look out for Gosden-trained favourites. Their 61 qualifiers fared very well, winning 55.7% of the time and returning just below 20p in the £.

Richard Hughes

Horses second in the betting have been profitable for Hughes thanks to 12 wins from 40 (SR 30%) for a surplus of £13.52 (ROI +33.8%). He also had an exceptional record with LTO winners, scoring with 50% of their follow-up AW starts (10 wins from 20) for a healthy profit of £17.96 (ROI +89.8%).

Sir Mark Prescott

Sir Mark has been consistent across all six AW tracks producing profits at five. The only losing course for him was Wolverhampton where he had minimal losses of 4p in the £. Horses that finished fourth or worse LTO had a good record on the all-weather in July and August for the stable thanks 19 wins from 65 (SR 29.2%) for a profit of £31.55 (ROI +48.5%).

Roger Varian

Varian has performed well with second favourites, claiming 17 wins from 56 runners (SR 30.4%) for a profit of £16.20 (ROI +18.2%). He had a good record specifically when sending runners to Lingfield: 10 wins from 27 (SR 37%) for a profit of £7.62 (ROI +28.2%).

Archie Watson

Take note when Watson runners appear at Lingfield. His record reads an excellent 10 wins from 30 (SR 33.3%) for a profit of £24.79 (ROI +88.6%). He also did well at Wolverhampton with 21 winners from 58 (SR 36.2%) for a profit to BSP of £26.15 (ROI +45.1%). Watson's LTO winners performed with credit winning 12 of 30 starts (SR 40%) for a profit of £5.97 (ROI +19.9%).

Earlier I shared the fact that a LTO run on the turf had been preferable, and below is a graph showing the trainers with the best records with horses that raced in a turf flat race LTO. To qualify, they must have had at least 75 qualifiers and recorded a profit. The graph shows their relevant returns on investment to BSP.

There were some excellent returns especially for Messrs. Botti, Fahey, Palmer and Prescott.

That wraps up this piece and it there have been plenty of positive angles highlighted for racing on the AW over the months of July and August, as well as some clear negatives.

Below is a quick summary of positives and negatives, mainly focusing on horses priced 16.0 or less BSP. The aide memoire excludes trainer findings as there were so many different positive angles, highlighted separately above.

- DR

3yo+ First Time in a Handicap: An Analysis

23 June 2026/in Dave Renham/by Dave Renham

Horses aged three or older: analysing their first run in a flat handicap

In this article, as the title states, I will be looking horses having their first run in a handicap race on the flat, writes Dave Renham. Specifically, I am ignoring two-year-olds and focusing solely on horses aged three or older. Data have been taken from 2018 to 2025 in UK flat and AW handicaps with profit/loss calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP), less 2% commission on any winning bets.

All Qualifiers

Let me start by looking at the results for all qualifiers across the eight years of study.

As we can see these horses have won roughly once in every nine starts and have made an overall profit. Of course, the figures are skewed somewhat with nine winners priced over 100.0 BSP, the highest being BSP 431.91. Hence, as I tend to do with most of my articles, it makes sense to impose a price cap to try and avoid certain stats looking better than they actually are. I think including horses up to BSP 16.0 is a sensible price point to use, and I will implement that for the remainder of the article.

So, let me look therefore at the figures for all qualifiers that were priced BSP 16.0 or less.

We still see a small overall profit which is interesting. It is clearly worth digging a bit deeper given this positive starting point.

Race Class

I want to look first at the ROI percentages for all these qualifiers (BSP 16.0 or less) in their respective Race Class.

I have grouped Class 7 with the Class 6 results and for the record there were only seven qualifiers from Class 7 races. There were four Class 1 handicaps during the period of study, but they don’t exist anymore, so it seemed pointless to add them in.

The graph shows that Class 2 qualifiers struggled in comparison, and the table below gives us a deeper breakdown:

Class 2 handicaps are contested by the best handicappers so that might be a reason why horses having their first run in a handicap struggled a little at that level. All other Class brackets edged into profit, with Class 3 first-timers doing best.

Age of horse

Now, let me split the results by age.

It should come as no surprise that the vast majority of runners have been aged three and, overall, they have had a solid record. Not many older horses (aged five or more) qualified, as would be expected, but actually as a group they have done well.

Sex of horse

Now I would like to look at the record of male horses versus female ones. The breakdown below is based on the results of mixed sex races, those races open to both sexes. It makes no sense to include male or female only races in any such comparison:

There was roughly double the number of male runners, which is the norm, and although they had a better win rate, females have been slightly better value when priced BSP 16.0 or less. However, in truth there has been little in it.

Position LTO

Let me now look at performance based on last time out position. The graph below shows the returns to BSP for each group:

As the graph illustrates, the value has been with horses that were soundly beaten last time (those finishing sixth or worse). Below is a table showing more keys stats including strike rate and the actual profit/loss figures.

My perception looking at all the evidence is that horses that finished second last time have been overbet, which makes sense to me, whereas those finishing sixth or worse have been under bet, hence they have offered a bit of value.

Previous Career runs

How about previous number of career runs? Has that made any difference? Let's take a look:

The vast majority of qualifiers had raced three to five times previously which makes sense because most horses qualify for their first handicap run after three previous career runs. This group produced the best returns as we can see. The performance of those with six or more runs was the poorest, but even losses of just over 6p in the £ is not the worst we have ever seen by some way.

Previous runs over the distance

I wondered if the number of previous runs over the race distance made any difference. Here are the splits:

Based on these stats, previous distance runs of zero or one have both given positive outcomes. Performance has started to tail off a little for runners with two previous runs over the distance, getting slightly worse for three, and then being relatively poor once we get to four or more. Albeit the four or more group is very small in comparison with the others.

Trainer Angles

Onto the area that many readers enjoy most: trainers and their performance. Below is a table containing all trainers who had at least 75 runners making their first run in a handicap when priced BSP 16.0 or less:

There are more trainers in profit than showing a loss in this table, (23 vs 12), with a few standouts. The Charlton stable, Kevin Ryan, Hugo Palmer, Alan King, Sir Mark Prescott and Richard Hughes have all managed to achieve returns in excess of 30 pence in the £. Let me share some ‘extras’ in regard to these six stables:

The Charlton stable had six winning years in a row from 2019 to 2024, but 2025 did saw just one winner from 17. Variance, or something else?
Kevin Ryan had an outstanding record with his sprinters when making their handicap debut. Of the 60 runners over five or six furlongs 18 won (SR 30%) for a healthy profit of £74.85 (ROI +124.7%). He also did well at Newcastle scoring six times from 17 runners (SR 35.3%) for a profit of £14.87 (ROI +87.5%).
Hugo Palmer has been consistent with six winning years out of eight.
Over 1m 4f Alan King’s runners have excelled, winning seven races from just 16 runners returning a huge 264p in the £.
Sir Mark Prescott has long been renowned for this handicap debutants. He is 5 from 10 at Yarmouth over the past eight seasons and 8 from 25 at Wolverhampton securing decent profits at both. Ignoring his favourites, which tend to be over bet, his record reads 26 wins from 106 (SR 34.5%) for a profit of £52.64 (ROI +48.7%). Also keep an eye out for his runners that finished well beaten last time out. Those that finished sixth or further down the field LTO have won 30 times on handicap debut from 101 starts (SR 29.7%) for a profit to BSP of £26.95 (ROI +26.7%).
Richard Hughes, like Palmer, has been very consistent with seven winning years out of eight. His female runners have secured returns of over 78p in the £.

With most of the runners being 3yos, I want to examine trainer records with 3yos running in 3yo only races compared with running in 3yo+ ones. Firstly, the overall trainer numbers from 3yo only handicaps:

Again, several trainers stand out, and below is a graph showing the trainers with the highest A/E indices based on BSP prices. This is a metric that helps to determine good value. All these figures are above 1.20 which are very strong indeed.

I will be keeping any eye out for handicap debutants in 3yo only races from these stables this year. For the record Richard Hughes turned a profit with these runners in seven of the eight years; Richard Hannon and the Charlton stable in six apiece.

Now a look at the 3yo+ handicap race data for these trainers with their 3yos have their first run in a handicap:

We drop down now to roughly half the trainers in profit, which makes sense I guess considering these 3yos will be up against older, more seasoned horses in such races. Also, the sample sizes for most of the trainers are smaller than the 3yo only ones, and in many cases much smaller. Only Saeed bin Suroor has run more 3yo debutants in races for older horses compared to races for 3yos only.

I thought it would be a good idea next to compare both the win strike rates and the A/E (BSP) indices for each trainer in 3yo races versus 3yo+ races with their 3yos. Remember the price cap is in place still at BSP 16.0. I have colour coded the A/E indices – anything 1.15 or above suggest good value and is coloured blue; anything 0.80 or lower is coloured red which suggests poor value.

There are some significant differences for certain trainers when comparing their records in the different age group races. Below is a quick ready reckoner table to show the trainers with the biggest contrasts:

That's all for this one. Lots to go at in terms of profitable angles for three-year-olds running first time in a handicap. Here's hoping we catch a nice one or two in the coming days, weeks and months. Until next time...

- DR

Royal Ascot 2026: Must Know Betting Angles

9 June 2026/in Dave Renham, Horse Racing Blog/by Dave Renham

Royal Ascot – Exploring a variety of angles

Royal Ascot 2026 is less than a week away, writes Dave Renham. It's obviously one of the biggest meetings of the year and it is one of my favourites, in my top three along with Cheltenham and Goodwood. In this article I will delve into Royal Ascot results data going back ten years (2016-2025) in preparation for the upcoming five days of the festival. I will be looking at some areas I have not previously publicly examined in depth, so I'm excited to get cracking. Profit/ loss figures have been calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP) less 2% commission.

Last year For Royal Ascot I looked at Group 1 races and in 2024 I focused on the mile handicaps. In this piece, as the title indicates, I am going to look at a variety of angles. Let’s get started.

Royal Ascot Draw Bias

Straight Track Drawn Bias (up to a mile)

Where horses are berthed in the stalls often has a big say in certain big field races on the straight track. Below are some recent examples, starting with the 2023 Sandringham Handicap run over a mile. The first nine runners home, along with their post positions, were:

There was a clear high to middle draw bias in this race with eight of the first nine home, and all of the first seven, racing stands’ side. Not only that several of these runners were big prices with a 33/1 second, a 66/1 third and a 50/1 in fifth.

The next example occurred in 2024:

This renewal of the Buckingham Palace Handicap, run over a furlong less than the Sandringham, again witnessed a very substantial bias in favour of high to middle berthed runners. The first ten home were drawn 18 or higher and all raced stands’ side. And the second and third placed horses were 28/1 and 25/1.

Last year's edition of the same race saw a near carbon copy occur as the result below shows:

The first four home exited from the highest five stalls. Indeed, it should also be noted that the 2023 renewal of this contest also favoured high to middle drawn runners (best finishing position of a horse drawn in single figures was ninth). Based on these recent races, when they line up in the Buckingham Palace Stakes this year it will be tempting to completely ignore those runners drawn low.

However, although we get some handicap races on the straight course that show a significant draw bias, when we look at all such races over the past ten years, the draw breakdown by ‘thirds’ are probably more even than might have been expected.

Lowish draws have won the smallest percentage, but I must admit I had expected a figure at least five percentage points lower. Middle draws have been the most successful in terms of wins at least, perhaps because plenty of the big field races are contested down the centre of the track thus meaning no lost ground manoeuvring for position.

Of course, we can view this draw data in a different way by looking at Percentage of Rivals Beaten (PRB). This potentially gives us a more accurate picture as it considers all runners in all races, not just the winners. Here were the splits across the 59 races:

This is more the type of pattern I was expecting with high edging it over middle and low a few points behind. 46% of rivals beaten on a sample this size is material: it's quite tough for the low drawn horses.

Royal Ascot Round course Draw Bias (1m4f)

If you were thinking draw bias only has the potential to impact straight course races, think again. Over 1m 4f we have seen a strong draw bias, albeit from a smallish sample of 20 handicaps run over this trip over the past ten meetings. Let me share the win splits by third of the draw first:

Low drawn runners have struggled, winning just three of the 20 races even though they ostensibly have the shortest distance to travel having been drawn closer to the inside running rail. Meanwhile, high draws won half of the sample races, with seven wins for the middle third. If we focus on the four lowest drawn horses versus the four highest drawn horses, we get this dichotomy:

These numbers are quite powerful and are at least partially corroborated by the PRB figures:

Based on these stats, it is a challenge to be berthed in draws one to four, perhaps because one either has to use petrol to hold a position or else take back and ride for luck buried in the ruck. Middle to high draws hold sway with 13 of the 20 winners coming from the top half of the draw.

OK, moving on from the draw let’s now look at...

Odds Movement at Royal Ascot

Early Morning odds compared with Opening Show odds

One would assume market movements at Royal Ascot differ slightly compared with your average meeting. I was expecting the early morning odds (EMO) for most runners to be more accurate than usual, for example. Below are the percentages for horses that lengthened/drifted in price from EMO to Opening Show (OS), those that shortened, and those that stayed the same price. For the record, the EMO prices were taken from around 9.30am and I have used William Hill odds. The OS odds are based on when the market became ‘live’ so usually around 15 minutes before the start of the race.

These figures are very different from the figures for all flat races. The control group of 'all UK flat races' saw 52.6% of horses lengthen in price, 36.4% shorten and 11% stayed the same. Hence, at Royal Ascot the market sees far fewer horses lengthen in price with their overall numbers similar to those that have shortened. In addition, far more horses have remained at the same price. Ultimately, I guess this is what we should expect – more accurate morning markets meaning less fluctuations during the day; and, perhaps, fewer horses defensively priced early in the day.

Opening Show odds compared with Starting Price

What about the price shifts in the minutes before the ‘off’? What type of changes do we see from the Opening Show on course to the final SP?

More horses remain at the same price than those that either shorten or lengthen/drift in price. Again, these figures differ markedly from the norm – in flat races as a whole, around 42% of runners drift in price, 24% remain the same price, while around 34% shorten. For those punters who bet close to the ‘off’, these stats will be useful to know.

There is one more comparison I would like to share before moving on. In all flat races horses that were clear favourite at early prices remained favourite at the off around 63% of the time. At Royal Ascot, more early morning favourites have retained favouritism at the ‘off’ than has been the norm with their figure standing at 73%.

Royal Ascot: Exchange Markets

BSP prices

I wanted to take a quick look at Betfair SP (BSP) to see if there has been a price band that offered some value. In Class 1 races the sweet spot seems to have been between BSP 5.0 and 10.0. This price grouping has seen 79 winners from 493 (SR 16%) for a profit of £60.67 (ROI +12.3%). Narrowing these Class 1 races down to the cream of the crop, the Group 1s, horses priced BSP 9.0 or lower has been the area to totally focus on. Backing all these runners blind would have seen us make a 16p in the £ on investment. Quite incredible, really.

In handicaps, the 5.0 to 10.0 band which was positive for Class 1 races was far from optimal here, producing just an 11.1% strike rate (27 winners from 243) for losses of £40.38 (ROI -20.3%). The best value in the handicaps was with longer priced horses – primarily those between 17.0 and 60.0. However, the strike rate is down at 4.5% across this huge cohort and hence finding the right horses within this odds bracket would have been tricky to say the least.

In-running betting/trading

Roughly 20% of all money bet on a horse race happens in running. At Royal Ascot, with competitive races, this percentage may edge up a point or two. I analysed some Royal Ascot in-running data in relation to ‘dobbing’. Dobbing or ‘DOB’ means ‘double or bust’. Essentially, dobbing is an in-play trading strategy employed by some traders where they are looking to double their original stake if their trade succeeds. Conversely, if the trade/DOB is unsuccessful they ‘bust’ or lose their stake.

I have written about dobbing before but for those who have not heard of it, I will offer a quick worked example. Let us imagine we back a horse at 10.0 for £10; in order to create a potential DOB we try and lay the horse at half the odds for double the stake – so we set a lay at 5.0 for £20. If the horse hits 5.0 or lower in running, our lay bet will be matched and regardless of the result we will win £10 (less commission).

The basic mathematics behind it are shown in the table below:

For dobbing to be profitable long term, we are probably looking to have a success rate of around 53% or more. This figure has to be a bit higher than a 50.1% baseline as we need to take commission into account.

Scene set, here are some Royal Ascot dobbing data. Mainly, I wanted to see if the price of the horse made a difference. Below is a graph that shows the dobbing percentages for different BSP price bands:

Horses priced under BSP 2.02 cannot ‘DOB’ hence why the lowest price band starts at 2.02. Horses priced between 2.02 and 4.25 have got close to a 50% dob rate, but the rest have been well below the type of figures we would be looking for to make a profit.

What about the distance of the race? Can that make a difference?

The graph clearly shows that the longer the race at Royal Ascot the more chance a horse has of dobbing. The longest distances of 2 miles or more have hit over 45% but still some way short of that 53% figure we would be looking for to edge towards profit.

If we combine the best BSP price band of 2.02 to 4.25 with races 2 miles or further, we would have hit a 65% DOB rate. However, before we get too excited this comes from a small sample of 23 runners.

Finally, on the in-play front, it should be noted that 80% of all winners traded higher than their BSP in running. So, if as a punter your preference is betting BSP, it may be worth considering setting pre-race a slightly higher figure than the expected BSP for a small proportion of your overall stake. For the record 39 of the 40 winners of 1-mile non-handicaps traded higher in running than their BSP.

Royal Ascot Trainer Form

Top Trainers by Win Strike Rate

Before closing, I wanted to review some Royal Ascot trainer data. With the level of racing being so competitive it is difficult for even the very best trainers to be consistently successful, and the highest win strike rate for any trainer who has had at least 50 runners in the past ten years is just 13.5% - not surprisingly it’s Aidan O’Brien. He has saddled an impressive 48 winners but from 355 runners.

John Gosden, and now with son Thady on the licence, has been the best of the British with 32 winners at a strike rate of 11.5%. No other trainer has saddled more than 20 winners and only three have hit double figures, namely Charlie Appleby (15), Andrew Balding (12) and Roger Varian (11).

To avoid big odds winners skewing bottom lines, let me share the trainer results for horses priced BSP 24.0 or less. To be included a trainer must have had at least 25 qualifying runners:

Seven of the 19 managed a profit but for some - notably Appleby, Beckett, Cox, Hannon and Joseph O’Brien - it has been hard going in terms of returns. Even Aidan O’Brien would have lost us more than 15p in the £.

Top Trainers by Percentage of Rivals Beaten (PRB)

It is also worth sharing the PRBs for these trainers with BSP 24.0 or lower priced runners and these were as follows:

One trainer in particular who we can say has been unlucky is Clive Cox. He has by far the best PRB of any of the trainers at 0.73, but has managed just three winners from 32. That PRB figure, though, does nod to the fact that Cox saddled ten placed runners as well as the trio of winners, and backing all of his Royal Ascot runners to place would have yielded a 25p in the £ profit on the Betfair Place market.

Specific Royal Ascot Trainer Angles

There are some additional trainer stats I wish to share based on the BSP price cap of 24.0.

The Gosdens in Group 1s have secured a near 30% strike rate thanks to 13 winners from 44. Backing all runners blind would have yielded a return of 64 pence in the £.
Meanwhile backing all Aidan O’Brien runners priced 24.0 or less would have seen significant losses of over 34p in the £.
Charlie Appleby has a poor record when saddling the favourite at Royal Ascot with just three winners from 21 (SR 14.3%) for hefty losses of £13.49 (ROI -64.3%).
Roger Varian has had an outstanding record when his horses have started favourite, winning 61.5% of the time thanks to eight winners from 13. Backing all Varian favourites to BSP would have seen an excellent profit of £20.31 (ROI +156.3%).
Another poor Charlie Appleby stat is that in handicaps he has had just one win from 43 with losses of 84 pence in the £.
Keep an eye on NH guru Willie Mullins when he sends a runner here that raced in a NH race last time out. Of the 23 such entries, six have won (SR 26.1%) for a profit of £11.94 (ROI +51.9%). Backing these types to place on Betfair would have yielded a further 20p in the £ return.

Royal Ascot 2026 promises to be an absolute treat for us racing and betting fans. Hopefully there is something in this piece to help you get your nose in front whether you're a backer, a layer or a trader. Good luck to those who will be punting during this meeting. I'll be sharing the race previews with a strong panel of experts next week before returning with my regular column the following week.

Until then...

- DR

Analysing Racing Post Ratings (UK Flat)

2 June 2026/in Dave Renham/by Dave Renham

An Analysis of the Racing Post Ratings in UK Turf flat racing

An excellent addition to the Query Tool back in December 2025 was the ability to query Racing Post Ratings (RPR), writes Dave Renham. Hence, I, along with other Geegeez Gold members, can now delve into past stats for this long-established rating method.

In this article I plan to dig into RPRs to try and unearth some positive or negative angles that hopefully we can employ successfully this year and into the future. It is not for me discuss the pros and cons of how the RPR figure we see in the racecard is calculated. Ultimately, this is a formula or method that the Racing Post have been using for many years, so we need to assume they are happy with their product.

Introduction

My focus for this piece is UK turf flat racing and I will be analysing the RPR figures for this specific race code. The time frame studied runs from the start of 2020 through to the end of 2025, six full turf seasons. All profit/loss figures have been calculated to BSP less 2% commission.

In the past I have had conversations with respected racing analysts who have compiled ratings, be they speed or ability ratings, and, for them, to judge the effectiveness of their ratings the win strike rate is very important. The top-rated runner should have the highest win percentage, gradually reducing for the other ranking positions.

Obviously, it is hoped the top-rated runner is going to be the best performer in terms of returns as well; however, it is important to point out that regardless of how good a set of ratings is, speed or form-based, we cannot expect the top-rated runner to secure a blind profit over thousands of races.

Overall Performance by RPR Ranking

Let’s start with looking at the win percentages (strike rates) for different rated runners. This covers all races on the turf over the period of study. The horizontal axis is labelled from 1 which stands for the top-rated runner, 2 the second rated and so on:

The strike rate for top-rated runners has been better than one win in every five races which is excellent for any set of ratings. More importantly perhaps, the win percentages have correlated positively with the rated positions producing the sliding scale I was talking about earlier. It is interesting, though, to see quite a big gap between the top two rated.

If we look at the Each Way (win & placed) strike rates, we have seen a similar pattern:

The top-rated runner has the highest percentage once more, and the sliding scale is replicated showing positive correlation with the win only figures.

Finally, in terms of the individual rating positions, let me share the Percentage of Rivals Beaten (PRB) figures. Being able to share these is down to another of the recent Geegeez additions of having PRB figures available in the Query Tool Results Summary. The splits were as follows:

The same type of graph has appeared a third time. Therefore, the RPR ratings have conformed well to the pattern we would expect for a good set of ratings.

RPR Top Rated

Overview

From here, it made sense to me to focus on the RPR top-rated horses to see if there were any positive or indeed negative angles. Hence let me look at the record of every single RPR top-rated runner since 2020:

Despite the excellent strike rate, losses have been steeper than perhaps might have been expected. As a general rule I am guessing these runners have been notably overbet. It is now time to dig a bit deeper.

RPR top-rated runners - Yearly strike rates

Let me start the digging process by comparing the yearly figures.

All years have shown a loss for the top-rated runner although the last two years have been the best, or least worst, in terms of returns.

RPR top-rated runners – Record by Month

A look now to see whether the time of year has made any difference to the returns. The graph below shows the splits:

Based on these data, the top-rated runners have performed far better in the Autumn than at any other time of the year. In the height of summer (July & August) top-rated RPR runners produced quite poor returns. I wonder if this has been a case of the top-rated runners being overbet even more than normal?

RPR top-rated runners - Market Rank

I would now like to share the performance of the top-rated runners in terms of market position / rank. The splits over the period of study were as follows:

Overall, the RPR top-rated runners would have lost us far less money when most closely aligned with market sentiment, specifically when starting either favourite or second favourite.

RPR top-rated runners - Handicaps versus non-handicaps

The table below illustrates the difference between handicaps and non-handicaps in terms of RPR top-rated horses.

As we should expected, top-rated non-handicap runners had the better win rate; but returns for each were very similar with an ROI difference between the two of just 0.58%.

RPR top-rated runners - Age of horse

Onto the age breakdown now.

There is a strong correlation between relative youth and win strike rate: younger top-rated RPR runners won a lot more than older ones. This is also true if we look at handicaps and non-handicaps separately.

One interesting age stat is for top-rated RPR 3yo runners in non-handicaps. They have had 902 winners from 2406 runners (SR 37.5%) for a very small loss of £22.04 (ROI -0.9%). This is the strongest cohort in terms of top-rated runners to date.

At the other end of the spectrum, older horses, those nine or above, have struggled in all races and they look best avoided.

RPR top-rated runners - Run style

Finally for top-rated runners I want to share performance by run style – possibly my favourite area of research. Firstly, a look at the win strike rates (within their specific run style groups):

We see an extremely familiar pattern when it comes to run style stats where early leaders/front runners have comfortably attained the best win percentage within their group while hold up horses endured the lowest.

Of course, we do not know pre-race what the run style of each horse will be and hence any profit/loss data shared is essentially hypothetical. However, I always like to show the splits to help emphasise the run style bias:

Essentially, if the RPR top-rated runner leads early then we have a huge value selection.

2nd Top Rated RPR

Overall, the performance of the top-rated RPR runner has been a little disappointing and, as I alluded to earlier, my feeling is that they have tended to be overbet. However, if the top-rated runner performance has been modest, horses second in the RPR Ratings have performed much better in terms of returns. Here are their overall figures:

Losses to £1 level stakes at BSP very close to break even over the period of study.

Let me drill deeper into the second rated runner to see whether we can find a positive angle or two.

RPR 2^nd rated runners - Handicaps versus non-handicaps

I want to start with handicaps versus ‘nons’ as we immediately ‘hit’ our first positive.

Horses second in the ratings have made a steady profit in non-handicaps which is impressive considering this is every single qualifier. All of this profit came from younger horses, those aged two to four. This cohort hit a win rate of 19% thanks to 1186 wins from 6253 producing a profit of £438.40 (ROI +7%).

RPR 2^nd rated runners – Horses with an ISP of 12/1 or less

As we know, some bottom lines can be skewed by big priced winners, so I narrowed down the group to those that had an Industry SP of 12/1 or less. Again, I have split handicaps and non-handicaps:

Handicap runners made a very small loss, while non-handicap runners within this price bracket enjoyed returns of 2p in the £.

Let me now share three further positive angles I found for those second top in the RPR Ratings. I am going to keep the price restriction of 12/1 or shorter in place for all three:

Second rated runners ridden by a claiming jockey produced 558 wins from 3420 (SR 16.3%) for a profit of £137.24 (ROI +4%).
Fillies and mares when second in the ratings secured a strike rate of 18.2% (1145 wins from 6289) for a profit of £227.50 (ROI +3.6%).
Sticking with mares, those aged five or six and second in the ratings enjoyed a great record, with 170 wins from 874 runners (SR 19.5%) for a decent profit of £233.71 (ROI +26.7%). It should be noted that five- and six-year-old mares would also have secured a small profit if focusing on horses priced over 12/1.

RPR 2^nd rated runners – Run Style

Finally, let me share the run style figures for those second in the RPR Ratings. To allow the best comparison against the top-rated RPR stats shared earlier these results will cover all races and all prices:

We'd expect lower strike rates for each group compared with the top-rated stats, but what about returns?

The front running (led) stats have been off the chart in terms of potential returns. In contrast, the losses for mid div and held up runners were quite significant.

The Racing Post Ratings have been around since the late eighties when they were known as ‘Postmark’ and are long established. Based on the recent evidence shared in this piece, the better value has been with those runners rated second in the ratings. I think that top-rated runners have been consistently overbet, thus making the second rated runners better value generally speaking.

I have yet to dig into the performance of the Racing Post Ratings in terms of either All Weather or National Hunt codes; so it will be interesting to see what I find. That research will be done some time in the Autumn with hopefully enlightening articles to follow.

Until next time...

- DR

Analysis of 3yo and 3yo+ Maiden Races

27 May 2026/in Dave Renham/by Dave Renham

3yo and 3yo+ maidens – a deep dive

As I have mentioned before my preference from a betting perspective is flat racing and, within the flat sphere, I primarily bet in handicaps, writes Dave Renham. In this article however, I will be looking 3yo only and 3yo+ non-handicap maiden races. I have researched eight full years of data spanning from 2018 to 2025 for UK flat and AW racing. All profits and losses have been calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP) less 2% commission on any winning bets.

Market Rank

Let me start with the betting market and, specifically, the Betfair market (BSP). I want to share the stats by market position:

Favourites have made the tiniest of profits to BSP, while those third in market rank have proved to be the best value. Once we hit fourth or bigger in the betting, we see a severe drop off in terms of returns. For the record, favourites returned a profit in both 3yo only and 3yo+ races. Betting all of the top three market ranked horses would have been a marginally profitable endeavour.

The focus clearly should be on horses near the top of the betting, then. This race type is market friendly - more market friendly than the norm. Indeed, if we compare the percentage of races won for horses priced BSP 10.0 or less in 3yo/3yo+ maidens compared with ALL races, we see quite a contrast:

As we can see the difference is more than 10%.

Moving on, for virtually all articles I write these days I implement a BSP price cap to try and avoid any huge priced winners skewing the figures. I will do that here, too, and, looking at the overall results, a price cap of BSP 14.0 or less makes sense. The remaining stats shared therefore are based only on horses within the stipulated price cap.

Sex of horse

My first port of call away from the betting market is to look at the record of male horses versus female ones. The breakdown below is based on the results of races open to both sexes. It makes no sense to include male or female only races in any such comparison:

As is usually the case, we see far more male runners than females, but the females have provided the value, and by far the best returns of the two when focusing on runners priced BSP 14.0 or less.

Sticking with this theme, I wanted to compare the results of male runners – colts versus geldings. I assumed that the colts would outperform geldings, but I have been known to be wrong in the past. Let me start by comparing the win percentages or win strike rate for each:

Colts have had a better win percentage by around 5% in absolute terms and a noteworthy 20% relatively; but has this equated to better value? The A/E index, based on BSP data, should be instructive:

According to these numbers, colts have been much better value than geldings, and if we now compare the returns, we can see that this has been the case:

In terms of returns to BSP, geldings would have lost us over 8 pence in the £ more than colts, when priced BSP 14.0 or less. However, there is one positive gelding stat to share and that is the record of horses having their very first run after being gelded. This subset of runners won 69 races from 242 runners (SR 28.5%) for a profit of £17.22 (ROI +7.1%).

Age

In terms of age it only makes sense to share the data for races open to more than one age group so the table below includes only 3yo+ maidens over the past eight years.

All bar 187 runners have been aged three. As it turns out 4yos have provided the best value but, on average, we saw fewer than 20 qualifiers per year over the period of study. 5yos and up have the worst record from a small sample. It should be noted that this older age group have really struggled when priced above BSP 14.0 – that cohort won just three races from 357 runners. Even backing them to a Betfair place would have lost £161.88, almost half of stakes!

Career starts

Let's now look at exposure, in terms of career starts, to see what that has told us with the price cap in place.

Horses making their racecourse debut had the lowest strike rate, as we would expect, but they edged into profit (just). It seems that horses that are making their second start (1 career run) have been overbet, based on the fact that they lost nearly 10p in the £.

Horses with two prior starts have produced the best returns and, if we focus on those that were in the top three in the betting, their figures improve further to 277 wins from 869 (SR 31.9%) for a profit of £97.75 (ROI +11.3%). Maybe slightly surprisingly, horses with four or more career runs also edged into profit.

Position Last Time Out (LTO)

A look now at where the horse finished LTO. Firstly, a look at the win strike rates:

Horses that finished runner-up LTO recorded an excellent strike rate and, as we can see, the win rate reduced as the finishing position gets worse. The table below adds more colour:

As the table shows, runners up have not only a good strike rate, but they have delivered decent profits, too. I am not sure why LTO 4ths have far better returns than those that finished third. My guess is that this is probably an anomaly, though looking at the similar win percentages it could be that they're a touch underbet in relation to third placed finishers.

Days since last run (DSLR)

There are two types of layoff abour which I would like to share some data, because both have shown a profit with runners BSP priced 14.0 or shorter. They are horses returning to the track quickly (within 10 days), and those absent for around 6 months or more (180 days+ to be precise). The table shows the two cohorts:

So, either end of the spectrum has proved to be the value.

Trainer Angles

I will finish with some trainer stats. The table below includes those trainers who saddled at least 60 runners at a BSP of 14.0 or shorter during the eight-year review period:

It is somewhat surprising that only six of the 18 trainers recorded a profit considering what has been shared to date. Indeed, two of the six (bin Suroor and Watson) were only marginally in profit. The performances of Kevin Ryan and the Charlton stable have been especially poor in terms of their returns (worse than 40p in the £). Both look worth avoiding generally in these contests.

On the plus side the three ‘B’s - Balding, Boughey and Burke - all performed well with good strike rates and decent profits to boot.

Let me now share some of the strongest trainer stats (BSP 14.0 or less) I could find in these maiden races and that aforementioned trio own a few, as does the Gosden yard:

Andrew Balding debutants have fared extremely well winning 13 races from 41 starts (SR 31.7%) for a healthy profit of £25.84 (ROI +63%).
Balding with second and third favourites combined has won 25% of races (30 wins from 120) for a profit of £37.90 (ROI +31.6%).
Any runner at Kempton from the Balding stable should be noted based on the past eight years of results. In this timeframe 10 of the 27 runners have won (SR 37%) for a profit of £20.04 (ROI +74.2%).
Balding runners that finished second LTO won 27 races from 69 runners (SR 39.1%) for a profit of £19.28 (ROI +27.9%).
When Oisin Murphy has been on board for Balding, their combined record reads 25 winners from 69 rides (SR 36.2%) for a profit of £32.44 (ROI +47%).
Horses having their second career run for the Gosden stable did well hitting a one in three win rate thanks to 42 wins from 125 with profits of £22.01 (ROI +17.6%).
The Gosdens also performed well with their market leaders thanks to 72 wins from 140 (SR 51.4%) for a profit of £22.92 (ROI +16.4%).
Team Gosden’s second and third favs combined won 41 from 169 (SR 24.3%) for a tidy profit of £38.51 (ROI +22.8%).
George Boughey runners when starting favourite won an amazing 75% of the time (15 wins from 20) for a profit of £12.19 (ROI +61%).
Boughey debutants did well from a small sample, winning 7 races from 16 starts (SR 43.8%) for a profit of 7.20 (ROI +45%).
Boughey’s runners were far better on the turf than the AW. His AW runners made a loss while the turf runners won 14 from 27 (SR 51.9%) for a profit of £32.15 (ROI +119.1%).
Karl Burke-trained favourites scored 12 wins from 18 (SR 66.7%) for a profit of £7.26 (ROI +40.3%).
Burke’s female runners underperformed but his male runners had an exceptional record. They won 16 races from 31, with colts winning 8 from 14 (SR 57.1%) for a profit of £15.06 (ROI +107.6%), and geldings 8 from 17 (SR 47.1%) for a profit of £13.83 (ROI +81.4%).

There are some extremely playable trainer stats there, and it will be interesting to see how many continue to prove profitable in the coming months and years.

These three-year-old and 3yo+ maidens have presented some surprisingly positive angles over the past few seasons and I will certainly be looking at more such races in the future with a view to potentially have a bet based on the research shared above. I hope there are some takeaways for you, too.

Until next time...

- DR

Instant Expert for 5f Handicaps: An Analysis

18 May 2026/in Dave Renham/by Dave Renham

An investigation into the Geegeez Instant Expert, Part 2

This is the second of a two-parter in which I take a look at the Instant Expert feature in more detail, writes Dave Renham. Last week, I shared some initial findings connected with 575 British 5f handicap races run in 2024. It would make sense to read that piece first here, if you have already not done so. This week I continue my digging and. as I did last time, sharing my findings as I dig! So, at this juncture, I am unsure whether the findings this week will be as interesting or indeed as positive as that first half.

Recap

To recap quickly, the 5f handicaps I am looking at exclude 2yo handicaps (known as nurseries), but include all other age classifications. Any profit/loss quoted will be calculated to Betfair SP (BSP) less 2% commission on any winners.

As I mentioned last week, the Instant Expert tab can be found on the top of the Geegeez Racecards, between the Profiler and Pace tabs.

Instant Expert provides the Geegeez Gold community with some useful, and quickly digestible, horse information. It has a unique ability to summarise the form profile of every runner in the race into this single view. Instant Expert covers the form of each horse in terms of wins (or places), runs, and win (or place) percentage for each of five key areas namely going, class, course, distance, and field size. This can be seen in the screenshot below where I have clicked the tab for the 2.52 at Beverley run on the 23^rd April of this year:

The parameters I am using in terms of generating the percentages for each horse in each category are:

2-year placed form (see top left above the grid), all races and all codes (see top right above the grid).

These parameters are the same as I used in last week’s article because clearly the data across both articles needs to be consistent. The display is colour coded to help us see things more clearly at a glance: green for a higher percentage rate, amber for a middling percentage, and red for a low percentage. Horses with no form under a certain condition have grey figures.

In the above example I have ranked the runners by their scores which are based on The Shortlist scoring system (The ‘Sh’ column). Green percentages score three points, amber percentages score one, grey percentages zero and red percentages minus one. Hence across the five areas a horse can obtain a top score 15 (five greens), whereas the lowest score would be -5 (five reds). Users may change the parameters and dropdowns so, for example, if you prefer to look at 5-year win only form just click the relevant circles. Once this is done, the Shortlist scores will change.

In the illustrated race above I’m Next had the maximum score of 15, while Novello Lad and Ventura Express were joint second on nine, with Trilby ranked fourth scoring seven points. For the record, the result of the race was as follows:

The top ranked horse I’m Next went onto win this race, priced at 11/8. Trilby, the fourth ranked runner, was second at 9/2 while one of the joint second ranked runners Novello Lad came third at 10/1. Based on what we found out last week in terms of the performance of the rankings, this type of result will occur much more than say three horses ranked near the bottom coming first, second and third.

A line on ranking methodology

Before getting into the meat and bones of this second piece, let me briefly discuss ranking or rating methods for a few lines. The key to a good set of ratings/rankings is not whether the top-rated/ranked runners make a long-term profit. Of course, that would be an added bonus but, essentially, to measure the effectiveness of a rating set we need to look at the win strike rate and the percentages of rivals beaten (PRBs).

The top-rated/ranked runner should have the highest win percentage, the second highest should win next most often, and so on, gradually reducing for the other runners. Ideally there would be a significant difference in strike rate between say the top-rated with the fourth rated, and likewise with the fourth rated and the tenth rated, and so on. This type of finding would ideally be mirrored in the PRB stats.

It was noted in my first article that the PRBs produced the perfect graph when assessing Instant Expert Shortlist score rankings with the PRBs decreasing from highest ranked to lowest. The win strike rates also showed the right type of pattern although the seventh and eight ranked were marginally out of kilter scoring maybe 1 to 1.5% higher than would be expected. Overall, the rankings had the right 'feel' based on all the stats I uncovered.

Instant Expert Rank #1 by Betfair Starting Price

Having set the scene, coupled with some key recaps, let me start to crunch the numbers once more. Last time, I looked into the combined performance of the top two ranked runners in terms of their Instant Expert (IE) Shortlist scores across different areas. To start with here, I want to focus solely on the top ranked runner starting with...

Instant Expert (IE) top ranked runner by Price

I want to see whether the BSP prices of the top ranked horses make any difference to returns. I have split qualifiers into different price band groupings and here are the splits:

We would expect higher win rates for shorter priced runners, but it is interesting that the performance of the bigger priced top ranked runners, those BSP 15.0 or bigger, has been very poor. Overall, these qualifiers have managed just three wins from 111 runs (SR 2.7%) for a loss of £57.07 (ROI -51.4%). From this sample, it is clear that top ranked runners based on their Instant Expert Shortlist scores give the best value if priced under BSP 15.0.

Instant Expert (IE) top ranked runner by Price (4yo+ hcaps only)

Last week it was noted that the top two ranked runners combined performed far better when contesting 4yo+ handicaps compared with other race classifications. Therefore, I want to look at the top-ranked runners in 4yo+ handicaps using the same price band analysis. Here are the splits:

There were no wins at all for those priced BSP 15.0 or bigger – 0 from 37 to be precise. The well fancied runners, those under BSP 6.0, produced very solid looking results albeit from a modest sample size of 98 qualifiers. The overall results for horses priced under BSP 15.0 are 43 wins from 200 runs (SR 21.5%) for a profit of £41.83 (ROI +20.9%).

Instant Expert top ranked runner by Age (4yo+ hcaps only)

Sticking with 4yo+ handicaps for a minute, I want to see if the age of the horse has made any difference when it comes to the top ranked runner.

Based on these findings it does seem that once we get to horses aged seven or older, performance of the top ranked runner tails off notably. This older age group produced just two wins from 41 starts with losses of close to 81p in the £. Yes, it is small sample but comparing the PRBs, five- and six-yrear-olds combined had a PRB of 0.64, while those aged seven and up were significantly lower on 0.54.

Of course, finding value selections is the key to successful betting and looking for positive angles helps us in this regard. However, it is also important to try and find negative angles in order that we can discard (or at least downgrade) certain runners from our shortlisting process. If we can narrow down the field it will implicitly improve our chances of finding value selections. It needs to be said that we can never be 100% confident that discarded selections won’t win, because a handful always will; but if these runners represent very poor value, then in general they are worth discarding. We know we can't back every winner!

In the first article we saw that those ranked ninth and tenth produced significant losses of nearly 46p and 30p in the £ respectively. Combining their two records they delivered just 33 wins from 754 runners (SR 4.4%) for losses of £272.75 (ROI -36.2%).

Instant Expert rank of 9 or lower by Class

Now I appreciate that these runners ranked ninth or lower will only be relevant in races of at least nine runners, but I still want to share a few stats I have found for this group.

A look at these lower ranked runners by Class of Race. Here are the splits:

As expected, we see losses across the board. However, there is no clear pattern in terms of whether lower ranked runners have struggled more in higher or lower classes. The Class 5 returns are somewhat out of kilter, but a BSP 50.0 winner is responsible for making the ROI% lower than perhaps what it should be. What the stats from different classes do tell us is that these runners struggle when racing in all class levels.

IE rank of 9 or lower by Race Classification

I am now going to split the races by 3yo only, 3yo+ and 4yo+ races to see what effect this has had on these lower ranked horses:

We see a lower strike rate in both the 3yo only and the 3yo+ group. These two also endured substantial losses to BSP. The 4yo+ group produced the best strike rate and almost broke even. However, all is not what it seems, as two of the 4yo+ winners were priced at BSP 50.0. Taking those two out and losses for the remaining 258 qualifiers would have been substantial, equating to around 38 pence in the £.

Digging a bit deeper, here are the numbers when we restrict all nine and lower ranked runners to those that were priced under BSP 15.0.

So even as we move towards the more fancied end of the betting market losses remained steep, although the 3yo only data set is small.

One final stat I wish to share before moving on is the performance of these lower ranked runners (9+) when aged three. If we look at all 3yo qualifiers that had a BSP of 10.0 or bigger, just one of these runners won from 192 qualifiers. Losses were £166.50 (ROI -86.7%).

Individual Instant Expert Shortlist scores by PRB

Having looked at a plethora of Instant Expert Shortlist ranking stats across both articles, let's now consider the performance of individual scores. As noted earlier, these scores range from the highest, 15, to the lowest, -5. I am going to examine PRBs first and, in order for them to fit within the graph, I have combined next door positions. Hence the highest two possible scores have been combined (15 and 13), followed by the next two (12 and 11), all the way down to the two lowest scores of -4 and -5. Remember, it's not possible to achieve a Shortlist score of 14.

We see a very similar graph to the one I published in the first article which I referenced earlier – the one that examined the PRBs for different ranked runners. The higher ranked runners had higher PRBs, and we see the same pattern here. The very lowest scores have commensurately low PRBs so, on this evidence at least, horses with a score of minus two or less can generally be safely ignored. Even those scoring 0 or -1 have a note of caution about them with a PRB of just 0.45. For the record, the top score of 15 produced the highest PRB, at 0.62, with a score 13 achieving a PRB of 0.58, while 11 and 12 both scored 0.56, and 9 and 10 both hit 0.55: that's very pleasing linearity indeed.

Instant Expert individual scores

Let me now share the strike rates, profit/loss, and ROI percentages for each individual Instant Expert (IE) Shortlist Score.

Some of the sample sizes are relatively small such as for the scores of 10 or 12, which is one of three reasons why we cannot necessarily be seduced by bottom lines for these individual scores. The second reason is that some individual scores will have been skewed somewhat by a big priced winner or two. One such example is a BSP 80.0 winner for the -5 group. If we weed that winner out and examine the other 237 runners which scored -5, the ROI% drops to -35% and correlating far better with all the other horses whose Shortlist score was a negative value. The third reason is that a score of 1 or 2, or indeed even smaller, could actually be the highest Shortlist score in the race. One such example of this can be found from a Yarmouth race in July 2024 which is shown below:

Merrimack was top ranked with a Shortlist score of just 2. For the record, he went on to win the race.

When looking at the strike rates for individual Shortlist scores there was not perfect correlation in terms of the strike rates always dropping as the scores decreased. However, when looking more generally the right strike rate pattern emerged and this can be seen to best effect when we group the highest IE scores together (11, 12, 13 and 15) and compare them to the lowest (-1, -2, -3, -4, -5).

Grouping like this does help to create more robust sample sizes and also smooths the data. This is further evidence of the potential effectiveness of Instant Expert, although I appreciate I have only looked at 575 UK handicap races, all run over 5f and from a single year, 2024. However, for this sample the correlation between ranking results and individual scores is primarily positive and makes me more hopeful that other result sets will produce similar results.

Instant Expert individual scores (4yo+ hcaps only)

It makes sense next to look at the 4yo+ handicap only data as these races to date have shown the most positive findings. Due to modest sample sizes, I have grouped the individual Instant Expert (IE) Shortlist scores into bands:

More positive correlation with both win rates and returns. This is replicated once more when we compare the PRBs:

For the record, horses scoring between 11 and 15 in 3yo only and 3yo+ handicaps had a lower PRB of 0.56. As with my first Instant Expert research offering, it seems 4yo+ handicaps see the Instant Expert at its most effective, when there is generally more data available from which to populate the scores and colour codings that the view thrives on.

Summary

In this article horses with negative IE Shortlist scores have performed very poorly across the board and are horses I believe we should be ignoring nine times out of ten. This type of performance is similar to what we noted with horses ranked ninth or lower in the first article. The same pattern is occurring – the higher ranked runners have totally outperformed lower ranked runners; higher individual Shortlist scores have outperformed lower scores.

Clearly, these two articles have only scratched the surface as far as the Geegeez Instant Expert is concerned. However, the early findings have shown that this tool has real potential to help pinpoint runners which should offer good value and others which likely represent poor value. Making money over the longer term when betting is about finding value. If we can do this regularly enough, we will come out in front. And, crucially, using tools like Instant Expert means we'll have fun in the process!

The Instant Expert tab is something I always look at when analysing races for potential betting opportunities and, I hope via these two articles, I have converted more Gold members to do likewise.

Until next time...

- DR

A First Look Under the Instant Expert Bonnet

10 May 2026/in Dave Renham/by Dave Renham

An initial investigation into Geegeez Instant Expert

I wonder how many people who read my weekly articles here are Geegeez Gold members? If you are, I think you're going to like this one... and if not, maybe it will give a gentle nudge to try things out, writes Dave Renham.

Introduction

One of the many benefits of being a Gold member are the daily racecards. These give far more ‘bang for our buck’ compared with other racing sites. Below is a screenshot of the racecard for a contest at Wolverhampton on Tuesday 5^th May of this year:

As we can see, there is the usual type of information we would see on most racecards such as the draw, recent form figures, name of the horse, age of the horse, weight carried, the trainer, jockey and official rating. However, we also get to have the Racing Post Rating (RPR) for each horse, the Racing Post Topspeed figure (TS), and Peter May’s excellent ratings (SR).

These extras are just the start, as if we cast our eyes to the top of the Racecard we can see some tabs: Full Form, Profiler, Instant Expert, Pace, Draw, Trends and Odds. Clicking on these tabs presents a wealth of further information and data in order to assist with our race analysis. There are also some icons just below these tabs (between the word ‘Horse’ and ‘Age’) with breeding data, jockey and trainer form etc, etc. So, to coin a phrase, these racecards are literally gold!

In this article I want to focus on the Instant Expert tab in a little more detail. This tab is exclusive to Geegeez, and the tab lets us see a variety of key data for horses as shown below using the same race as above:

Instant Expert gives us punters key horse information. It has a unique ability to summarise the form profile of every runner in the race into a single easily digestible view. It covers the form of each horse in terms of wins (or places), runs, and win (or place) percentage for each of five key areas namely going, class, course, distance, and field size. It also compares today’s official rating for each horse with their last winning official rating. The display is colour coded to help see things more clearly at a glance: green for a higher percentage rate, amber for a middling percentage, and red for a low percentage. Horses with no form under a certain condition have grey figures. It should be noted that the past data is taken from UK and Irish racing only so will not include overseas form.

Users have the ability to change parameters easily. In the above example I am using placed form over two years. This is my favoured combination, but at the touch of a button we can change this to one or five years, or even look beyond that for older horses using the ‘All’ tab. We can look at win data only if preferred over any of the four-time frame options. Also, we can expand individual areas if required; so for example when I look at All Weather races, after looking at the stats for the specific going, I will click the going tab, so it includes both standard going and standard to slow to give me extra data. Clearly, we can do the same with all other variables should we wish and I will often do this for longer distances on the distance dropdown. For example, if a National Hunt race is being run over 2 miles 1 furlong, I will expand a little by including past results from any race from 2 miles to 2 miles 2 furlongs.

In addition to drilling into each horse within the five key areas, we are able to look at sires, trainers and jockeys within those areas too should we wish. Sire data is particularly useful for 2yo races for example, when the majority of runners have little or no past form to speak of. Trainer data is something most punters like to look at, and I will always look at the trainer data when analysing any race. This Instant Expert tool is exceptionally useful, and we can crunch so much data within a matter of a few seconds.

In the last few months there has been a new addition to the Instant Expert template, namely a new column with scores based on The Shortlist scoring system. Green percentages score three points, one point for amber, none for grey, and minus one for red. Hence across the five areas horses can obtain a top score of 15 (five greens) and the lowest score is -5 (five reds). The scores update when you change the variables and dropdowns above the main data grid. In the screenshot I shared above, the Shortlist column has the heading ‘Sh’ and is highlighted in the green box.

In this race, we can see Kento had the highest Shortlist score of 11, whereas Tomarlo had the lowest figure of -3.

Having set the scene, I am now going to share some research I have undertaken connected with these Shortlist scores. I have used a data set that I used for run style / pace articles a year ago, in May 2025. I will be looking at 5f handicap data from the whole of 2024 with the exception of 2yo handicaps, or nurseries, due to limited past horse form.

This sample covers 575 races and over 5000 horses with their individual Instant Expert Shortlist totals. This, therefore, is a reasonable sized sample, and I must say that adding over 5000 Shortlist scores to my Excel sheet was not the quickest process! [We're very grateful! - Ed.]

After all the leg work to input these individual scores, I hoped that I would find something worth sharing! Let’s see…

I am going to write this research up while crunching the numbers so, at this point, I do not know which way this will go. Normally, I do all the research, then crunch the numbers and then write it up. Therefore, it will read more in the present tense than usual.

So, to recap, the highest possible Shortlist score is 15 and the lowest -5 so one area I plan to look into will be the performance of different individual Shortlist scores. I guess the hope is that the higher scores, 12, 13 and 15, (14 is not a score that can be achieved), would certainly win more often and hopefully prove better value, than the lowest scores such as negative values of -1 to -5. However, there is a slight caveat to this because there will be plenty of races that are contested by horses with modest or poor long-term records and hence a Shortlist score of 3 or 4 could in fact be the highest Shortlist score in the race; so I will also need to rank the Shortlist scores in each race. One would hope and indeed expect that the higher ranked positions would win more often than the lower ranked ones and, assuming that is the case, does that lead to a difference in returns?

In terms of these ranked positions, there will be some horses in most races who have the same Shortlist score and therefore they will be treated as ‘joints’. In other words, if we have a five-runner race and the Shortlist scores are 13, 11, 8, 8 and 0 then the horses scoring ‘8’ with be ranked both ranked third, there will be no fourth ranked horse, with the horse with ‘0’ being ranked fifth. Fairly obviously I hope the 13 score would be ranked one or top, with the ‘11’ second.

In this article I will start by looking at the results with no price cap as I just want to examine the raw data first. Obviously, the odd big priced winner could skew the bottom lines, but I will mention it when that happens. I will probably use a price cap at various junctures, I’m just not sure exactly when as yet.

Instant Expert Shortlist (Sh) – Performance by Rank

My starting point is to look at the ranked positions of the Shortlist scores across all the handicap races in my sample. I began by comparing their win percentages / win strike rate. The graph below shows the breakdown:

The hope was that we would see the usual sliding scale from left to right as we normally do when we look at any type of ‘ranking’. Generally, that has been the case here, although those ranked seven and eight are slightly out of kilter. I think because there were a good number of ‘joint’ positions we should expect slightly more overlap than normal. The good news though is when we look at either end of the graph we see the top ranked runners winning the most often and those ninth or worse winning the least. Not only that but the top ranked have by far the best win rate and likewise those ninth or lower have by far the worst.

To build the picture further I want to look at the PRBs (Percentage of Rivals) for each rank. This metric essentially creates much bigger sample sizes as the figures are affected by all the runners in every race. Hence, I am hoping this graph will have the near perfect left to right sliding scale:

0.58 is a strong PRB for the top ranked and we essentially see our ‘normal’ type of graph when analysing the performance of ratings or in this case rankings.

So, how does all this equate then into profit and loss returns? As I tend to do in all my pieces, I will use Betfair SP (BSP) less 2% commission on any winning bets for these calculations. Here are the splits:

As far as I am concerned, it makes excellent reading if focusing solely on either end of the table. The top ranked runners have by far the best win strike rate, while the top two ranked runners combined have seen very small losses overall. Meanwhile those ranked ninth and tenth have produced significant losses of nearly 46p and 30p in the £ respectively. These definitely look to be horses to avoid.

However, we can see that those horses ranked seventh and eighth both made decent overall profits. At first glance this is not ideal as I would have preferred to see any profitable figures at, or near the top of, the table. However, both of their profit figures have been skewed by one big priced winner in each case. A horse called Rainyniteingeorgia won at Lingfield on 22^nd December 2024 at the odds of 127.21 when ranked seventh. Take that winner out, and the remaining 427 horses ranked in seventh place would have made an overall loss. In terms of the eighth ranked winners Big Nut won at Musselburgh in August ‘24 at odds of 80.0 which wipes out a huge chunk of the eighth ranked runners’ profits.

Instant Expert Shortlist (Sh) – top two ranked runners

I want now to dig into the top two ranked runners in a bit more detail as when combined together they have not been that far from breaking even (losses of just under 2.5 pence in the £). With these combined results I am going to see if they have performed better or worse within different areas. To begin with, I am going to look at Class of Race. Here are the splits for each Class level combining the results of the top two ranked runners:

The figures do not fluctuate massively. Lower win rates in Class 2 and 3 races is what I would expect as these races tend not only to be very competitive but have bigger fields. Bigger fields mean lower win percentages. Also, the data sets for both of these class brackets are relatively small. Returns are similar across the different classes, although in Class 4 races the losses were a tad above the rest.

How about if we split the top two ranked runners by the Race Age Classification? There are three main types being 3yo only races, 3yo+ (races for horses 3 years old and older), and 4yo+ (4 years old and older races). There was one 6yo+ race in the sample which is obviously too small to worry about!

Before digging into the stats for each I am hoping to find slightly better results for the more exposed runners, namely the 4yo+ races. I am also expecting that the 3yo+ races would be the least predictable with less exposed 3yos running against more exposed rivals. However, I have been known to be wrong before! Right, let's see how the top two ranked runners have fared across the three different age classification types:

The 3yo only results are interesting; definitely better than I would have expected. The results for the 3yo+ and 4yo+ races seem to match my initial hypothesis which is pleasing. There is a significant difference in the strike rates between 4yo+ and 3yo+ races for these top two ranked runners. Also, the 4yo+ results for these runners see very decent returns of close to 16p in the £, compared with losses of over 17p in the £ in 3yo+ races.

However, before we get too carried away, the 4yo+ figures did have a BSP winner of 55.0 which accounts for a decent chunk of the overall profit figure. Therefore, it makes sense to implement a price cap when comparing these 3yo+ and 4yo+ results to avoid bigger priced runners potentially skewing bottom lines. Thus, for the next dataset I will include only horses that were priced under 15.0 BSP. Let's see if this changes things or not. I will build up the tension by first comparing the win and each way (win & placed) percentages for each:

We see positive correlation with the 4yo+ top two ranked runners having outperformed their 3yo+ counterparts in both the win percentage and the EW percentage. This also correlates so far with what saw before I introduced a price cap. What about the profit/loss returns? The table below shows the splits and does the 4yo+ group come out on top as before?

They have indeed, and comfortably so. Based on this sample, and I appreciate it is just one sample of races, it seems that the top two rated runners from the Instant Expert Shortlist scores should be considered a strong positive in 4yo+ handicaps.

Sticking with 4yo+ handicaps, how have the top two rated performed when they finished first, second or third LTO? Let’s find out:

These figures are very impressive with each one showing a profit. I should add a caveat that each individual LTO position sample is fairly modest. However, to create a bigger sample, if we combine the results to include any horse that finished in the top three LTO we get 50 wins from 195 (SR 25.6%) for a healthy BSP profit of £54.17 (ROI +27.8%). Based on these findings, horses that finished in the first three LTO require close scrutiny if racing next time in a 4yo+ handicap when in the top two of the Instant Expert Shortlist scores.

Shortlist Rank Comparison: 3yo+ Handicaps vs 4yo+ Handicaps

Before finishing I want to share the PRBs for all individual Instant Expert Shortlist ranks for both 4yo+ handicaps and 3yo+ handicaps. We have seen already that the top two ranked runners have performed much better in 4yo+ races. How about using a PRB comparison across the board? The chart below gives us a neat graphical comparison:

This graph perfectly illustrates why, for this sample of races, the ranking of Instant Expert Shortlist scores would have worked better in 4yo+ handicaps compared with their 3yo+ counterparts. The graph highlights the edge to higher ranked runners in 4yo+ handicaps coupled with the fact that the lower ranked runners perform less well when compared to the lower ranked 3yo+ groupings.

It is important to reiterate that what the graph shows is what we should expect from drilling into each horse in terms of their record on the going, in the specific race class, at the course, over the distance, and within a specific field size grouping. Handicappers aged four or older, as a rule, would have raced more often than 3yo handicappers over a full 2-year period. This would be especially true in the first half of the year, as 3yos only have two full years of races once they reach the end of their 3yo year, and that's assuming they started racing early on as juveniles.

More data for each of the five areas should be expected to be more robust and reliable.

When I started this research, I was heading into the dark somewhat. I assumed I would have enough decent material for an article and, as it turns out, I have plenty more to delve into. And I haven’t even started to look at the individual Shortlist scores from 15 to -5 yet. All in good time!.

Based on my findings so far, the Instant Expert tab is one that is not only unique to Geegeez, but it really might have the potential to almost single-handedly improve our bottom line. That certainly seems the case for the data analysed to date.

Next week I will continue my research and share the rest of my findings.

Until then...

- DR

Making Sense of 3yo Class 2 Turf Handicaps

5 May 2026/in Dave Renham/by Dave Renham

Class 2 turf handicaps for 3yos only – a study

In this article I am going to take an in depth look at three-year-old (3yo) only Class 2 handicaps run on the turf, writes Dave Renham. These are the highest level of handicap, so they tend to be very competitive. We often hear pundits saying something like "this horse could be a Group horse in a handicap", and there will be some of these 3yos which prove them right by going on to tackle Listed and Group level in the future.

The data have been taken from UK flat races (turf only) spanning eight seasons, from 2018 to 2025. The profit/loss figures have been calculated to Betfair SP (BSP) less 2% commission. It should also be noted that 65% of all qualifying races were staged at one of four tracks: Ascot, Goodwood, Newmarket and York. Plenty of top-quality handicaps held at top-quality venues, and we should expect around 35-40 qualifying races from this point in time this season.

Market Factors

Let me kick off by looking at market factors. In the table below I have split the results by BSP:

Horses at the shorter end of the price range (BSP 4.5 or less) performed well, while there was not a single winner priced above BSP 70.0 which is slightly surprising. The 28.01 to 70.0 group have edged into profit but this often happens if we get two or three more big-priced winners than the norm across a specific time frame.

Based on the earlier evidence, it will probably come as no surprise to hear that favourites have made a blind profit over the past eight seasons. The favourite stats have been thus:

Considering the competitiveness of these races, for favourites to return close to 16p in the £ ‘blind’ has been rather impressive. Favourites also did well at two courses in particular, Ascot and Newmarket, as can be seen in the following table:

Favourites also excelled from a small sample at Newbury with nine of the 14 winning (SR 64.3%) for a healthy profit of £23.50 (ROI +167.9%).

In terms of negative stats for favourites, market leaders struggled when racing up in the North or Scotland. In these contests their record reads 28 wins from 113 favs (SR 24.8%) for a loss of £14.67 to £1 level stakes, equating to losses of 13p in the £.

One final set of data for favourites that I will share looks at different distance bands. I have split the races distances into five groups in order to provide better sample sizes. The groups are 5f to 6.5f, 7f to 1m.5f, 1m 1f to 1m 2.5f, 1m 3f to 1m 4.5f and 1m 5f or longer. The BSP ROI percentages for each group have been as follows:

All five groups proved profitable during the review period suggesting real consistency across the board when it comes to market leaders.

Having looked at the market, it is time to look into other areas. For the remainder of this piece, I will be using a BSP price cap of 18.0 to avoid any winners especially from the BSP 28.01 to 70.0 bracket potentially skewing individual bottom lines.

Sex of horse

Let me share some data now in terms of the sex of the horse running. It should be noted that there are far more male runners contesting these races than females. However, when female runners have competed against their male counterparts, they have struggled somewhat. So, below I have considered only mixed sex races to get a fair comparison between the two. I want to share the A/E indices for each group first – these are based on BSP prices so are the most accurate:

Males have offered far better value than females in these races and, when we look at the win rates / returns, we see positive correlation with that finding:

Male runners delivered a better strike rate and in terms of returns would have lost us around 22p in the £ less than females. Female runners have been relatively rare, but they have not been good investments.

It is also worth splitting male horse data to review the performance of colts versus geldings. These results include male only races as well as the mixed sex ones. The splits were thus:

As we can see, colts have comfortably outperformed geldings so that is another useful nugget of information we could potentially utilise in the future in these contests.

Weight carried

A look at weight carried now. These splits do not include any jockey claim, so the chart displays the actual weights each horse was allotted for the race. In terms of win rate, we witnessed the following:

This pattern, where horses carrying more weight win more often, tends to be the case in all types of flat handicaps. However, prices are generally well adjusted for this so that there is no clear edge to those horses that win more often. Time to see how the splits pan out here in terms of profit/loss/returns:

Returns wise, the highest weighted runners only lost a small amount. There has been no clear pattern, although I would be a little wary of backing lower weighted runners (8st 7lb or less) without a very good reason. It should be noted that if we dropped to 8st 4lb or less this cohort would have lost about 8p in the £ more tipping the scales at a little over 24p in the £.

Previous Career wins

Has the number of wins a horse has previously achieved made a difference over the past eight years? Let’s take a look:

One or two prior wins seems to have been the optimum. Horses that have won three or more times were very poor value – I guess why this has been the case is because these runners have become more exposed and, therefore, open to less improvement. Indeed, horses that won at least three times and had raced at least six times had an even worse record, winning just 39 times from 340 (SR 11.5%) for losses of £85.07 (ROI -25%).

Considering briefly the number of previous runs in handicaps a horse has had, if we concentrate on runners that had at least six runs previously in handicaps they have scored just 9.6% of the time (21 wins from 219) for losses of £63.54 (ROI -29%).

Again, I am guessing some of these animals were just less open to improvement. Compare this to horses which had previously run just once in a handicap, such types enjoyin a positive record of 77 wins from 511 runners (SR 15.1%) for a profit of £26.54 (ROI +5.2%). These runners were far less exposed, with more scope for improvement, from their current handicap mark.

Finishing position LTO

Normally with last time out (LTO) finishing position we see LTO winners following up more often than runners-up, who in turn win more often than LTO thirds, and so on. We tend to see a sloping graph with the bars getting lower, the further down the field the horse finished last time. However, that pattern has not occurred for these races as the graph below shows:

The left-hand side of the graph starts in a familiar fashion, but then we see the bar rising on the right-hand side. Hence it seems that LTO position has not quite been as important as it can be for other types of races. The full splits were as follows:

The value clearly has been with horses that finished fifth or worse LTO. They produced very strong profit figures as well as a decent win strike rate. These numbers for the 5th or worse cohort can be improved if restricting last time out runs to handicaps only. The figures then read 62 wins from 402 (SR 15.4%) for a profit of £117.08 (ROI +29.1%).

Course LTO

A quick look to see if the LTO course data has given us any past positives. Well, there have been four LTO courses that would have produced a profit. These have been:

Four of the top tracks in the country which I guess should come as no surprise, three of them representing 75% of the major 3yo Class 2 turf handicap hosts. The LTO York figures have been particularly eye-catching.

Trainer Angles

The final area to look at is trainers. Good individual trainer datasets have been hard to come by for most handlers but nine have had at least 50 horses run in these events (with the 18.0 BSP price cap) and their stats are shown in the table below. The trainers have been ordered alphabetically:

Charlie Appleby, Andrew Balding, Clive Cox, the Gosden stable and Richard Hannon all performed well and made fair profits. In contrast, Ralph Beckett and Richard Fahey have both struggled, posting significant losses.

Appleby, Balding, the Gosdens and Hannon also fared notably well when saddling the favourite.

Summary

This piece of research has highlighted plenty of positives as well as negatives in these handicaps. Here is a quick ready reckoner for us:

Until next time...

- DR

The WORST Draw / Run Style Tracks in 2026

28 April 2026/in Dave Renham/by Dave Renham

The draw and run style combinations we need to avoid

The inspiration for this piece was the recent Form Hacker’s Guide researched and compiled by Matt, and I suggest readers to take a look if not done so already, writes Dave Renham. In those two excellent pieces (which you can read here and here), Matt started by focusing on 10-runner handicaps on turning tracks, expanding later to 8- to 12-runner handicaps.

His research noted that the wider drawn runners generally struggled, as did those drawn 1 (those closest to the inside rail) if they did not get away well. He also noted that races of 1 mile or less were best as they tend to be run at a true gallop. My aim for this article is to build on those initial Form Hacker findings.

Approach

So, this was my plan. I wanted to highlight the worst course and distance (C&D) draw/run style combinations in the UK. I decided to look at handicap races only but expanded the remit to 8+ runner handicaps from 5 furlongs to 1 mile: the majority of these were 8 to 12 runner affairs. Unlike Matt's research, I also included races run on straight courses. Data has been taken from between 2021 to 2025, so five full years/seasons.

Being able to consistently find horses that represent poor value is extremely useful when it comes to improving your bottom line. The more horses we can (reasonably) confidently put a line through the better. If we can ignore, say, three horses in a 12-runner field due to the chance of any of them winning being considerably lower than their prices suggest, then we suddenly turn the betting market in our favour.

For example, imagine this hypothetical market on Betfair for a 12-runner handicap:

This market gives a book percentage of 102.3% (that is, an overround of 2.3%), so the type of market we will find on Betfair for this sort of race. Let us imagine that the horses ranked 4, 6 and 10 in the betting can be as good as ignored due to their draw and likely run style. That takes out just under 21% from the market book and turns the odds well in our favour.

Now, I appreciate that one of those horses we eliminated could win, but if we are right with our research then this will happen sufficiently rarely that the method will still give us a decent edge over the longer term. It’s time to crack on.

Mechanics

On geegeez.co.uk, we are able to look at draw and run style combinations through the Draw Analyser. Below is a 'heat map' screenshot taken from Chepstow over 6f for this recent five-year time frame in 8+ runner handicaps:

The numbers in this heat map image are PRBs (Percentage of Rivals Beaten). To refresh, Percentage of Rivals Beaten (PRB) is a calculation based on a horse's finishing position in relation to field size. It makes key distinctions between a horse finishing, say, third in a five-horse race (PRB 50%, two rivals beaten, beaten by two rivals) and finishing third in an eleven-horse race (PRB 80%, eight rivals beaten, beaten by two).

PRB is beneficial for researchers like me because it helps to make datasets bigger. In racing we are often blighted by small datasets, relative to what general statistics would consider so at any rate. And when we then try to discern knowledge from the data by looking only at wins, we ignore nine-tenths of the information we have (assuming an average field size of ten, one winner, nine losers).

The Draw Analyser also gives us more extensive data for each draw/run style group, and this is shown for the same Chepstow example below:

We are able to see in this one table the sample sizes in more detail. They include win and placed percentages, profits/losses (SP and Betfair SP), A/E indices, Impact Values and the PRBs.

On geegeez.co.uk, we express PRB as a number in decimal form between 0 and 1 rather than a percentage. So 0.69 for example, the PRB for the low drawn led group (see table above), equates to 69% while the low drawn held up figure of 0.39 equates to 39%, and so on. The key thing to remember about PRB figures is that a par score is 50% of rivals beaten, or 0.50, so better than 0.55 is positive and worse than 0.45 is a fair negative.

To qualify as a ‘poor’ C&D draw/run style combination I am looking for groups of runners with draw/run style PRBs below 0.40, as this indicates these horses have really struggled. In addition, there must have been at least 40 horses within each specific C&D draw/run style combination which will give us a decent PRB sample size from which to work from.

Below are the worst 20 draw/run style C&Ds starting with those with PRBs of 0.38. The C&Ds are not strictly in order of poorness culminating with the ‘worst’, but in general the later C&Ds will show a slightly stronger negative bias.

Let's get to it!

The Worst 20 Course/Distance Draw/Run Style Combinations in UK Flat Racing

Carlisle 6f – draw third LOW; run style – HELD UP

We start with Carlisle over 6f. This C&D sees runners turn right roughly 150 yards after the start and then take a further shallow right turn just after two furlongs, with a final slight turn between the two- and three-furlong pole. Let’s look at the splits for low drawn held up runners:

The win rate was higher than both the placed% and the PRB of 0.38 suggests it should be. An extra win or two over 71 races can change the win percentage considerably. I surmise though, that over a longer period the win rate would be nearer 5 or 6% based on the PRB. All in all, low drawn held up runners over this C&D have been horses that have generally found it tough.

Chester 7f – draw third MIDDLE; run style – HELD UP

Chester is the tightest track in the country, so I had expected to see it make the list somewhere. Over 7f, horses positioned in the middle third of the draw have been at a significant disadvantage as the figures below show:

These runners lost a little over 70p in the £ over the past five years. I am guessing that some of the runners get squeezed somewhat from both lower and higher drawn runners starting more quickly and, on this tight track, being behind a wall of horses makes life very tricky. For the record low drawn hold up horses have also struggled with a PRB of 0.42.

Leicester 6f – draw third HIGH; run style – HELD UP

To the Midlands and Leicester. The 6f trip at Leicester is run over on a straight course and high drawn held up types have had a poor time of it as the stats show:

Just the three wins from 64 qualifiers, and when we look at the stall position rather than simply highest third of the draw, horses drawn 10 or higher that were held up won no races from 40 runners. Indeed, horses that raced in mid-division when drawn 10 or higher over 6f here also failed to score, this time from 34 runners. Thus, high drawn runners that raced mid div or were held up have seen 74 consecutive losers over this 6f trip at Leicester.

York 1 mile – draw third HIGH; run style – HELD UP

I have always been a fan of this C&D as low draws have enjoyed a strong edge in such races for many years. York's mile handicaps are run around a bend and the horses drawn in the top third (high), when held up, have struggled as the numbers below illustrate:

This C&D witnessed extremely low win and placed percentages for the high/held up cohort, especially considering the very decent sample size. Also, if we concentrate on handicaps with bigger fields, horses drawn 13 or higher when held up won just once from 61 (SR 1.6%) with only 3 horses placing (SR 4.9%). This is the strongest bias seen to date and clearly we should steer clear of habitual hold up horses drawn high over this C&D.

Windsor 1 mile – draw third LOW; run style – HELD UP

Windsor is a unique flat track as the racecourse is a figure of eight, although over a mile it is effectively like a round course. Horses drawn low that were held up really struggled since 2021 as these numbers indicate:

As we can see, not only has the PRB figure been very poor, but all other metrics have followed suit. Both the win and placed rates were extremely low and if backing all 115 runners we would have lost just over two-thirds of stakes. It should also be noted that horses drawn in the lowest stall (1) have performed dreadfully with 0 wins and just one placed effort from 26 runs; the PRB stands at a dismal 0.30. This backs up Matt’s findings in his Form Hacker’s Guide where he noted that slow starting horses drawn 1 tended to really struggle.

We can also see that the runners drawn in the bottom third of the draw struggled year on year when viewing the win percentages for each year. The graph below shows the splits:

In addition, the yearly PRBs correlate positively with the win percentages with four of the five years seeing PRBs of 0.39 or lower.

Musselburgh 1 mile – draw third LOW; run style – HELD UP

Musselburgh is a course I like from a punting perspective as over 7f and 1 mile there is a very strong front running bias. Hence, it comes as no surprise that we see hold up horses struggling over the mile trip when drawn low. Here are the splits:

As can be seen these low drawn runners have really found it tough going. They have the same PRB as the other C&Ds shared to date, but the lowest win rate, lowest A/E index and lowest IV value. If we had backed all 44 runners we would have lost over 85p in the £. Hold up horses drawn either 1 or 2 went 0 from 21 with just two placing in the five year review period. Low drawn hold ups are a ‘no no’ from a backing perspective.

Chepstow 7f – draw third LOW; run style – HELD UP

Chepstow’s 7f races are run on a straight track and hold up horses have struggled generally (we will see more evidence of this in a minute). Those hold up types drawn low produced the following stats:

Just a single win and, although the place% is one of the highest we have seen so far, when we compare it to the ‘LED’ place% over this C&D (all draw thirds combined) we see that this stands at 44.4%. There is quite a difference between the two percentages.

The next C&D on the list is the first where the PRB drops to 0.37 and it happens to be the same C&D as this one!

Chepstow 7f – draw third MIDDLE; run style – HELD UP

It is the middle third of the draw this time combined once again with held up runners. Here are their splits:

We see similar figures for most metrics, although the place% is lower than the high drawn figure previously shared. It should be noted that hold ups from the highest third also struggled and almost made the list as well but their PRB of 0.41 was just above the cut-off point.

It should also be noted that when we look at ALL hold up horses over this C&D (all draw thirds combined) that started in the top three of the betting, only two of 32 won for hefty losses of over 77p in the £.

Ayr 6f – draw third HIGH; run style – HELD UP

Back up to Scotland and one of the sprint trips at Ayr next. Here are the stats:

The win rate looks slightly inflated based on the PRB and Place% but, having said that, backing all runners would have still incurred losses of £74.75 (ROI -65%). The bias against high drawn held up horses seems to have been accentuated on softer ground. On going described as good to soft or softer the PRB was just 0.32 over the past five years with a win percentage of under 5%.

Nottingham 6f – draw third LOW; run style – HELD UP

Over to Nottingham now and low drawn runners when held up off the pace performed poorly between 2021 and 2025. Their stats were as follows:

Just the two wins from the 50 hold up horses and the PRB as with Ayr 6f stands at 0.37. It may be that this bias is stronger on slower ground because for the 19 qualifiers who ran on good to soft or slower their PRB was a measly 0.31. They did manage one win from those 19 runners, but no other horse managed to place. Also, when we look at the other hold up horses from middle and high draws their performance on easier ground was much worse also. Hence this gives extra confidence that slower ground here makes it even harder for hold up horses.

Lingfield AW 5f – draw third HIGH; run style – HELD UP

Lingfield's all-weather (AW) track next. The 5f trip is slightly unusual as round course 5-furlong tracks go because the stalls are placed on the outside, rather than next to the inside rail. I wonder if this is why high drawn hold up horses have struggled, especially when factoring in that the first turn at Lingfield occurs before a furlong of the race has been completed.

Hold up horses are either going to be trapped very wide having to go the longest route or, if they dive to the inside, they are likely to encounter significant traffic. We have a decent sample size supporting these assertions:

Such hold up horses over Lingfield's all-weather five incurred losses of 55p in the £ if backing all blind to £1 level stakes. Focusing on horses from the top three in the betting that were held up from one of the three highest draws, this cohort won just four of the 36 races (SR 11.1%) for a loss of £17.54 (ROI -48.7%).

Windsor 5f – draw third LOW; run style – HELD UP

5f at Windsor sees horses essentially race over a straight five though there is a slight kink at halfway, so horses on the inside (low) can get squeezed if racing off the pace and close to the rail. I am guessing this has been a contributing factor to the poor figures for this combination. The stats were as follows:

One win, and a placed rate of just one in seven. Compare this place% with that of early leaders here (any draw) which stands at 58%! Hence, front runners have been four times more likely to place than low drawn hold up horses over this 5f trip.

Backing all low drawn hold up horses over this 5-year period would have lost £50.22 (ROI -89.7%), and one additional finding is that on firmer ground (good to firm or firmer), the bias against hold ups seems to have strengthened still more. Under these conditions hold up runners were 0 from 33 with just three placed efforts; PRB 0.34.

This makes sense because, on firmer ground, the horses tend to congregate near the stands’ rail (low) meaning real traffic problems for hold up horses close to the rail. Conversely, on softer ground horses often fan out in the final two furlongs, racing middle to far side more, meaning that low drawn hold ups are not faced by a wall of horses sticking to the stands’ rail.

Wolverhampton 5f – draw third HIGH; run style – HELD UP

Our second AW C&D, again over 5f, this time at Wolverhampton. Here the stalls are positioned, as we would expect, on the inside and higher draws are at disadvantage regardless of run style. However, the disadvantage is made worse if they are held up as these stats show:

This is the biggest sample of the 20 C&Ds in this article so we can be very confident in the findings. Backing all high drawn hold up runners would generated eye-watering losses of £193.48 which equates to just under 58p in the £. Horses drawn high that raced midfield also performed poorly with a win rate of under 4% and a PRB of 0.42.

York 6f – draw third MIDDLE; run style – HELD UP

Coming from behind at York over 5f or 6f has always been difficult and middle drawn held up runners over 6f have had a particularly poor record in recent times:

The draw, as well as run style, has often been key here over the past few seasons with lower draws definitely enjoying an edge. Hence, middle and higher draws have tended to be at a disadvantage at most meetings. As well as the middle, high drawn hold up runners have also found it tough over 6f here winning just five races from 126 runners; PRB 0.41.

Catterick 7f – draw third LOW; run style – HELD UP

A look at 7f at Catterick now. This is a round course 7f where the stats have been as follows:

We see a very low win rate from a decent sample of over 100 runners. I mentioned earlier about Matt’s findings regarding horses drawn 1 struggling when running around a bend. This has definitely been the case here as hold up horses drawn 1 have won zero races from 26. It has not been any better for those drawn 2 either, that group going 0 from 21. Nine of those losers (both draws combined) started either favourite or second favourite.

Catterick 5f – draw third HIGH; run style – HELD UP

Over to the 5f trip at Catterick which is well known for favouring early speed. Hence, one would expect horses that have been held up to struggle and that has been the case. Those drawn high have produced the following stats:

Hold up horses have struggled regardless of post position here. Low drawn hold ups have a PRB of 0.41, while hold up horses drawn in the middle third of the draw appear next on this list...

Catterick 5f – draw third MIDDLE; run style – HELD UP

Horses drawn in the middle have also struggled over this C&D when being held up. As with the high drawn runners their PRB has ended up at 0.37. Here are all the relevant metrics:

We see a slightly lower win rate, coupled with a marginally higher placed rate. The A/E index though has been much lower as has the Impact Value (IV). I should also share that horses which raced mid-division from either a high or middle draw also performed poorly, winning just twice from 50 combined qualifiers (SR 4%).

It will come as no real surprise that there is a significant run style bias over this C&D as the graph below shows:

The graph combines all early leaders / front runners comparing their record to all hold up horses regardless of post position over this course and distance. This type of difference occurs at numerous courses over 5f.

Musselburgh 7f – draw third HIGH; run style – HELD UP

Back to Musselburgh over 7f this time where high drawn held up runners have produced a poor set of figures:

This is the lowest PRB so far standing at just 0.35 suggesting it has been a huge disadvantage to be held up here when drawn high. Indeed, stall 8 seems to be where the trouble has started, as horses drawn 8 or higher when held up won just one of 70 races (SR 1.43%) over the five years with a place% of just 7.1% and a PRB of 0.33.

Musselburgh 5f – draw third LOW; run style – HELD UP

Sticking with Musselburgh we now look at the stats for low drawn runners when held up over the minimum trip of 5f:

Low drawn runners are stuck out wide at Musselburgh over five furlongs and it seems if they start slowly their chances of success are very low indeed. The lowest drawn runner (drawn 1) has a quite dreadful record when being held up managing no wins and also no placed efforts from 36 runs! The PRB for this cohort has been... wait for it... just 0.20. Runners berthed in stall 2 also drew a blank from a win perspective when held up (0 from 28 with just 2 placed efforts). There is an argument to suggest that this C&D has shown the strongest bias in the list.

Leicester 1 mile – draw third HIGH; run style – HELD UP

We come to the final C&D and the one with the lowest PRB in the list, at just 0.34. Leicester’s 1 mile trip has seen the following stats for high drawn hold up horses:

15 of the 44 races over this C&D over the past five years were won by the horse taking the early lead. Higher draws were at a disadvantage so knowing these two facts helps explain the poor figures for hold up horses drawn high. Finally, horses drawn 9 or higher when held up over C&D were 0 from 28 over the period of study.

Summary

Before I finish this table shows the combined results from all 20 C&Ds including the Betfair profit and loss - well, just loss! - figures:

It makes fairly damning reading. Roughly one win in 25 and for every £100 staked a loss of £47.50. Ouch!

It is not an accident that all twenty draw/run style combinations were draw third/held up.

Horses that race at the back of the field early do not win very often in flat handicaps at a mile or shorter.

Here's a handy 'cut out and keep' guide to the 20, listed alphabetically:

How to spot a hold up horse...

The million dollar question, of course, is how do you spot a hold up horse? Well, that's not straightforward to answer, but I can tell you this: in the five year study period, across UK flat handicaps, horses that were held up in their two previous races led on their next start just 4.2% of the time... and they were held up again 56.5% of the time. 27% of this 30,000+ sample size raced in midfield, meaning that five out of every six horses that were held up in their previous two races raced in the latter part of the field on their next start.

It's not a crystal ball by any means, but it's a pretty good start. Being able to eliminate horses confidently from races we are analysing means we start to move the odds in our favour. As Matt also indicated in his ‘hacks’ there are not just negative angles which will help us but positive ones too.

Combining positive draws with positive run styles moves the odds even further in our favour. From there, it should be easier (note, easier not easy!) to find value selections which is the route to long term profit.

I guess I should plan another article in the near future looking at the C&Ds with the highest draw/run style combo PRBs. Until next time...

- DR

Course & Distance Deep Dives: Musselburgh 7f, Windsor 1m

21 April 2026/in Dave Renham/by Dave Renham

Back in early February, I wrote a piece about 3-mile handicap chases at Uttoxeter, writes Dave Renham. This was the third time I had looked at a specific course and distance and diving deeply into past statistics. I will again revisit this idea today, delving forensically into Musselburgh's 7 furlongs trip, focusing on handicap races only. And, as a ‘Brucie Bonus’, I will also look at the key stats in Windsor 1-mile handicaps. Two for the price of one!

I have noted before in the earlier articles that looking for patterns and pointers for races from a specific course and distance (C&D) is a type of trends-based approach. Using past race trends remains very popular – for example, for every race I bet on at the Cheltenham festival this year I first studied past race trends in an attempt to gain some extra insight into how the races may pan out this year.

For this article I have taken handicap data from 2017 to 2025. Profits are calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP) with returns adjusted for 2% commission. It should be noted that for all areas other than the draw and run style I have ignored 2yo handicaps. For the record there were only nine such 2yo races at Musselburgh.

Musselburgh 7f handicaps – an overview

Firstly, there have been on average 21 qualifying races a year over seven furlongs at Musselburgh (handicaps only), so a decent number. Just over 40% of the races were Class 6 races, the lowest tier, while around 65% were either Class 5 or 6. Let’s start the digging process.

Musselburgh 7f handicaps: Betting market

I am going to look at the betting market for our first main set of stats and specifically market rank. I have used the Betfair market for this:

The value has been with those second and third in the market, while favourites have been over bet. There were no ridiculously priced winners over the past nine seasons with the highest two being 50.0 and 58.93. Horses priced BSP 60 or more were 0 from 94 with just four placing.

It is interesting when we analyse favourite performance in more detail as there has been a big difference when we split their record by Class of Race.

At the lower levels favourites have done OK. In better class races (4 and above) their record has been very poor indeed.

Musselburgh 7f handicaps: Sex of horse

Time to see whether the sex of the horse has made a difference. I have restricted races to mixed sex races (which was still a decent sample of 146 races), and below shows a comparison between the win and each way strike rates:

The blue bars show there has been a definite edge to male horses, and the full splits were thus:

Males accounted for many more of the runners but made a blind profit to BSP. Of course, we need to double check these bottom lines have not been skewed by winners at huge prices, so here are the splits using a price cap of BSP 18.0 or less:

We still see a clear difference between the sexes in these Musselburgh contests with males doing best.

I have said many times before, especially when using BSP for profit and loss, it often makes sense to use a price cap to avoid skewed findings. Therefore, for the remainder of the article, bar the run style and draw stats, I will be using the BSP 18.0 price cap.

Musselburgh 7f handicaps: Age

I am going to split the age stats into two – firstly I will look at 3yo+ handicaps, after which I will look at 4yo+ handicaps. So, 3yo+ handicaps first. Roughly half of all the handicaps over this C&D were open to 3yos and older:

There was a strong overall performance by the youngest age group, 3yos. Not only did they make a profit to win bets, but they would have made a small profit on the Betfair Place market as well. The 7yo+ group had the lowest win rate, as we would probably expect, but nudged into profit. However, four of their nine winners were priced between BSP 13.0 and 15.0 which helps to explain that.

A look at the 4yo+ handicaps now and the age splits. There were 64 such contests across the period of study:

We see a similar pattern here with the youngest horses, in this case 4yos, having performed best, and comfortably so. These 4yos have offered good value and their A/E index (BSP) backs that up with an impressive figure of 1.20.

Musselburgh 7f handicaps: Course form

Previous course winners have scored 15.4% of the time (57 wins from 365) for a small loss of £2.46 (ROI -0.7%).

Horses that had never raced at Musselburgh before saw 69 of them win from 471 (SR 14.7%) for a profit of £39.47 (ROI +8.4%).

Horses that had raced at the track before but had failed to win won 47 of 347 (SR 13.5%) for a loss of £31.02 (ROI -8.9%).

Musselburgh 7f handicaps: LTO Course

I am going to look now at where horses that contested these Musselburgh 7f handicaps ran last time out. There are four LTO venues that have provided at least 75 runners priced 18.0 or less. These have been:

Positive returns emerged from three of the four. Clearly it was a positive to have run at Musselburgh last time, while Catterick, like Musselburgh a sharp track, also shows positive figures during the review period.

Musselburgh 7f handicaps: Recent runs

Next stop is to look at the horses’ best finishing position over the past three runs to see whether anything can be gleaned. The splits were:

It was a positive for horses to have won at least once in their previous three starts, such runners making a small gain of close to 6p in the £. Likewise, ‘out of form’ horses, those whose best finishing position in the last three runs had been 5^that best, also proved profitable when priced BSP 18.0 or less. Indeed, returns increase to 30p in the £ if focusing solely on male runners.

Musselburgh 7f handicaps: Trainers

Trainer data is limited for most handlers in this context, but two names shone.

Richard Fahey had an 18.7% strike rate (14 wins from 75) for a profit of £12.32 (ROI +16.4%).

Grant Tuer enjoyed an even better record with 13 wins from 39 (SR 33.3%) for a very healthy profit of £39.60 (ROI +101.5%).

For the last two Musselburgh sections I will be ignoring the price cap and including all runners once more. This is because I am not focusing on profit/loss for the draw and run style analyses.

Musselburgh 7f handicaps: Draw

For a potential draw bias to exist we need bigger fields to analyse, so I have focused on races with at least eight runners. Let me share the raw data first, splitting the draw into the three sections I normally do – low third, middle third and high third, giving the win percentages for each third of the draw.

As we can see these stats suggest that there has been very little favour to any specific third. However, if we look at the PRBs (Percentage of Rivals Beaten) we see there may have been a small bias after all.

Low have had an edge over high (0.53 versus 0.47) and if we restrict races to good to firm or firmer, we see something quite interesting:

On firmer going the PRB numbers are indicating that high draws have been at a real disadvantage under such conditions. Indeed, high draws have managed to ‘win or place’ just 21% of the time on good to firm or firmer, well below the expected figure on a perfectly fair track of 33.3%.

On soft or heavy ground low draws have performed extremely well, winning 12 of the 20 races. This was quite a small sample but with a PRB of 0.56 I would expect low draws to continue to enjoy a decent edge when the ground comes up soft or heavy in future.

Musselburgh 7f handicaps: Run Style

Finally for this course and distance I will review the run style PRB splits.

As we can see there has been a significant edge to horses that led early, and the nearer the front they were in the first part of the race the better. Hold up horses performed poorly.

By using the Geegeez Pace Analyser we can see the remaining metrics in full:

More evidence of the strength of the front running bias over this C&D. Oh, for a crystal ball that could predict the early leader!

It is now time to switch our attention to 1-mile handicaps at Windsor. Again, 2yo handicaps have been ignored except when looking at draw and run style.

Windsor 1m handicaps – an overview

There have been slightly more Windsor 1-mile handicaps compared to Musselburgh 7f ones with an average of 22 qualifying races a year. Before looking at the numbers in more detail let me share what Class of race we tend to get when racing this C&D. The graph below shows the splits:

Roughly two thirds of all races have been class 5 or 6, with just 10% of races in either Class 2 or 3. Time for some digging.

Windsor 1m handicaps: Betting market

Let me take a look at the Betfair betting market and the performance of different ranked positions.

Here we see the front end of the betting market has dominated, with both favourites and second favourites making decent blind profits. The 5^th+ group was also profitable but essentially this was down to two winners at big prices – BSP 107.08 and BSP 116.69. Removing those two outliers meant the remaining 1089 runners made a loss of 8 pence in the £.

Sticking with favourites and second favourites, if we combine them and look at the returns achieved in 3yo+ races, 3yo only races and 4yo+ races we see positive figures for all three:

It seems that the top two in the betting have performed consistently well over the past few years.

Again, in the next few areas I will only include data regarding horses priced BSP 18.0 or less to avoid skewed bottom lines.

Windsor 1m handicaps: Sex of horse

The advantage males had over females in mixed sex races at Musselburgh over 7f has not been replicated here, but males still enjoyed a small edge. In terms of strike rate males won 15% compared to females on 12%, and they posted better returns, albeit only by around 3p in the £.

However, the value metric, the A/E (BSP) index, does indicate that males have been far better value with males on 1.05 and females on 0.87.

Windsor 1m handicaps: Age

I am going to look at the age splits in 3yo+ handicaps, as such races have occurred most often (86 races). The breakdown was thus:

We see a similar and arguably stronger 3yo edge here to the one in the Musselburgh research. 3yos won far more often than all other age groups and produced a tidy profit. Horses aged 7 and older also made a profit but the sample size was small, and three of the six winners were priced BSP 12.00, 14.00 and 16.30 so I would not see this age group as a positive over this C&D.

The 4yo+ handicap data covered only 31 races so this has been too small a sample to drill down into and find anything meaningful.

Windsor 1m handicaps: Course form

Previous course winners have scored 18.3% of the time (30 wins from 164) for a profit of £13.97 (ROI +8.5%).

Horses that had never raced at Windsor before saw 86 of them win from 643 (SR 13.4%) for a significant loss of £90.12 (ROI -14%).

Horses that had raced at the track before but had failed to win, won 59 from 379 runners (SR 15.6%) for a profit of £18.54 (ROI +4.9%).

It does seem that past experience at the track has been useful regardless of whether a horse won there previously.

Windsor 1m handicaps: LTO Course

It is time to look at where the horses ran last time out. There are four LTO venues that have produced positive stats from at least 50 runners priced 18.0 or less. These have been:

I mentioned in the course form section above that the stats were indicating that a previous run at Windsor had been a positive. We have now had an even stronger positive if they had raced at the track last time out. The figures for horses coming from Newmarket have also been exceptionally good.

Windsor 1m handicaps: Recent runs

I could not find any worthwhile patterns when analysing the last three runs, but in terms of LTO winners, they performed poorly losing £31.37 from 170 qualifiers showing negative returns of over 18p in the £.

It is also worth noting that last time out winners actually did very well when sent off as the favourite (a 36%-win percentage coupled with returns of 28p in the £), but if they did not start favourite their record was dreadful: just 11 wins from 120 runners (SR 9.2%) for a loss of £45.49 (ROI -37.9%).

Windsor 1m handicaps: Trainers

Trainer data is again very limited and only one trainer, Richard Hannon, saddled more than 30 qualifying runners in the review period. He ran 68 horses, of which 10 won (SR 14.7%), for a small loss of £1.85 (ROI -2.7%).

Clive Cox is worth a mention as he has had eight wins from just 25 runners (SR 32%). Profits were £24.94 (ROI +99.8%). For the record he saddled six different horses to win, so it was not a case of one or two horses skewing the stats.

Windsor 1m handicaps: Draw

As earlier I will be concentrating on races with at least eight runners when looking at the draw (2yo handicaps included). Here were the win percentage splits for the bottom, middle and highest thirds.

Once again, we have had a very level playing field. This has been backed up when looking at the PRBs:

Essentially, I think we can disregard the draw at this trip.

Windsor 1m handicaps: Run Style

Finally for this article I will be taking a look at the run style PRB splits over this C&D.

As with the Musselburgh findings we can see there has been an edge to horses that have led early, and the nearer the front a horse was early in the race, the better. The bias was not as significant here, but it was still strong. The Geegeez Pace Analyser below shares the other key metrics:

These stats correlate strongly with the PRB figures and confirm the front running bias.

That's it for this week – two for the price of one and it’s not even Christmas! I hope we will be able to exploit these findings across the 40 or so qualifying races we will have this season.

Good luck, and until next time...

- DR

Negative Draw Bias in 2026

8 April 2026/in Dave Renham, Horse Racing Blog/by Dave Renham

Negative draw bias revisited for 2026

Last week I looked at some draw biases over 5 furlongs in 7+ runner handicaps, writes Dave Renham. In this follow up I will examine ‘negative draw bias’, or NDB for short. I discussed NDB four years ago in a piece (here), but this one will take a slightly different slant. Or at least it will be highlighting NDB horses in a slightly different way.

Russell Clarke, who has written several excellent articles on geegeez.co.uk, was the first person I saw discussing NDB back in the 1990s in Odds On magazine. Ever since then it has been something I have kept a close eye out for.

What is negative draw bias?

Negative draw bias highlights a horse or horses that ran well from a poor draw and, hence, in theory have performed much better than their finishing position initially indicated. From there, we would have a horse to keep an eye on, hoping that a good opportunity to bet this horse may come up soon afterwards given more favourable circumstances.

As with many things in racing, negative draw bias is not quite as simple as it sounds. There are problems with the idea – for example, once we have found a horse that has run well from a poor draw, we have the tricky decision of how long to continue supporting the horse in the future? One run? No more than three runs? Until it wins? What if it loses four or five races? There clearly is no ‘correct’ answer to this question.

We also need to think about under what circumstances we back the horse. Should we back it blindly? Or only under similar conditions? What if it is drawn poorly again, and so on .

A third question to consider is, can we be completely sure the horse has actually run well against a draw bias? In my 2022 article, when looking for examples of NDB I focused on individual races that had seemed to show a significant draw bias. These were primarily big field affairs, often on a straight course where one side of the draw seemed to be strongly favoured over the other. There is a case to say that biases that occur like this can be down to a pace bias (i.e. the fast horses were all congregated on one side of the track and therefore made that 'mini race' quicker) rather than a draw bias, but my educated guess is that it is often a combination of the two. How important one is over the other though is anyone’s guess and not something I want to dwell on here.

Approach

For this article I am going to take a different approach to highlighting NDB horses. It is essentially a systematic approach, and the starting point is last week’s draw bias article. System-based ideas are rigid and not for everybody, but the big plus is that we can find system qualifiers without having to do any serious legwork. Because, for this ‘system’, I’ve done the legwork for you.

Last week I highlighted a variety of courses that had shown an apparent draw bias over 5f in handicaps between 2021 to 2025. From this initial group of courses, I wanted to try and establish those with the strongest biases. I did this using two rules. The first rule was that the disadvantaged third of the draw needed to have a win percentage of below 25% coupled with a PRB figure of 0.48 or lower. The second involved a simple calculation of multiplying the win strike rate percentage of the disadvantaged third of the draw by its PRB with only the lowest scoring courses making the cut. I felt this was a fair way to do it and, essentially, I needed to use some sensible parameters to establish what were likely to be the strongest biases.

The courses that qualified were:

Ascot, Ayr, Bath, Chester, Musselburgh, Redcar and Thirsk.

Now I had the courses with the strongest 5f draw biases against my calculation, I planned to use them within my NDB method like this:

I wanted to see how horses that had run well from the poorest section of the draw at these course/distance combinations fared on their next run.

The system I came up with, then, was thus:

Last run at one of Ascot, Ayr, Bath, Chester, Musselburgh, Redcar or Thirsk
Last run in a 5f handicap with 8 or more runners
Finished second or third when drawn in disadvantaged section of the draw.

Not many rules, which I think makes the best kind of system.

I do need to clarify what I mean by disadvantaged section of the draw. Specifically, I wanted to try and find the very worst drawn runners; so instead of including all stall positions within the ‘worst’ third of the draw, I set things up like this:

Essentially, I was trying to concentrate on horses berthed in the lowest quarter of the draw as best as possible. Clearly, because all field sizes are not divisible by four, I could not do that perfectly, so the draw positions in the table clarify which stalls qualify as being in the ‘disadvantaged’ section.

It should also be noted that the draw positions have been adjusted for when there were non-runners. For example, if the horse drawn 3 was a non-runner, then the horse drawn 4 was now effectively drawn 3, draw 5 became 4 and so on.

Baseline Method Qualifiers

Before moving on to the nitty gritty, let me quickly give two last time out (LTO) run scenarios, one where a horse would qualify under this NBD system and one where a horse would not.

LTO run at Redcar 5f where the field size was 14 runners. The horse drawn 12 finishes in third place. This horse qualifies under the NDB system, as draw 12 counts as a disadvantaged stall.
LTO run at Thirsk 5f where the field size was 10 runners. The horse drawn 3 finishes second. This horse does not qualify under the NDB system, as draw 3 does not count as disadvantaged stall (with 10 runners only stalls 1 and 2 qualify).

An issue with this system is that we are only going to get a small amount of qualifiers because not many runners finish second or third from a very poor draw. Indeed, over the five years I studied there were only 109 qualifiers across all LTO C&Ds. How they fared is shown in the table below:

So, the good news is that they made a fair profit with a solid strike rate, but the less good news is that the system has averaged out at around 22 qualifiers per year.

Here are the course LTO splits:

As we can see, six of the seven tracks were individually profitable, with Redcar having a shocker! Of course, these individual course sample sizes are extremely small, but it is pleasing to see that it is not just one course or one big priced winner that has been responsible for the profits.

One quick caveat at this juncture: when I researched the original draw bias piece, I used handicap races with 7+ runners. For this NBD system I tweaked it slightly and am using 8+ runners. There was nothing sinister going on like trying to improve upon the results, it was simply to make it easier for me to split the draw in four. I did back check the results for LTO races with 7 runners and the overall results would have actually improved matters! However, I was not going to change to 7+ runners LTO just to get better figures. Back-fitting is not a good option.

Broadening the Search

After this promising start I decided to look for other strong track and trip biases to test the NDB system. The distances I wanted to check next were the other ones along with 5f where the draw bias tends to be strongest – namely 6f, 7f and 1-mile races. Let’s start with the longest trip and work backwards.

1 Mile

Over the 1-mile trip the C&Ds that passed my two earlier rules were Hamilton, Pontefract and York. Their draw third win splits for qualifying 1m handicaps (7+ runners) were as follows:

And the PRBs

All three courses saw high draws really struggle during this recent timeframe and below are the overall stats when combining all NDB system qualifiers that ran over these C&Ds last time out.

It's another smallish sample despite combining three more courses, but also another very profitable one. There was a winner priced BSP 35.44 so after commission that effectively accounted for half of the profits but even taking that out of the equation the figures would have been excellent.

Here are the individual LTO course splits:

All three in profit, albeit again the sample sizes are very small. One course over 1 mile that just failed to pass my two rules was Redcar. For the record, applying the NDB system to this LTO C&D would have yielded five winners from 25 producing a return of 26p in the £.

7 Furlongs

When I switched to look for courses over 7f with a strong bias only one course passed the two NDB system tests: Goodwood. High draws have struggled there with just 16.3% of the top ‘third’ winning (PRB 0.47). Subsequent NDB system qualifiers from here would have amounted to 20 runners with the following results next time out:

Another small profit which keeps things moving along in the desired direction.

6 Furlongs

Finally, I looked at the strongest 6f biases to see which C&Ds qualified for the NDB system. Four passed my rules namely Kempton, Leicester, Yarmouth and York. For all four it was the higher draws that performed poorly. Here are their top third win percentages and PRBs:

It’s amazing that three of the four had exactly the same win percentages. The chances of that happening was extremely unlikely shall we say!

Combining these four LTO C&Ds together, NDB qualifiers would have produced the following results:

It is yet another group of courses combining to make a profit, and a bigger sample here due mainly to Kempton’s LTO qualifiers accounting for more than half of the total. (The advantage of a lot of races over a specific C&D). Here are the individual LTO course splits:

Three of the four would have been profitable, with Yarmouth just missing out.

There were a couple of other courses over 6f that were close to qualifying across my two rules, namely Chelmsford and Pontefract. As it turns out both would have proved extremely profitable if I was able to apply the NDB system rules to their potential qualifiers. Unfortunately, though they cannot be added to the overall totals. As I said earlier NO BACK-FITTING! In any case, Chelmsford has now unfortunately been mothballed, at least for the foreseeable future.

Combined Total

Ok, it is time to share the combined totals for all LTO C&Ds qualifiers (5f-1m).

That's not too shabby, if I do say so myself!

For anyone interested in following this NDB system this year, below is a list of all of the qualifying LTO courses used in the article. I have essentially replicated the earlier ‘number of runners’ table but added all the C&Ds (6f to 1 mile) to the relevant columns:

This research has seen a good deal of legwork from yours truly, and it was also extremely hard to put together coherently in an article, but it is hopefully an interesting piece. As can be seen, there's a lot of milage in negative draw bias angles - so keep your eyes peeled!

- DR

5f Draw Bias in 2026

31 March 2026/in Dave Renham/by Dave Renham

An in depth look at draw bias over 5 furlongs

I must admit that this is my favourite time of the year for two reasons, writes Dave Renham. Firstly, I am starting to think about the sunnier and warmer weather to come in the next few months; and secondly, the flat turf season is now upon us.

From a betting perspective I prefer the flat because traditionally I have had a better betting record in flat racing compared to National Hunt. The flat also has a special place in my heart because the first book I published was a flat racing one. That book was about draw bias and back then, in the late nineties, draw bias offered astute punters a real edge. Nowadays that edge has diminished somewhat.

Primarily, that is because there are fewer biases due to either better course management or rail movements, or indeed both. Also, draw information is more accessible these days so it can be difficult to find an angle that is not widely understood. However, having said that, up to date accurate bias data is still important because biases are constantly evolving; we must not blindly stick to what we have known in the past.

Introduction

One of the beauties of Geegeez is that we have the Draw Analyser tool which means we can check all course and distance combinations in terms of recent draw bias changes. In this article, then, I will share the most up to date draw bias information for UK racecourses over the 5-furlong distance, concentrating on those tracks where the statistics seem to indicate there has been a recent advantage to one part of the track or another. Data have been taken from 2021 to 2025 with the focus being handicap races as they give us more reliable draw data. I am also ignoring races with very small fields so only including those with seven runners or more.

When analysing each individual race, I have split the draw into ‘thirds’ - those drawn in the bottom third (low), those drawn in the middle third, and those drawn in the top third (high). It should also be noted that the draw positions are adjusted when there are non-runners – for example if the horse drawn 3 is a non-runner, then the horse drawn 4 becomes drawn 3, draw 5 becomes 4 and so on.

On a completely fair course the winning percentages for each "third" of the draw should be around 33% each. The differences in the percentages will help to determine the strength of the bias. I’m also going to share the PRBs (Percentage of Rivals Beaten) when there seems to be a potential bias to help give us a more accurate overall view.

In my experience, I consider there to be two types of draw bias. One is a clear bias towards a specific section of the draw; this is the strongest possible bias. The other is a bias against a specific section of the draw.

I will work through the qualifying courses in alphabetical order.

Ascot 5f

The round course at Ascot sees horses run right-handed so on the straight course where 5f races are run, the highest stall is drawn closest to the nearside stands’ rail. There have been 40 qualifying races, and the draw third splits have been as follows:

Low draws seem to have struggled a little in terms of wins over the past five years. That is at least partially because the centre of the course tends to ride a little slower than the ground closer to the stands rail. A look at the PRBs now:

The PRBs suggest that higher draws have an edge. My own experience is that lower draws have indeed been at a disadvantage, and the highest draws have a very slight edge over the middle. However, biases can change at Ascot throughout the year, so we need to keep an eye on developments.

Ayr 5f

To the west coast of Scotland now and Ayr's five-furlong strip. Like Ascot there have been 40 qualifying races over the past five years. The draw splits in terms of wins are as follows:

High draws have really struggled from a win perspective. Let me share the PRB splits:

The PRBs correlate extremely well with the win third percentages, corroborating that high has been at a considerable disadvantage over this 5f trip in recent years.

Bath 5f

Bath has two 5f distances, and we are concentrating on the shorter of the two - the bare minimum. This C&D has plenty of races annually and in the past five years there have been 57 qualifying contests in total.

Horses drawn low seem to have enjoyed a solid advantage, winning twice as many races as those drawn high. Will the PRBs correlate? Let’s see:

The PRBs also indicate that lower draws have enjoyed quite a decent edge. If we had backed every single low drawn runner blind over the past five years we would have secured a BSP profit of £85.53 (ROI +51.5%).

Beverley 5f

Thirty years ago, Beverley over 5f had one of the strongest draw biases in the country. That is no longer the case, but it is still perceived that horses near to the far rail (low) retain a slight edge.

There have been 99 qualifying races over the past five seasons - an excellent sample size - and low draws have enjoyed a small edge in terms of wins. High draws continued to get the worst of it. The PRB figures suggest that the bias is a little stronger than the raw win third percentages suggest, and largely against high:

It is well worth noting that 28 of the 99 races have been won by one of the two lowest drawn horses. Moreover, horses drawn 11 or higher have really struggled, winning just five races from 98 with losses equating to 57p in the £.

Catterick 5f

There have been plenty of qualifying sprints at Catterick – 83 to be precise, and the breakdown was thus:

Based on the win stats, middle draws seem to have been at a slight disadvantage. This is also reflected in the PRB figures:

The key, though, to Catterick is the ground. On better ground lower draws have an edge; on softer ground that reverses and high draws often prevail, as when there has been plenty of rain the near side rail seems to possess the fastest strip of ground.

On good or firmer ground 19 of the 42 races have been won by horses drawn in the lowest third (45.2%), and their PRB has been clearly best at 0.55 (middle was 0.46, high 0.49). There have been 21 races on soft or heavy of which the top third have won 10 (47.6%). The PRB figure for the top third of the draw was 0.54.

Chepstow 5f

Over to Chepstow now starting with the win strike rates:

The numbers suggest that higher draws may have a small edge. Do the PRBs correlate?

The PRBs back up the likelihood that there is a small advantage to being drawn high. This has been especially true on good or firmer ground as 17 of the 32 races (53.1%) were won by horses drawn high, with a PRB of 0.55. Overall, if given the choice, one would prefer to be drawn higher than lower, especially on better ground.

Chester 5f (& 5½f)

Chester has traditionally had one of the strongest sprint biases in the country. However, in recent years, with the introduction at some meetings of a false rail at the top of the short home straight, the bias has been less potent and the strike rates back that up.

High draws still struggle a lot, but middle draws have been almost as successful from a win perspective as low draws over the past five years. The reason for this is almost certainly due to course officials moving the inside rail for some races. In fact, two thirds of these races saw rail movement of some distance or another.

The PRBs correlate well with the win stats:

In the past five years, the value has been with those drawn in the middle. Backing all middle draws ‘blind’ would have produced a small profit to BSP of £13.67 which equates to 10p in the £. The middle third A/E index also stood at a healthy 1.13 indicating good value.

This is an example of what I discussed earlier: that we need to be aware of recent changes and not assume a historical draw bias remains as strong as it was previously. I suspect that the market is yet to fully adjust to these changes so, for the foreseeable future, middle drawn runners should continue to offer the best value.

Goodwood 5f

Down to the South coast next and my favourite track from which to watch racing. There have been 30 qualifying races over the past five years which is one of our smaller samples. The win percentages for each third were as follows:

17 of the 30 races were won by horses berthed in the lowest third of the draw. Based on this alone the bias looks strong. Let’s see what the PRBs have shown:

This is one of the reasons it is always good to focus on more than one statistic, especially with smaller sample sizes, as we should reasonably have expected a PRB of around 0.57 or 0.58 for the low third based on the win stats. Here, we have 30 races and hence only 30 winners – a relatively small sample. However, the PRB figures give some sort of score to all 310 runners – providing a much broader, and potentially more accurate, set of numbers.

So where does that leave us with Goodwood’s 5f trip? Well, I think low drawn runners do have an edge. The ground tends to ride quicker in the centre to far side than it does near side where the high drawn runners are positioned. Also, there have been some clear examples of low draw bias in certain races – one such being the Buccellati handicap run at the Goodwood Festival meeting on 1^st August 2024. The first five home were:

As can be seen, in this 16-runner race, low draws dominated the finish with four of the lowest five draws occupying the first four finishing positions. The trifecta paid nigh on £3,600 for £1.

Overall, I’d take low over high again this year.

Musselburgh 5f

Back into Scotland and to the Edinburgh shores for Musselburgh's minimum. There have been 102 qualifying races over the past five years. The win percentage breakdown for each third of the draw was as follows:

Horses drawn high have been virtually twice as successful as those drawn low from a win perspective. High draws are located close to the nearside stands’ rail, so it seems the ground has generally been riding quicker nearer to that rail than out in the centre if the win stats paint a fair picture. There is also a slight dogleg on the straight which kinks away from the lower drawn horses on the flank.

Let us see if we get better correlation with the PRBs than we did with Goodwood given to the much larger 102-race sample:

The PRBs correlate strongly with the win figures and, therefore, it seems that there has been a decent high draw rail bias in play over the past five years. This result from early last season is a good example of this:

High draws dominated this one with those drawn one to five nowhere to be seen. Ideally, then, any horse we feel has a strong chance here should be drawn high.

Pontefract 5f

Pontefract next. With the 5f track turning left one would assume lower draws might have some sort of edge. The splits for the 46 races were thus:

There definitely seems to have been an advantage to horses drawn low and hence near the inside rail. Let’s look at the PRBs:

The PRBs confirm that lower draws have indeed held sway. It is also worth noting that horses drawn right on the inside (stall one) have won 10 of the 46 races showing a BSP profit of £30.15 (ROI +65.5%). Very high drawn runners, those exiting stall 11 or higher, have really struggled with 0 wins from 26 and only one of those 26 making the frame.

Redcar 5f

There have been 49 qualifying races over the minimum trip at Redcar with the following win strike rates by draw third:

Nearly half of the races have been won by horses drawn in the lowest third. Let’s look at the PRBs to see if they corroborate this possible low draw bias:

These figures confirm we have one of the strongest biases seen to date. 21 of the 49 races were won by one of the two lowest drawn horses. Backing both stall 1 and stall 2 ‘blind’ would have secured similar returns for each at around 60p in the £. My advice: keep an eye out for 5f handicaps here as the draw might help us find some value selections.

Ripon 5f

46 races to analyse at Ripon with the following splits:

A strong edge it seems for middle draws which is surprising considering how horses tend to gravitate to the near rail (high). Do the PRBs show a similar pattern?

The PRB figures back up the win stats to some extent, although with a 50%-win rate I would have expected a higher PRB for the middle third. This course and distance is a tricky one for me; I am not convinced there is a strong bias here, even though the stats point to middle draws having the edge. Maybe the ground a few horse widths away from the rail rides slightly quicker. Not sure.

Thirsk 5f

Back in the 80s and 90s the Thirsk high draw rail bias was as strong as any in the country. That is not the case any more, but do higher draws retain an edge? Here is what the 60 race sample threw up:

High draws have performed best, albeit not by much. Lower draws, however, have really struggled from a win perspective. Onto the PRBs:

These figures suggest the high draw edge is slightly stronger than the win stats implied. They do also confirm that lower draws have been at a disadvantage. One more nugget to share is that on good to soft or softer ground the PRB for the lowest third was just 0.41. It seems the bias against lower draws strengthens as the ground eases.

Yarmouth 5f

42 races at Yarmouth to dissect now; firstly, with the win splits:

Lower draws may have a slight edge based on these figures, and the PRBs confirm that there has been a bias in play over of the past five years:

0.56 for low draws is a solid number. It seems that if betting at Yarmouth over five this year, we should definitely prefer to be drawn lower than higher.

York 5f

Finally, we come to York. There were 58 races with 7+ runners on the Knavesmire over the past five seasons with the following breakdown:

The lowest third of the draw has accounted for half of the winners. Do the PRBs correlate positively with the above numbers?

Yes, the low PRB of 0.56 confirms the advantage low draws (far side) have enjoyed here.

I should also mention that this low draw edge has looked even stronger in bigger fields. Races with 15+ runners saw the winner emerge from the lowest third of the draw 19 times in 31 races (61.3%). Further, horses drawn 15 secured just one win in 31 attempts, while horses drawn 16 or higher have won 0 races from 90! Very high draws are definitely best avoided.

Draw bias in 2026 is not as prevalent or as strong as it once was. However, in this piece I have reviewed 15 tracks at the minimum distance where post position does seem to make a difference; and, in some cases, a significant difference.

Before closing, I need to flag the impact that the run style of a horse will have on any potential draw bias. Normally the combination of a good draw and early speed increases the win rate and, looking across the five-furlong handicap front-running stats from 2021 to 2025 for these courses, that has been the case more often than not.

Beverley, however, has been a course where low drawn front runners actually underperformed, and that has been the case with low drawn runners at Chester, too. My guess is that some drawn low have gone off too quickly at these courses as jockeys try to take best advantage of their stall position at what have historically been renowned draw bias tracks. For the record, there were 27 low drawn front runners at Chester of which only three have won.

There were two tracks where front runners drawn in the best ‘third’ have absolutely excelled. Firstly, low drawn front runners at Pontefract won 9 times from just 18 qualifiers (50%); while at Thirsk, of the 11 high drawn front runners, 8 won (72.7%). Two other tracks also saw well drawn front runners perform extremely well and they were Redcar (8 wins from 23; 34.8%) and York (10 wins from 28; 35.7%).

I hope this article has demonstrated that, while perhaps not the same as in the golden years around the turn of the century, draw bias can still make a real difference in 2026.

- DR

p.s. for much more in depth commentary on draw biases in the UK and Ireland, see our 'Articles' archive here.

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An Investigation into Last Time Out Run Style

A four-week trial of combining Pace with SR Ratings, Part 2

A four-week trial of combining Pace with SR Ratings, Part 1

Week 1

Week 2

All-Weather racing in the height of summer

Market Rank

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Age of horse

Position Last Time Out (LTO)

Race type LTO

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George Boughey

John+Thady Gosden

Richard Hughes

Sir Mark Prescott

Roger Varian

Archie Watson

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Age of horse

Sex of horse

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Previous Career runs

Previous runs over the distance

Trainer Angles

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Royal Ascot Draw Bias

Straight Track Drawn Bias (up to a mile)

Royal Ascot Round course Draw Bias (1m4f)

Odds Movement at Royal Ascot

Early Morning odds compared with Opening Show odds

Opening Show odds compared with Starting Price

Royal Ascot: Exchange Markets

BSP prices

In-running betting/trading

Royal Ascot Trainer Form

Top Trainers by Win Strike Rate

Top Trainers by Percentage of Rivals Beaten (PRB)

Specific Royal Ascot Trainer Angles

An Analysis of the Racing Post Ratings in UK Turf flat racing

Introduction

Overall Performance by RPR Ranking

RPR Top Rated

Overview

RPR top-rated runners - Yearly strike rates

RPR top-rated runners – Record by Month

RPR top-rated runners - Market Rank

RPR top-rated runners - Handicaps versus non-handicaps

RPR top-rated runners - Age of horse

RPR top-rated runners - Run style

2nd Top Rated RPR

RPR 2nd rated runners - Handicaps versus non-handicaps

RPR 2nd rated runners – Horses with an ISP of 12/1 or less

RPR 2nd rated runners – Run Style

3yo and 3yo+ maidens – a deep dive

Market Rank

Sex of horse

Age

Career starts

Position Last Time Out (LTO)

Days since last run (DSLR)

Trainer Angles

An investigation into the Geegeez Instant Expert, Part 2

Recap

A line on ranking methodology

Instant Expert Rank #1 by Betfair Starting Price

Instant Expert (IE) top ranked runner by Price

Instant Expert (IE) top ranked runner by Price (4yo+ hcaps only)

Instant Expert top ranked runner by Age (4yo+ hcaps only)

Instant Expert rank of 9 or lower by Class

IE rank of 9 or lower by Race Classification

Individual Instant Expert Shortlist scores by PRB

Instant Expert individual scores

Instant Expert individual scores (4yo+ hcaps only)

Summary

An initial investigation into Geegeez Instant Expert

Introduction

RPR 2^nd rated runners - Handicaps versus non-handicaps

RPR 2^nd rated runners – Horses with an ISP of 12/1 or less

RPR 2^nd rated runners – Run Style