Read all sorts of commentaries and tips across a range of racing disciplines on the most popular horse racing blog in Britain, from staff and guest writers.
In this video post, I outline what's happening now and next on geegeez.co.uk, and beyond these shores. Specifically:
- Geegeez Feature Upgrades
- Australian Open AI Play
- Tix... PLUS?!
- Racehorse Syndicate Updates
The geegeez feature updates are first up so feel free to skip the rest if it's not of interest to you.
Enjoy!
Matt
p.s. link to the Nirvana du Berlais ex Futura syndicate detail is here >>
Friends of mine who go racing once or twice a year often ring me up beforehand asking for some ‘tips’, writes Dave Renham.
My initial reply is always the same, “what exactly do you mean by tips?”
And their answer is invariably the same, “winners Dave, I want to back as many winners as possible!”
“Ah!”, I reply, “then that’s a simple one – just back all the favourites”.
After my opening gambit I go on to explain the rationale behind such an apparently facetious answer: that in order to give them the best chance of backing as many winners as possible on the day, backing favourites is the way forward.
Of course, for serious punters the question would be different, as making money over the longer term is about finding value, not winners. If it was as simple as backing winners, we would all be backing the favourite and making lots of money. Favourites are like any other market position in that they can offer value, but of course that does not apply to all market leaders.
In this article my quest is to find the groups of favourites that have offered value in the past, or those that have offered poor value. Poor value favourites give us two options essentially; we can lay them on the exchanges, or we can look for a viable option from the remaining runners.
The data for this article relates to UK AW Racing from 2018 to 2025 inclusive. Profits have been calculated to Befair Starting Price (BSP) with returns adjusted for 2% commission. I am using Betfair Exchange favourites (clear favourites only) for this so let me start by showing the results for all such AW market leaders in the eight-year study period:
Losses are quite modest at just under 3 pence in the £, so there looks to be hope when it comes to finding a positive favourite angle or two. In terms of the betting returns on favourites, here are the annual splits:
Last year actually would have turned a profit, but 2020, 2022 and 2023 all saw steeper losses of over 5p in £.
What about different race types? Firstly, let me share the handicap versus non-handicap figures for favs:
As we can see there have been slightly smaller losses in non-handicaps. Having said that non-handicap maiden favourites lost more than 5% due to 549 winners from 1267 (SR 43.3%) for a loss of £64.28 (ROI -5.1%). In fact, this is where my first two negative angles come in, namely 2yo only maidens and Class 2-4 maidens:
Once losses hit the 10%+ mark, I see that as a strong negative as far as favourites are concerned. Both these subsets siginificantly beyond that threshold; and, while on the 2yo maidens’ theme, 2yos making their career debuts that start favourite in all-weather maidens have done very poorly thanks to just 38 wins from 126 runners (SR 30.2%) for a loss of £34.66 (ROI -27.5%).
On a more positive note for 2yos, favourites in nursery handicaps have edged into overall profit thanks to 297 wins from 918 (SR 32.3%, +£28.44, ROI +3.2%). This could have been improved upon if we limit qualifiers to horses that had run at least once on the AW before. This cohort won 33.3% of time (232 wins from 697) for a profit of £51.04 (ROI +7.3%). We will of course have to wait for the summer to potentially exploit this in 2026.
One other race type to quickly mention is claiming races. Favourites have secured returns of over 11% in these races, but unfortunately such races on the sand are extremely rare these days. Last year (2025) for example saw just two such races. Hence, unless there is a change in policy it seems unlikely that we are going to get many claiming races to go at.
Have favourites performed any better at some courses compared to others? Let’s see:
The Southwell stats are based on tapeta races, so only since the change of surface; it seemed to make no sense to combine the fibresand results with them as they are no longer relevant. Southwell’s stats are the worst for favourites with losses edging close to 6p in the £. Wolverhampton has been the happiest hunting ground for jollies closely followed by Kempton.
In terms of Wolverhampton favourites, a group that have performed well are those runners who won last time out on the AW but at a different track (e.g. at any of the other five UK AW tracks). This group recorded a £69.44 profit (ROI +12%) thanks to 239 winners from 581 (SR 28.9%).
I would like to talk about ‘time of year’ now and below are the win strike rates by quarter:
Favourites have had the best strike rate in the first three months of the year, and the remaining metrics correlate with that time being the best for favs:
As we can see, January to March favourites would have lost us less than a penny in the £ across over 7000 selections. I am assuming this has been the case because at that time of year 91% of all favourites had raced on the AW last time out, whereas from July to December for example this figure has been less than 60%. Hence, by the start of the first quarter (January) the focus is solely the AW with it being nearly two months into the AW season, and horses are starting to run regularly on an artificial surface rather than potentially switching back and forth from the turf. That would also explain the poorer returns in the final quarter. That is simply a hypothesis but there is a definite logic behind it.
Sticking with that first quarter, we have already seen that Wolverhampton market leaders have returned the smallest losses. If we restrict Wolves favourites to January, February and March only we see the following – 586 winners from 1604 runners (SR 36.5%) for a profit of £96.53 (ROI +6%).
A look at Race Class now. The splits are shown below:
The highest two classes of race have proved profitable, but what is more interesting perhaps has been the very poor performance of favourites in Class 3 races. The losses have been significant at over 13p in the £. Most Class 3 events were handicaps, and handicaps actually produced losses close 15p in the £.
My initial theory for why favourites performed poorly in this class was that is may just be down to variance, but I back checked the 2010 to 2017 Class 3 results and noted that they produced similar overall losses (11p in the £). I cannot come up with a logical reason why favourites have struggled in these particular races, but the long-term stats suggest that this has been the case.
Moving on to how long it has been since the horse last ran, and there have been a couple of timeframes that have proved profitable over the past eight years:
Hence favourites having a very recent run, or one coming back off a break of 5 months or more have performed above the norm.
Personally I am a little sceptical when it comes to fancied runners wearing headgear and favourites have had a poor record wearing blinkers over this period. They scored 27.2% of the time (382 wins from 1405) for losses of £168.40 (ROI -12%). This performance was worse if we focus on handicaps only – 305 wins from 1203 runners for a loss of £164.90 (ROI -13.7%).
I wondered how well favourites fared from the poorest draws, although I knew that data for specific course and distance combinations was going to be limited. What I wanted to know is how favourites fared when berthed in one of the three widest draws at Kempton over 6f, Wolves over 5f and Chelmsford over 5f. I currently perceive these three track/trip combos to offer the strongest AW biases - and, from a positive perspective, to inside draws, I should add. I looked at handicaps only as they offer the most robust results as far as draw data is concerned.
We're dealing with small samples here as I had anticipated, but all three confirm that favourites really struggled.
One other draw bias which I looked at was Kempton over 7f, but my reading of that bias is that horses need to be drawn very wide (in double figure stalls) to be really disadvantaged there. Hence, I looked at the performance of favourites from the three widest draws over 7f at Kempton with the caveat that the draw must be a double figure one. With such restrictions there were only 30 horses that were favourite under those circumstances, but they did struggle with only 5 winning and losses were steep at 46p in the £.
Finally I wanted to see which trainers have done well with favourites and which ones have not. Firstly, let me share a chart of the trainers whose A/E index (based on BSP) is 1.15 or higher. This type of figure suggests their favourites have been very good value. To qualify, a trainer must have had at least 75 horses that started as favourite.
It is nice to see some different trainers appearing and indeed it makes sense that less familiar names would show up when looking in such an obvious place as market leaders. Jim Goldie tops the chart with an outstanding 1.50 A/E index and all seven on the chart have unsurprisingly been blindly profitable as the table below shows:
Not all trainers have done well when saddling the market leader, though. The table below shows the handlers that had recorded losses of more than 25p in the £ (again 75 runs minimum to qualify).
The most interesting name in the list for me is Charlie Johnston; his father Mark had a very good record with favourites at the start of this time frame. From 2018 to when he retired at the end of 2022 his record with favourites read an impressive 144 winners from 331 (SR 43.5%) for a profit of £54.25 (ROI +16.4%), A/E(BSP) 1.13. There has been a clear change in success for favourites since Charlie took over, perhaps as a result of a different focus or training modus operandi.
This article has highlighted plenty of positives and negatives. I have put the main ones in the table below as a type of ‘ready reckoner’. I have excluded the trainers as their tables are nearby and easy to access.
I hope this article will prove useful over the rest of the AW season as well as the remainder of 2026 as a whole. Obviously, we cannot always tell who is going to be favourite, especially in very competitive races. However, if we are able to back as close to the off as possible then we should know the favourite pre-race around 95% of the time.
- DR
I’m sure I’ve gone over this ground a time or two before but last week’s irritating cold weather snap has inevitably slowed down the workings of this ancient brain, writes Tony Stafford. I intend to show, in the manner of a Paddy Power early payout when a team goes two goals up, that Dan Skelton has already won the 2025/26 British Jump Trainers’ Championship.
Many thought he would win it last time round, but Willie Mullins sent a flotilla of his best horses to Sandown on the final day of last season and ended up foiling him by almost £200k – Mullins’ £3,570k to Skelton’s £3,377k. It seems emphatic, but until Mullins had that near clean sweep of the lavish £1 million Grand National prize – his 1-2-3 collecting £800k and 5th and 7th another £60k – he wasn’t seemingly even contemplating a challenge.
Of course, Mullins is good at making up lost ground in the second half of the season, which is pretty much where we are now, as his rival Gordon Ellliott would frustratingly testify.
Before yesterday at home Mullins was reasonably in touch with Elliott, whose 275 individual horses had clocked up €3,150k from 134 wins and numerous places. Mullins’ individual 228 had notched 106 wins and €2,289k. Elliott’s best of €4,744k in 2023/24 compares unfavourably with Mullins’ peak of €7,299 in 2022/23. Willie’s haul last season was €6,028k, almost exactly €2 million more than his rival.
In the UK though, it will take not just a herculean effort to target the big prizes, in some part to the detriment of looking after business at home, for him even to begin to look a danger to Skelton.
The nearest four players behind Dan are multiple champions Paul Nicholls in second and Nicky Henderson in fifth, with in between the fast-progressing Olly Murphy and Ben Pauling. Nicholls at £1,116k, Murphy and Pauling are both above the £1 million mark, but even then, hopelessly out of touch with Skelton. I don’t remember anything so one-sided ever before.
With the most lucrative part of the season still to come, Skelton, on £2,470k, is already around 65% of the way to last year’s personal best return. Mullins is trailing more than £2 million behind him after the Irish champion’s so-far meagre return of £278k from four winning horses.
Unless he matches or exceeds last year’s Grand National Trifecta, it’s hard to see where he can begin to stem the tide of the Warwickshire onslaught, which has already produced 111 wins for the season. Only once before has he exceeded 200, in the days a few years back when he targeted summer jumping. That’s no longer on the agenda – it’s class and quality over quantity these days.
Saturday’s impressive performance at Kempton under a 10lb penalty from Precious Man could well be significant as the big 4yo prizes come along.
This second win for the team after he was snapped up from under the noses of the Mullins/Kirk buying partnership from France last summer puts him firmly in as a challenger to the no-doubt formidable array of Mullins juveniles from the same source that will be in the Triumph Hurdle line-up in eight weeks’ time.
The Skeltons have targeted the three days of the Winter Racing Festival at Windsor and Ascot over the coming weekend for a concerted aim at solidifying their already commanding lead.
Windsor on Friday offers seven races worth a total of £415k and Skelton has a dozen entered in five of those contests. Ascot on Saturday and then back to Windsor for Sunday, there are similar cards with almost precisely the same amount of cash to be won – in all £1.25 million for the 21 races.
I always loved going jumping at Windsor in the old days, particularly enjoying the New Year’s Day Hurdle which was a serious trial for the Champion Hurdle. I was unsure whether last season’s initial go at jumping after so many years away from the Calendar was a success, but any gremlins with the track seemed to have been ironed out when they staged the first fixture of the 2025/26 season in late November. I’m looking forward to a midwinter feast this weekend.
The promised ease in the weather over the coming days will ensure a strong entry for all those races and the Skelton runners will face determined opposition throughout the weekend. It’s hard to escape the feeling though that Dan and jockey brother Harry have elevated themselves onto a higher plane, their defeats at the hands of Mullins merely doubling their resolve.
**
I was very sad to hear the news of problems at Chelmsford City racecourse, struggling with a serious loss on the past financial year leading to a reported delay in full payment of staff on the days leading up to Christmas.
Chelmsford isn’t everyone’s favourite track, but it’s handy to get to for racegoers in East London in particular and all over Essex. The grandstand might be facing the “wrong way” and unless you go along to the winning line and combine that with watching on the big screen, much of what happens around the circuit can be hard, actually impossible, to follow.
Trainers from Newmarket love its proximity, just down the M11, but those around Lambourn can be subjected to harrowing journeys when the M4, M25 and the M11 North are playing up, sometimes all at once!
With only a single way in, it was always tricky for the track when it hosted well-attended (sometimes up to even 30,000) music events, but when Justin Timberlake appeared last summer the whole thing ground to a halt after his performance with cars stuck in the car park for hours and the adjacent road connecting the City of Chelmsford to the A120 similarly blocked for ages.
That brought a severe sanction on the number of people that would be allowed at any fixture, 10,000 I believe, effectively stifling the wonderful work done by Neil Graham and his staff. I’ve known Neil since he trained out of the yard in Newmarket adjacent to the Tattersalls sales paddocks, when he had horses in the yard for the Thoroughbred Corporation.
He knows his stuff and is a very nice man to boot. I hope Chelmsford’s troubles will soon be sorted. They’ve fought back before and hopefully will do so again. I always enjoy going there and wish I’d been free to go yesterday, but late additions to the schedule aren’t always easy.
It’s a place where horses can build up impressive winning sequences and my pal Mick Godderidge, a shareholder in the now six-year-old Carlton, saw the horse win six times from seven runs at the track between December 2024 and last September for James Owen. No doubt he’ll add to that tally over this winter.
- TS
I have mentioned several times before that I am a great believer in specialising when it comes to betting on horse racing, writes Dave Renham. On that note, this article revisits an idea I looked at in February last year, that of honing in on a specific all-weather course and distance and undertaking a deep dive into the plethora of past facts and figures.
Looking for patterns and pointers for races from a specific track and trip is a type of trends-based approach. Using race trends has become more popular in the past 15 years or so although more specifically this approach has been used for big races such as the Derby or Cheltenham's Gold Cup.
In that prior article I looked at Lingfield over 1m2f; today I will set my sights on Kempton's 7 furlongs range. I will consider handicap races only (but I'll ignore 2yo nursery handicaps), with data taken from 2018 to 2025. Profits are shown to Befair Starting Price (BSP) with returns adjusted for 2% commission.
Looking at the results from a specific course and distance (C&D) should give us good insight and potentially an edge over fellow punters in such races. Choosing this particular C&D means we are guaranteed plenty of qualifying races each year – there are roughly 60 annually based on the last eight years.
So, let’s crack on starting with market factors.
The price bands shown are Industry SP simply because these price bands are more familiar to most, and the splits were as follows:
As we can see from the numbers in the table, the market has been a very good guide in these races; surprisingly so, to me at least. The 15/8 or shorter group did exceptionally well, producing returns in excess of 17 pence in the £. Overall, if backing every single runner that had a final ISP of 8/1 or less a profit would have been achieved backing blind to BSP. Below is a graph showing the yearly BSP A/E indices for this 8/1 or shorter cohort:
Seven of the nine years saw A/E figures of 1.00 or more indicating ‘value’, with the two below not far off at 0.97. It seems that a sensible approach for this coming year, in these races, will be to focus on shorter priced runners. That is not to say that we put a line through the rest, but we need to treat runners likely to start higher than 8/1 with some caution.
In terms of the bigger priced brigade – once the price hit an ISP of 20/1 or greater, returns were very poor indeed. Taking all-weather handicaps as a whole, horses priced 20/1 or bigger would have lost us around five pence in the £ during this time frame. This has partly been due to some big prices winning and helping to claw back the losses, but at Kempton these big priced winners have been far rarer than elsewhere.
Let me now see if the finishing position last time out has given us any useful pointers:
On the face of it LTO winners have fared well, but their profit figure has been skewed somewhat by a winner with a Betfair Starting Price of 92.0. Despite there not being too many big-priced winners it seems more prudent to look at LTO finishing position restricting the results to horses that were 20/1 or shorter:
LTO winners have still done best when looking at finishing positions one to four, but bizarrely the value has been with horses that finished fifth to seventh on their most recent run. I am guessing that the profit for this group has been due to variance more than anything but having said that seven of the eight of the years would have produced a profit for this LTO 5th to 7th group. This is one stat I cannot easily explain.
For the remainder of the article, I am going to stick to horses that had an ISP of 20/1 or less, in an attempt to avoid any skewed bottom lines.
Next stop is a look at the course horses ran at last time, focusing on AW tracks only as they are the most likely courses at this time of year for horses to have had their last run at:
Poor returns from those racing last time either at Lingfield or Southwell. In contrast, I would view a run LTO at Kempton as a positive. In terms of horses that raced LTO on the turf, they have combined to win only 11% of races showing losses of close to 13p in the £.
Anybody who has read previous articles penned by me on AW racing will know that males tend to outperform females in this discipline from a win rate perspective. However, for Kempton 7f handicaps there was a closer gap than normal.
Not only was the win rate gap closer than we normally see, but females have edged males in the profit / returns department. When I dug deeper into the female runner group, I noticed that older horses (mares) completely outperformed their younger counterparts (fillies), albeit from a much smaller sample. If we compare strike rates first – both the win rate, and the win & placed (EW) rate:
As the graph shows mares (females aged four and up) have performed much better than fillies (three-year-old or younger, so just 3yos in this study) from both a win and a placed perspective. Also, if we examine the PRBs (Percentage of Rivals Beaten) mares have won that ‘contest’ comfortably too – 0.59 to 0.55.
The overall stats for mares priced ISP 20/1 or less were excellent – 32 wins from 203 runners (15.8%) for a BSP profit of £112.99 (ROI +55.7%). Based on these findings, mares could continue to offer up some value over this C&D in the future.
Personally I have always felt that 7f is quite a specialist trip, so I wanted to see whether a run over the same 7f distance LTO was a positive. Likewise, whether being upped or dropped in trip proved to be a negative. Here were my findings:
These stats certainly back up my theory, at least as far as this C&D has been concerned. This definitely looks to be something to keep an eye on over the coming months and years.
I think comparing past course winners versus horses that have yet to win at the track (non-course winners) can be sometimes flawed, as some horses in the ‘non course winners’ group may not have even raced the track before. Hence, for this section a horse must have run at least twice at Kempton to qualify. Comparing the A/E (BSP) indices between both groups is enlightening:
Horses that have raced at the track at least twice before have been much better value if they're already a course winner. Indeed, all the main metrics were strongly in favour of previous course winners as the table below shows:
This has been a very important factor over this C&D across the eight-year time period.
In many previous articles I have demonstrated the importance of run style, which can have a big say in shorter distance races on the flat/AW where front runners/early leaders often have an edge. This has been the case here too as the table shows:
I have not included profit/loss figures as we do not know the run style of the runner pre-race. Just for the record, though, if we had been able to know which horses would lead early, they would have produced huge returns of over 40 pence in the £.
Front runners have been able to win from any draw but it has been easier to lead if drawn low to middle. One final front-running fact is that front runners have performed much better in races in medium to bigger sized fields. Races with 9 to 14 runners have seen front runners really excel; the same run style would have actually made a loss in races of eight or fewer runners.
Finally, for this piece I am going to look at the draw. For potential draw bias to exist we need bigger fields to analyse so I have looked at races with at least eight runners. I will also not impose the 20/1 price cap as it unbalances the draw groupings and, as it turns out, those bigger prices winners have not significantly skewed the results in any particular draw section. Let me share the raw data first, splitting the draw into three sections – low third, middle third and high third, giving the win percentages for each third of the draw.
As far as the win rate goes lower draws had the edge, but in recent years middle drawn runners seem to be closing the gap. In the past two years for example the PRB for low draws was 0.54; for middle draws 0.52 (over the longer time frame it is 0.55 versus 0.50).
High draws have always struggled, however, and are generally best avoided. Indeed, horses drawn 9 or higher had a dreadful record, winning just 55 times from 1,116 runners for losses of £422.77 (ROI -36.4%). Compare this to horses drawn in the bottom three stalls (1 to 3) who recorded 142 winners from 1,255 runners with much smaller losses of £83.74 (ROI -6.7%). However, the best value has been with those drawn in stalls 5 to 7 thanks to 135 wins from 1,253 losing just £11.92 to £1 level stakes which equates to less than a penny lost per pound staked.
I think those middling stalls of 5 to 7 will continue to offer the best value as the lowest draws are slightly overbet, the highest draws really struggle, and the cut away in the Kempton straight allows those middle drawn runners who might not have got an ideal pitch early on more options in the final phase of the race.
*
Undertaking this type of specific course and distance research can offer some useful insights to aid the selection process. If any reader has a specific track/trip combo they’d like me to review, then please drop a note in the comment section below. I will do my best to do some initial digging and maybe it will end up as an article.
- DR
Did you get any of those 'your year in review' thingies from online subscriptions? I did. My Spotify listening age is 67 apparently (don't play classical music if you want to be considered young and hip - who knew?), and I'm in the top 0.1% of global ChatGPT users - and probably the top 0.00001% of those who swear profusely at the robot (may the lord preserve me when the machines rise up).
Well, no such automated 'done for you' harvested data flatter-fests here; something a bit more DIY - and more personal as a result - instead.
Seeing as we're in January, the month named after Janus, the two-faced Roman god who could look both back and forward, it's time for some reflection and resolution. That's a sentiment that applies as much to horseracing play as to other, more meaningful, facets of life. So in this post I'd like to share a few brief thoughts on my own reflection and resolutions.
The turn of the year is an excellent time to de-clutter and to make the space to start afresh. That clearing out applies to tools as well as mindset.
Racing trackers are brilliant aides-memoire. They provide a handy reminder, just when you need it, about a horse (or jockey or trainer or sire) in which you're interested. If you watch racing at all - even a little bit - you should add horses to a tracker. I really strongly encourage it. The geegeez tracker is part of our free provision so you don't even need to be a paying member to use it.
As well as adding a horse or other entity to the tracker - just by clicking the little star icon next to its name - you can include a comment about why you're tracking it. I use the comments religiously, while trying to use the tracker more sparingly, when I see something I think will be useful in future. Here's an example:
That randomly chosen example - Ballysax Lil' Mick - finished 2nd at 11/1 on his next start, and was then a slightly disappointing 6th of 14 the only time he ran since.
And now, as part of my 'reflect and resolve' activity, I have to choose whether to keep him on my tracker. In his case I'm going to remove him. Adding horses (or other entities) to a tracker has been a great source of winners for me; but removing them once they've served (or failed to serve, as is also often the case) their purpose is just as critical. Purge and reload.
So, step 1, review your tracker and clear it down. Or start using a tracker if you don't currently but you do watch racing.
Another tool I use a lot is the geegeez Query Tool. I do plenty of general research, occasionally replicate specific big race conditions so I can analyse, say, the Derby in more detail from a profile perspective, and I have lots of micro-systems and angles saved as QT Angles.
Again, the problem is that angles get added but they also need removing: sometimes the perceived benefit doesn't manifest or, more often, loses its edge. Reviewing the ongoing performance of QT Angles is good discipline in and of itself, but it also declutters the personalised content you pipe into the racecards.
After all, why would you want out of date and/or unprofitable intel presented as fact? That's one of the reasons ChatGPT and other LLMs are currently so moderate at assessing racing form. They will improve over time, but the fact that the companies want to burn as few tokens as possible means a lot of the responses are far less considered than they ought to/could be. Anyway, I digress.
I review my angles at least once a year and, to be honest, I'm overdue. I'll be finding time this week or next (there's a lot of actual work I need to do just now, alas) to pare my QT Angles back.
Once you get into it, it's actually pretty fun; and there's an above average chance you'll end up doing a bit of impromptu research triggered by one of your current angles which has gone 'end of shelf life' on you.
*
Clearing down your Tracker and Query Tool Angles sets you up to start adding new entries in the coming months. The danger with all such tools if they're not semi-regularly pruned is that their utility becomes diluted by content that you know to be stale but which you haven't cleaned up. So clean them up!
Once you've set the scene for the new year, it's a perfect time to look at how the previous year (or period, a year being entirely arbitrary) went. Below are two ways of doing this, one beloved of some and the other available to all of us.
So, how did you get on punting last year? What do you mean, you don't know?
Just kidding. Hardly anyone who bets knows where they are with their pee and ell. Part of that for a lot of people is because they either know they're behind and would prefer not to specify to what degree... or they just don't care: they're winning or losing a few quid and it doesn't matter either way because they're having a good time.
I am enormously ok with that take. Betting on racing - or anything else - should be fun first; otherwise it's just another form of work. Naturally, it can be rewarding in more than just passing the time terms.
If you want to know where you are on the profit/loss spectrum, you could use our Bet Tracker. Not only will it help you with your bottom line awareness, it will also highlight areas of strength and weakness - by race type, handicap/non-handicap, distance, field size, and so on.
Users who commit to adding their wagers to Bet Tracker evangelise about how helpful it is in understanding what they do well and where they're leaking cash. Often, it's confirmation of something long suspected; occasionally, it provides a shock in an area considered relatively strong.
I should front up here and concede that I don't use Bet Tracker. Part of the reason is that a lot of my bets are not standard bookie bets. Rather, I play on exchanges and the tote a fair bit, which doesn't lend itself readily to this tool (although there are at least partial workarounds that can be deployed, especially if using the 'notes' function: use a prefix in the notes, and then sort your csv download by the notes column).
But what every online punter - including me - can, and arguably should, do is review deposits and withdrawals from bookie accounts. These won't include bookmaker balances or ante post bets in transit, but as a crude barometer of the ledger they are the one-eyed king in the land of the blind.
Further candid admission: whilst I haven't yet undertaken my annual public P/L exercise, I'm pretty sure I lost a small bit last year. There were reasons for that - apart from picking the wrong quadrupeds! - which I'll come on to when I do that article; but what is crucial is that I sort of knew what was happening throughout... and I was (and still am) totally fine with that. I have several 'jobs' where I derive my income, and I generally top it up a tiny bit from betting - but in real terms that amount has only ever been a vanity symbol. Last year, it probably wasn't. And I had a wonderful time betting horses all year! Anyway, like I said, more on that anon. Which leads me to...
Having reflected, it's time to resolve. Once you know where you are - or have recently been - you have a choice to make. You might want to change, and you might not. There is no wrong option. Reflecting in the ways I've suggested will only truly answer the "did I make a profit?" question. That, almost certainly, is not the most important one.
Questions like "did I enjoy my time with the form?", "were there any unwelcome side effects?", and "is there something else I'd rather be doing?" are much better ones to ask, assuming the financial bottom line is acceptable to you.
My answers are, "Hell yes, I enjoyed my time with the form", "no side effects whatsoever", and "there is almost (almost!) nothing else I'd rather be doing with that time".
Your responses might be different. But by reviewing, and knowing what they are and where you are, you get to make an informed decision either way.
Forward is good, and sideways might be absolutely fine, too!
Happy New Year,
Matt
Much has been made in recent days about the 21st Century record that Billy Loughnane snatched from the grasp of Kieren Fallon on the final day of 2025, writes Tony Stafford. His single winner, the classy Enemy from the Ian Williams stable, won a £15k first prize at Southwell on Thursday which put Loughnane on 222 for the calendar year, exceeding Fallon’s best, set in 2003.
Fallon won the jockeys’ title six times, the final one in that year when 207 of the wins came in the prescribed period of the championship. The sextet was interrupted midway through in 2000 by Kevin Darley.
Billy would have had a more arduous task to secure the record at the tender age of 19 had Oisin Murphy bothered to stay in the UK for the conclusion of the 2024 season. Murphy and I had a chat at York’s Ebor meeting that August when I suggested that at his then rate of progress, he could even have bettered the record of Sir Gordon Richards, who collected 269 wins in 1947. That was the 20th of Gordon’s 26 championships.
Oisin decided not to stay in the UK, instead chasing the big prizes available to the top riders around the world. He still ended the year with 217. His best to date is 220 in 2019.
Richards missed out on the title three times, to Tommy Weston 100 years ago, Freddie Fox in 1930 and Harry Wragg in 1941. He achieved a lifetime ambition by finally ending his Derby hoodoo in that Coronation year on Pinza. He then broke his pelvis in a fall in the Sandown Park paddock the following summer and retired with 4,870 career wins to his credit. He subsequently enjoyed solid success as a trainer when Lady Beaverbrook was his most important client.
In more recent times, only AP McCoy, of course over jumps, has managed anything comparable, with 20 consecutive titles. His first was as a conditional rider in 1995/96 when based with Toby Balding, whose brother Ian, trainer of Mill Reef, sadly died last week.
AP’s last title came in 2014/15. He habitually broke the 200-winner mark each season, with a peak of 289, thereby considerably exceeding Richards’ best, in 2001/02. The latest champion, Sean Bowen, seems to have been made in McCoy’s single-minded mould. Riding for the prolific and upwardly mobile Olly Murphy, he looks to have a winner-providing source to match McCoy’s supply-line from Martin Pipe.
Bowen apparently sees “no reason why I couldn’t get to 300.” A little boastful maybe, but he won last season’s championship with ease with 180 wins and is already on 170 with almost a full four months to go – that’s 30-odd per month. He won’t want many cold spells to hinder that aim though.
Not an instant success, unlike McCoy and Loughnane, Sean Bowen has been developing his skills for around a decade, initially on now-retired father Peter’s horses. Peter has been succeeded with the licence by another son, Mickey, but is also the first port of call for many other top trainers, in addition to Olly Murphy.
Loughnane also got his riding education with a training father, Mark Loughnane, who normally sends out around 40 winners a year. Billy’s progress has been meteoric, going from six when first allowed to ride as as a 16-year-old in 2022, to 130, 162 and now 222.
Kieren Fallon has been able to watch the young man at close quarters as the former champion is a regular rider at Charlie Appleby’s yard, as is Loughnane. The teenager is the jockey of choice when Appleby needs an alternative when William Buick is otherwise engaged, usually at the main meeting of the day.
It’s a numbers game of course. To get to 222, Loughnane leant heavily on his boss George Boughey – 100 wins in 2025 – and gives great credit for his progress. In all he had 1,321 rides in 2025. Only twice did Kieren Fallon have more than 1,000 rides: 1,055 in his last title winning year and 1,109 for 200 in the following season.
Fallon describes Loughnane as “a guaranteed future champion that does all the right things.” Since the BHA restricted jockeys to riding at a single meeting in 2020 – I had thought it was longer ago than that – to help curb the spread of Covid 19, jockeys might have a quieter life, but the big numbers are less easy to be achieved.
Luke (have saddle will travel) Morris five times rode more than 1,500 horses in a year and despite the one-meeting restriction, he has still maintained at least 1,000 every campaign since 2010.
Fallon is also delighted his son Cieren is developing nicely, helped by a connection with William Haggas. He rode 136 winners despite having not much more than half of Loughnane’s rides (721 last year). Haggas has given him a Group 1 winner in Montassib and the other two victories for him at the top level have been for Roger Teal with his stable star, the sprinter Oxted.
I had a nice day out on Saturday, leaving at an unconscionable hour to make the first race at Lingfield, and I wasn’t the only one. The owners’ room has around 25 big round tables, each with eight chairs and for the entire afternoon most were fully occupied, alongside some very decent food and a well-stocked and easily accessible bar.
Multiple ownership and friends thereof made for a terrific buzz and young Fallon had rides for both his previous Group 1 providers. I was there to represent the owners of recent Southwell winner Florida Suite, only allowed to take her chance after a good deal of agonising by her trainer.
“I think the track might be too sharp – she looked more of a stayer when she won at Southwell – and I’m not sure if the blinkers will work again.” Cieren was more hopeful, but as she toiled home last of six having drifted like a barge, as they say, Fallon reckons Newcastle would be more to her liking. A winning Starman filly, would you want to risk another poor run when a convenient sale is close at hand?
Fallon partnered the Roger Teal newcomer Pangbourne later and that youngster showed some promise for the future. The always-cheerful Roger had already won the opener with All Too Beautiful, completing a hat-trick under Jack Mitchell. That followed a dead-heat for first time handicapper Three Socks On at Chelmsford the previous day.
With so much ice to clear from my car windows before setting off for Lingfield, I was more than a little surprised when Sandown survived the winter snap to provide jumps action that same day. Those frost sheets do pay their way, although Wincanton and already cancelled Newcastle confirm them to be fallible.
Back in the owners’ room at Lingfield, the atmosphere was great. As was mentioned last week, crowds at the race meetings around Christmas and the New Year were very good. To some extent the rather idiosyncratic scheduling of Premier League matches probably didn’t hurt in that regard.
I’m now going to speak a foreign language where the Editor is concerned. [Qué? – Ed.] I stayed awake until late listening to our much-maligned cricketers making a bold riposte in Sydney, only condescending to close my eyes when an accursed thunderstorm ended play early.
Matt no doubt had been annoyed when Arsenal beat Bournemouth on Saturday night. Bournemouth could have scored at least five if things had gone their way. They didn’t. Sorry boss!
- TS
Amid all the thrilling performances over the Christmas period so far, I cannot shake from my consciousness Ben Pauling’s Mambonumberfive, writes Tony Stafford. I must confess I hated the song of that name when it was popular – maybe I’ll be a bit more charitable after Kempton on Saturday.
Using times as a guide to merit in jump racing is never foolproof, but when successive races on the same card, distance and discipline are concerned, you have a chance of getting a reasonable line to the form.
On Saturday at Kempton – shamefully destined soon to be another housing estate it seems – both Ben Pauling’s Mambonumberfive in the Wayward Lad Novices Chase and Dan Skelton’s Thistle Ask, top-weight in the Desert Orchid Handicap Chase, both Grade 2 events, immediately afterwards were easy winners. The time of the former at 4.47 seconds faster than the standard for the two miles at Kempton, was 0.42 seconds better than Thistle Art’s demolition job in the handicap.
Dan Skelton is considering the Queen Mother Champion Chase for his eight-year-old, winner of five of six chases, the last four all by at least a margin of seven lengths since Skelton took him over from the retired James Ewart this season. He won off 115 first time for Dan and was already up to 146 on Saturday, with a hike guaranteed well into the 150’s when the new ratings come out tomorrow.
This was a race where the pace was unrelenting – three horses goading each other at the front until Harry Skelton pushed the button and sent Thistle Ask away from the rest of the seven-horse field. He seemed to be quickening throughout the race, gathering pace once more as they approached the first of three fences in the straight.
Thistle Ask will be a nine-year-old if he lines up for the Champion Chase, but you need to have an attacking mindset if you want to see off Willie Mullins.
Despite all this, Ben Pauling, a day on from the emotion of The Jukebox Man, Harry Redknapp and all that, unearthed a chaser I contend of equal potential to his stable star.
When Mambonumberfive went through the Arqana sale ring last year for €450k, the obvious question about the three-year-old’s qualification for such a lofty price was, “how?”
He had been unable to win in three tries in juvenile hurdles at Auteuil for French jumps training ace Francois Nicolle with the final effort in June 2024, a month before his sale, being a second to Double-Green homebred Raffles Dolce Vita.
That horse has failed to win again in seven tries, latterly when switched to Ireland. His latest effort was a fourth of six to Gordon Elliott’s Romeo Coolio, beaten 31 lengths, at Fairyhouse late last month. His chance was mirrored by the starting price, 125/1!
While his stock plummeted, Mambonumberfive has flourished under Pauling, initially in three tries over hurdles, winning the second, a Grade 2 novice at Kempton, then switching as a four-year-old to chasing this autumn.
A horse of impressive size and scope, he immediately took to this new role, winning with a sustained finishing effort at Aintree and trumping that with a comfortable two-length defeat of Mighty Bandit at Newbury.
From novice handicaps, Ben switched him to this weight-for-age Grade 2 race against his elders. Five runners here and for most of the two miles Ben Jones allowed him to sit at the back, with a couple of slight errors confirming that position.
Then, as they turned for home, you could see him making quick progress, and by the second last he had got to the front. From the final fence he was travelling so well that he had put seven lengths between himself and runner-up Hansard, a solid performer for Gary and Josh Moore. From last place four from home to seven lengths clear and careering away at the line. All as a four-year-old, although he will be five on Thursday!
You’d have to give him a chance in the Arkle Chase at Cheltenham as he clearly handles going left-handed as well as Saturday’s romp the other way round, but it might be less certain that Cheltenham would suit him as well as Aintree with the long straight there to get him organised for that charge to the line.
The amazing elements for me about Saturday were less that he was quicker than a possible Queen Mother contender having loitered at the back of his field for so long, against the sustained gallop of Thistle Ask’s race, but that he could manage it with so little previous experience of chasing behind him.
If his enormous talent was evident, his stablemate The Jukebox Man exhibited the one attribute that apart from natural ability is most elusive in racehorses, courage and determination not to be beaten.
I well remember how in 2009 when Punjabi won his Champion Hurdle for Raymond Tooth and Nicky Henderson, he was in the middle of a three-horse thrust up the Cheltenham hill between Celestial Halo and Binocular, grittily holding on to the narrow lead he and Barry Geraghty had taken at the final flight.
Here, though, The Jukebox Man did even better as he was overtaken by last year’s King George VI Chase winner Banbridge at that point in the race. It seemed inevitable that he would succumb to that Joseph O’Brien horse’s speed from the last and that of the joint favourites, Willie Mullins’ Gaelic Warrior and Nicky Henderson’s Jango Baie who were also bang there; but he would have none of it.
As four horses strained for the line, suddenly in the dying strides, The Jukebox Man, in the middle under Ben Jones, had his head down at the crucial time, winning by noses from Banbridge and Gaelic Warrior with Jango Baie half a length away. It was a race that racing needed and if you listened to the ITV commentators, a win in the Harry Redknapp colours that was “great for racing”.
It was great for Harry Redknapp and the two Bens certainly, but here was a man in his late 70s, however well known to the public, winning a race. Would his win inspire young racegoers to take more of an interest in the sport? That seems fanciful. Big days, be they at Kempton and Chepstow, where we got a great home win for the Rebecca Curtis/Sean Bowen horse Haiti Couleurs in the Coral Welsh Grand National, inevitably engender great enthusiasm for the young people that attend.
I remember last autumn suggesting that Champions Day at Ascot had many more younger attendees than I’d ever recalled at any meeting, something Grand National winning rider Graham Thorner also noticed that day. Getting them to come back for say, an all-weather card at Kempton, is another matter. I wonder who would get their many all-weather fixtures if the sale did go through.
Kempton was one of the many tracks near London, including Newmarket, my dad took me to from about the age of eight. I’d become much more interested in racing by 1961 at age 15. I recall one Easter we watched the Kempton Guineas trials from the stand at the top of the straight, where they now keep the course equipment.
The horse he’d backed in the 1000 Trial was in front passing us and I was shocked when it didn’t make the frame. That was three from home, though, and a long way out for a mile race! Even so, I thought I knew a bit more about the game than he did – not that ever in my life I’ve matched his facility for successful punting for small stakes.
One day in my teens, I had brought a girl friend to the flat in the afternoon with both my parents out at work, expecting a clear couple of hours. We were in the early throes of getting involved when I heard the front door opening. With a face like thunder, he took one look at the slight clothing disarray, went into his bedroom and within minutes had gone out again.
When mum arrived from work, she told me he went to Kempton, no doubt on the Fallowfield & Britten coach from Clapton Pond <Prince Monolulu, the famed so-called tipster who peed on my shoe at the halfway stop on the way to Newmarket one time, would always be on board>. When he came home, the girlfriend long gone, again I was greeted with a frosty silence as my mum looked on sympathetically.
The following night he went to Hackney dogs, his regular venue while I continued my apprenticeship in punting by going off with my mates to my favoured Thursday night track, Clapton. Slightly closer to home I always got back before him, and the difference in mood was soon evident.
He said, “I went to Kempton last night and had the Tote Treble <a regular bet in the second, fourth and sixth races of ten shillings, 50p in those days>. It Paid £98.18 shillings. Then tonight I had the Trifecta <first three home> at the dogs. It paid £123,15s,3d. <12 pence to the shilling>” He was always a lucky punter and couldn’t wait to tell me, whatever his feelings otherwise.
I never found out what happened to his last bet – he dropped dead in the William Hill betting shop (now closed) at Hackney Wick, 100 yards from his house and the ticket was never found. He was 82 and left me the heritage of Arsenal, cricket at the Oval and racing. What more did an eight-year-old need to set him up for life?
- TS
For avid fans, racing on Boxing Day is something to be cherished, usually for one of two reasons, writes Dave Renham. Firstly, the day includes one of the major steeplechases of the year, the King George at Kempton; and secondly, there is always a short hiatus before Christmas and, for those who bet regularly, a few blank days can feel like a lot longer. This year we have three days with no UK racing starting on the 23rd December, today.
In this article I will be examining data from the last ten Boxing Days, focusing on the National Hunt meetings that have been run in the UK. Profits and losses are calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP) with 2% commission applied to any winning bets.
This year there will be seven such meetings on Boxing Day: at Aintree, Fontwell, Kempton, Market Rasen, Sedgefield, Wetherby and Wincanton. Plenty of meetings to choose from, then, but when there are numerous meetings there can be a tendency to skimp when it comes to analysing and ultimately deciding upon our bets. Lack of time is a factor at this time of year so we need to be careful not to take our eye off the ball, and to continue to use the tried and tested methods we deploy at other times.
When discussing the need for pragmatism around Boxing Day wagering, I hope readers, and more especially my editor Matt, will permit some poetic license given the time of year – allow me a little rein, dear, as it were for the next few paragraphs. [*that was the Ed's joke - apologies! Fire away Dave, permission granted...]
A question I want to start with is, ‘Do you play chess?’
The reason I ask is because, as a keen player myself, I see a lot of parallels between a game of chess and finding a horse to bet on. A chess game is made up of three distinct phases – the opening, the middlegame and the endgame. The opening lays the foundation for the remainder of the game – it sets the stage as it were. When I play chess, which I do regularly online, the black pieces are my pieces of choice. This is despite white having the first move and effectively having the smallest of advantages. The big advantage of me playing black is that it is easier to steer the game in the direction that I would prefer. The middlegame is the complex part of a game of chess. There are usually plenty of pieces on the board and it is key to choose the best strategy for the position. Some middlegame positions see players looking to attack, others require a slower, more strategic approach. The endgame is the final phase where the ultimate goal is checkmating your opponent’s king and winning the game.
My approach to betting on horses is very similar to that of a game of chess. The process I use, like chess, has three distinct phases. The first, is scrolling through the racecard. I will start by looking for the types of races I want to bet in, as well as looking for horses that I have previously made notes on with a view to backing them another day. Just like with the opening in chess, I am trying to play to my strengths.
The second phase is looking in more detail at the races I have initially highlighted, deciding which races fit best in terms of the strategies I typically employ. Some races are easy to attack: they appear less complex, maybe with fewer runners or limited competition; while others demand more time and consideration. The final phase, or my ‘endgame’, is to decide which selections I am going to bet, with the ultimate goal being that I will have a winning day where the bookmakers are ‘checkmated’.
The other parallel that betting on the horses has with chess is how one’s preparation for both has changed in the last 25-30 years. The advance in technology over this period has changed things beyond comprehension for both. Before the late 90s the best humans were better at chess than the best computers. That is not the case now with computers so much better than the best players in the world. However, computers have changed how players learn, study and improve their chess. Likewise in horse racing, 30 years ago there was limited technology to help us with the study of races. Nowadays, 95%+ of serious punters will be using technology when analysing a race.
Here at Geegeez, Gold (and Lite) members have a plethora of tools, at the touch of a button, to help when it comes to the betting selection process. The Query tool, the Profiler tab, the Pace and Draw analysers, numerous daily stats reports, and of course the racecard. From the Geegeez racecard we can easily tap into past form, utilise the excellent Instant Expert tab, as well as look at past race trends, and instantly compare bookmakers’ odds.
Now, I appreciate that readers' approaches will all be slightly different when it comes to deciding upon which horses to punt. However, when betting this Boxing Day, I hope my chess and racing parallels will remind you to select bets in the same way that you would do on any other given day. I have been bitten myself on a few previous Boxing Days when I have rushed, not following my usual methodical approach. I have hurried in the past because of family commitments, which many of us have. But I have learnt that, if I am restricted time wise, I must simply look at fewer races. Alternatively, some, or indeed most race prep can be done before Boxing Day thanks to the early declarations. However, regardless of how many races I eventually look at, I still need to use all of the Geegeez tools that I normally do.
Well, that could be the longest preamble for one of my articles ever! So let me now share some numbers.
Firstly, I would like to look at the win strike rates of different BSP price bands comparing all UK NH results between 2015 and 2024 with the Boxing Day results for those ten years. Clearly, the sample sizes vary considerably but there have been over 430 races run on Boxing Day during this time frame which is a decent sample. The graph below shows the splits:
As the graph shows, the comparative strike rates have been fairly similar across the price bands, although the 1.01 to 8.00 group for Boxing Day runners has been a couple of percentage points below the norm. Ultimately the evidence points to the fact that we are unlikely to see a plethora of unusual results this coming Boxing Day, such as huge betting coups landed on a regular basis, or most favourites going in.
To attempt to put more meat on the bones, below are some more detailed BSP splits for the last ten Boxing Days, looking not just at strike rates, but at profits/losses and returns too:
Horses priced BSP 30.01 and above have produced very poor returns, affirming that big shocks have been rare, indeed rarer than we see usually. The ‘sweet spot’ seems to have been those runners priced 12.01 to 20.00 – they have produced very solid profits over the past ten Boxing Days. The shorter priced runners (BSP 4.25 or shorter) have been slightly below par as a group.
Meanwhile we have seen quite a difference between the returns for the favourite versus the second favourite. Favourites on Boxing Day have been very poor value overall losing over 14p in the £; (133 wins from 438 for a loss of £62.38). Second favourites however have been good value, winning 100 times from 432 runners (SR 23.2%) for profit of £57.21 (ROI +13.2%).
I thought it was worth sharing favourite performance by course. I have not included Aintree as that is a new Boxing Day fixture and the sample size amounts to just 14 runs.
Only Fontwell favourites made a profit during the period of study, and the worst returns have come at the most prestigious meeting at Kempton. It will be interesting to see how favourites fare this Boxing Day at the Surrey venue. Neither Sedgefield nor Wincanton has been kind to favourite backers in the past ten years.
For the remainder of the piece, I would like to set a maximum price limit of BSP 20.0 in order to avoid any of the really big priced winners skewing the bottom lines.
With this price limit set I want to examine market movement, specifically the price movement from Early Morning Odds (EMO) to Opening Show (OS) odds. The table below shows my findings:
As the table clearly shows, horses that lengthened in price from early morning to Opening Show on Boxing Day have proved to be poor value. Conversely, those horses staying the same price or shortening have proved profitable. What is even more interesting is when we examine the group that shortened between EMO and OS but then drifted between OS and the final ISP. This qualifying group, still with the earlier caveat that their final BSP was 20.0 or less, have produced 454 qualifiers of which 79 won (SR 17.4%) for a healthy profit of £149.04 (ROI +32.8%). So, assuming the pattern repeats this Boxing Day, we should be looking for horses that shorten during the day, but drift in the last ten minutes or so before the off.
Time to look at ‘days since last run’ data, again with the 20.0 BSP cap. Below is a graph which shows the BSP returns (ROI%) based on different periods of time off the track:
In terms of value, the more recent the run, the worse it has been. Horses returning to the track within ten days of their previous run have lost over 20p in the £. Those off the track for 11 to 21 days would have lost us over 11p in the £. The better value has been with horses returning off a longer layoff, especially those absent between 22 and 84 days (three to twelve weeks). Even those off the track for more than 12 weeks (85 days+) have edged into profit.
The finishing position last time out is next on my agenda. The Boxing Day splits have been as follows:
Based on these stats a finishing position third or worse last time out has been clearly preferable. Horses that finished runner-up LTO have proved to be very poor value. Continuing with the runner-up theme, looking at horses that finished second LTO but were priced bigger than BSP 20.0, there were 65 such qualifiers and all lost. For whatever reason, horses finishing second LTO have clearly not enjoyed Boxing Day in recent years, and they've certainly been over-bet.
Finally let me share some trainer data. Clearly, sample sizes for trainers with runners priced BSP 20.0 or less over just ten days are relatively modest to say the least. The table below shows those trainers who have saddled at least 30 runners:
A few trainers do stand out, one being Gary (and Josh) Moore. That yard has produced an excellent strike rate of 32% with returns of just under 16p in the £. Their market leaders have been particularly impressive with 11 wins from 16 (SR 68.8%) for a profit of £9.38 (ROI +58.6%). The Neil Mullholland stable has also performed well hitting a strike rate of just over one win in every five with the price cap in place. They have sent runners to most meetings, but two courses have seen significantly better results: Wetherby has seen four wins and two seconds for Mulholland from 12 runners producing a decent profit of £26.70 (ROI +222.5%), while the stable's record at Fontwell has been very similar with four wins and one second from 12 runners for a profit of £21.39 (ROI +178.3%).
Philip Kirby is another trainer who has excelled with his runners on Boxing Day producing huge returns from a strike rate in excess of 30%. Most of his profits have come from his handicap hurdlers which enjoyed eight wins from 22 runners (SR 36.4%) for a profit of £58.01 (ROI +263.7%). One other stat to note is that Kirby has sent eight runners to Sedgefield of which four have won at BSP prices of 12.0, 7.56, 4.65 and 10.27.
The legend that is Nicky Henderson has a decent Boxing Day record having secured a better than one in four strike rate, coupled with returns of a smidge above 16 pence in the £. His hurdlers have been the ones to follow thanks to 19 wins from 53 (SR 35.8%) for a profit of £31.60 (ROI + 59.6%).
A trainer who has fared less well based on the win stats is Paul Nicholls, with just 12 wins from 108 runners that were priced BSP 20.0 or less. However, before writing off his runners this Boxing Day, it should be noted that he has had 24 (!) second places across this time frame. It seems that luck may not have been on his side on Boxing Day in recent years, his illustrious record in the King George aside.
*
So those are my thoughts on the topical question, "To bet or not to bet on Boxing Day?"
That will be a question each of us must answer and, for those who respond in the positive, I hope the stats I have shared will point towards some value on the day.
Have a fantastic Christmas and thanks for your support and for the many positive comments members have posted over the past year.
- DR
When you are a grandson of the great show jumper Harvey Smith, what do you do other than become an international show jumper, like your father Steven Smith before you?, writes Tony Stafford. As Yorkshire as they come, Harvey was showjumping’s equivalent to another blunt speaking but highly talented man of his county, in his case from cricket in the middle of last century, Fred Trueman, in the days when both sports got plentiful live coverage on the BBC.
Add the surname Parkinson – remember the chat-show legend? – and the county theme continues. But if you want some historic nomenclature from horseracing, how about your parents call you Joel, recalling the Classic winning owner-breeders Jim and Stanhope, whose family made its money from gold mines in South Africa.
For those of more tender years, Harvey was as famous for a single V-sign to the judges after he won the 1971 British Show Jumping Derby as anything else. They withheld the £2,000 prizemoney for the “obscene gesture” which Harvey explained was merely a homage to Winston Churchill’s wartime victory salute. When Fred was asked by 13-year-old me as the players milled about in front of the pavilion on a rain-ruined day at I think Valentines Park, Ilford, “Please Mr Trueman, can I have your autograph?” “Fook off sooon!”
Twenty years later, standing in for Jonathan Powell doing the People weekly racing article, I was invited to sit in Fred’s seat. I declined.
It was to surprise in many quarters when Harvey joined with wife Sue to set up a training stable at High Eldwick, near Bingley in West Yorkshire. They opened for business in time for the 1989/90 season and, for the next 36 winters, Sue Smith was a regular winner of major races – mostly chases. The highlight of course was the victory of Auroras Encore in the 2013 Grand National.
For the past few years, her young relative Joel acted as her assistant before she had notched a single winner at the point in her final solo season when the joint training agreement came into play. Sue had gone from a peak of 70 wins at one stage to more modest high teens returns in her two final campaigns in sole charge.
The benefit of the new arrangement where, as in several other well-publicised partnerships, the younger element takes increasingly more prominence, was soon evident. Last season, the pair added 27 to Sue’s solo single and, after the weekend, with four wins in the last 14 days, they have already collected 22 and are within a jot of matching that season’s improved prizemoney tally.
Why the preamble? I’m getting to it. A horse trained by Joel Parkinson and Sue Smith was backed as if defeat was out of the question on Saturday and won accordingly. The race, the Tommy Whittle Handicap Chase at Haydock Park, is a three-mile contest named in honour of one of Haydock’s chairmen.
It was inaugurated in 1982 and among its first dozen winners were northern-trained Cheltenham Gold Cup heroes Little Owl, Forgive ‘N Forget and The Thinker, along with the phenomenal grey One Man. Sue Smith won the 2004 race with Chives, ridden by Dominic Elsworth.
It’s now a 0-145, so the likelihood of its ever offering a hand-up to another Gold Cup winner – they tend to be rated in the high 170s – is remote, except possibly in the case of Saturday’s extraordinary winner.
If ever a chase of this fame – however slightly tarnished the Tommy Whittle might be by that upper limit of 145 – has been won by a horse that had never previously won any race, I’d need someone with better historical records to remind me.
Six-year-old Grand Geste had been bought by Harvey Smith for £13,000 at the Goffs UK Spring sale in 2022. Before Saturday, he had run 11 times without winning, in two bumpers, seven hurdle races and a couple of chases.
On Saturday he was 2lb out of the handicap, so running off 119 in a 12-runner race which featured Nicky Richards’ previous Tommy Whittle winner Famous Bridge. That rival was never in contention as Danny McMenamin sent Grand Geste to the front from the off, jumping with amazing alacrity and agility.
There’s something about a front-running, bold-jumping grey horse – Desert Orchid? – and while it might be premature to talk about these two horses in the same breath, come a couple of years down the line, the relevance of Saturday will have been reinforced many times over, I’m sure.
A six-year-old as I mentioned, he is one of five of that age to win the race, more common nowadays with its being an event for emerging talents rather than established stars that have gone beyond the upper limit bracket.
Yet, in a way, Grand Geste should have probably been operating off far more advantageous marks – to begin with at least. Many shrewd handicap trainers who know how to play the system would describe as “unfortunate” on the one hand or “idiotic” more likely the day at Carlisle when Grand Geste narrowly failed to record a 200/1 win in his final novice hurdle race before collecting a handicap mark.
That day, the grey entered the uphill run-in with two lengths to spare over the field, but Sean Bowen on Olly Murphy’s Barlavento conjured one of his flying and all-action finishes to foil the grey, who in the process probably added 30lb to what would otherwise have been his opening mark.
He operated decently enough last season, with a couple of third places in a light campaign, but when he returned to Carlisle for a first run over fences, he got within four lengths of Ben Pauling’s useful performer The Jukebox Kid. Next was a narrow defeat at Newcastle, caught late on by Alcedo, trained by Venetia Williams.
Here though, in his first race beyond three miles, from start to finish all that remained in the mind was the vision of that exuberant jumping and the six-and-a-half-length winning margin that Danny could have stretched if needed. Expect maybe 14lb or even a little more to be lumped on the 119 he ran off when the new ratings come out tomorrow. If anything, on present evidence, Parkinson/Smith will be saying, “the more the merrier” and “handicapper, bring it on!”
The way he galloped all the way to the line, something like the Peter Marsh Chase back at Haydock next month would be ideal. Sue Smith has won it five times, but Grand Geste needs to go up even more than the harshest assessor could contrive to get in the weights. Mr Vango, one of the favourites for next year’s Grand National won it last year off 140 – and he was bottom weight! Who says he couldn’t win it from 10lb wrong? The trainers and the market are unlikely to be bothered at all.
Talking of Mr Vango, he came back to action this month and just failed in a thrilling tussle to win the Becher Chase over the Aintree Grand National fences. I can picture Grand Geste going over those before long, too.
Mr Vango was done on the line by Ben Pauling’s Twig and I remember when Twig got his first handicap mark a few years back, Ben was bemoaning the fact that he had started off with a far higher figure than was necessary.
After two unplaced runs from Ben’s yard, he switched to point-to-pointing, winning six times, all for stable owner Mrs Georgia Morgan and ridden each time by Georgia’s son Beau. Before rejoining Pauling from the Matthew Hampton yard, he added a comfortable hunter-chase win at Warwick. Had he run three times rather than two in that initial spell, he would already have had a mark and running in that hunter chase might have been avoided. As it was, he started off with 132.
That Ben could win to date nine times, three over hurdles and six chases, with him from that difficult starting point, shows that if the talent is there, the wins will follow given the abilities of trainer and rider.
On a lower level, on Saturday I was talking to Hughie Morrison about a filly of his that was lining up for a third run later at Wolverhampton. He said she had been working much better of late and that he expected her to run a decent race, despite the massive morning odds.
She still started at 40/1 but ran nicely all the way, only beaten by a once-raced Godolphin filly ridden by Billy Loughnane.
Hughie expected that this home-bred daughter of St Mark’s Basilica, for the Arbib partnership, would “blow” a potential favourable mark, but for such owners showing something on the racecourse, especially a two-year-old filly, transcends such trivialities.
Judging by the smooth way she travelled around the inside at Dunstall Park, and remained well ahead of the rest of the field, suggests she won’t be too far off in another fillies’ maiden, especially if Charlie Appleby suffers a touch of heat stroke during his winter sojourn in Dubai and forgets to enter against her.
Hughie got a result just over half an hour later when nursery winner Tinsel provided an apt moment for the Christmas season. With no racing after today until Boxing Day, he can sit back and enjoy the festivities.
I would like to wish all my readers a lovely holiday season. I’m happy that, as you may have noticed, the days are getting longer at last! Roll on Royal Ascot.
Mentioning Ascot, I must drop in a line about Sir Johnny Weatherby, the late Queen’s representative at the Royal course for many years. It was as much a shock to learn that that he was 66 when he died as that he had passed away at all. Many who knew him much better than I did have spoken so highly of him. His loss will be sorely felt throughout the racing world, but especially at the family firm, Racing’s secretaries, that carries his name. Nice man.
An analysis of Racing Post’s Topspeed (TS) on the All-Weather, Part 2
This is the second article of two looking at the performance of the Racing Post’s speed ratings, known as Topspeed, in races on the all-weather (AW), writes Dave Renham. In the first piece, which you can read here, I looked at a variety of general Topspeed stats before focusing on non-handicap races. In this concluding half, the spotlight falls on handicap races and, from now on, I will use the abbreviation TS when talking about the Topspeed ratings.
The next paragraph is basically a carbon copy of what I wrote in the first article as it gives some background information regarding the TS ratings. Feel free to skip it if you have read the first one.
The raw TS figure is a measure of the speed a horse achieved in a particular race. It is amended slightly considering things like distance, weight carried, and the ground conditions. Essentially the TS is calculated by comparing a horse’s time with a standard time for the same course and distance. The TS figure we see in the Geegeez Racecard are known as adjusted TS ratings with the main adjustment made for weight carried in the current race. I believe the TS handicapper also tweaks this adjusted TS rating for the current race conditions. The adjusted TS figures we see in the Racecard are based on the best raw TS performance in the past 12 months. These performances must have occurred in the same ‘Race Code’, so for all-weather races only past TS raw figures in AW races have considered. Likewise for turf flat races, only past turf flat raw TS figures will be considered. For the jumps past hurdle race TS raw ratings will be used for hurdle races only, while past chase TS ratings will be used for chases only.
As I mentioned in the first paragraph this article examines all-weather racing analysing the performance of the TS figures in handicap races only. The time frame covers January 1st, 2019, to November 30th, 2025, and it includes both UK and Irish racing with any profit or loss being calculated to BSP less 2% commission.
I noted in the first piece how it is generally considered that, for a set of ratings to be effective, the win rate is key. The top-rated runner should have the highest win percentage, gradually reducing for the remaining runners. Ideally, the top-rated runner will also be the best performer in terms of returns. However, it is important to point out that regardless of how good a set of public ratings is, be they speed or form-based ratings, it is unreasonable expect the top-rated runner to secure a blind profit over a long period of time.
Let's start in a similar way to last time by looking at win percentages (strike rates) for different rated runners in handicap races. This covers all such races on an AW surface over the period of study. We saw in article 1 that for the ‘all races’ data the graph showed the right type of correlation between the rating position and the strike rate. Let’s see if that has occurred when focusing on handicaps only. In terms of understanding the graph, the horizontal axis is labelled from 1, the top-rated runner, to 2, the second rated, and so on:
The win strike rate for TS top-rated runners has been just under 15% and, more importantly, the win percentages have correlated positively once more with the TS ordinal rank. We have the left to right sliding scale that is the ‘ideal’.
If we look at the Each Way (win & placed) strike rates, we have a similar pattern:
The top-rated runner has the highest percentage once more, albeit only just, and the sliding scale is replicated once again.
The third graph looks at Percentage of Rivals Beaten (PRB). 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. Here are the splits:
We can see exactly the same type of correlation once again so it seems therefore, that in handicap races, the TS ratings have been very accurate in terms of predicting the overall performance of the horse in relation to their TS ranked positions.
For the remainder of the article my main focus will be the handicap race performance of the TS top-rated horses to see if any positive or indeed negative angles can be found. Firstly, let me share the record of every single TS top-rated runner since the beginning of 2019:
We see a close to break-even situation, which is an excellent starting point. Let me now break down the TS top-rated performance in more detail.
In terms of delving deeper I want to start looking at the TS top-rated runners in all-weather handicaps by comparing their annual win strike rates and win & placed (Each way) strike rates to see how they matched up.
Both the win and EW strike rates have been extremely consistent and this has also been the case with the yearly PRB figures that have ranged from a high of 0.59 to a low of 0.56.
Below is a table highlighting the performance of the top-rated runners in terms of market position / rank. The splits over the period of study were as follows:
Favourites made a small loss but those ranked two to four in the betting market all edged into profit. Returns were slightly less good when horses were fifth or higher in betting.
One potential issue when looking at data across all prices is that some bottom lines can be skewed by winners at big BSP prices. Interestingly, though, out of the 2445 TS top-rated winners only five had a BSP price above 50.0 (52.07, 54.15, 61.52, 126.19, 145.1). Even so, as in the first piece I am going to use a price cap hereafter in case any of those bigger priced winners skewed certain findings. For non-handicaps my price cap was 10/1 (ISP), for handicaps I think we should go slightly longer at 12/1 (ISP).
This is an area I feel is always worth checking out. The splits over this timeframe were thus:
These stats do not correlate with the usual male/female stats found on the AW where males tend to win more often within their group than females. Here we have witnessed a different scenario where female TS top-rated runners priced 12/1 or less have been very good value going back to 2019. TS top-rated female runners aged four and five have done particularly well, combining to win 19.8% of the time (280 wins from 1416) for a healthy profit of £295.21 (ROI +20.8%).
Onto the age splits now. We know from the previous paragraph that the female four- and five-year-olds performed well, but they only made up about 25% of the total runners for both those age groups. Let me share the full breakdown combining male runners with female runners:
Each individual age from three to six made a blind profit which is interesting, but it was clear that once we got to 7yos and older the performance dipped markedly, despite still being top-rated. Losses of 16p in the £ are steep at the best of times, so TS top-rated runners aged 7 or older are probably best swerved in the future.
Do the TS top-rated runners in all-weather handicaps have similar records at each course? Let's review the PRBs first:
The Irish track of Dundalk has seen the strongest PRB figures, and I wonder will that correlate to better returns?
*Southwell data based on results on the tapeta surface which had its first race in December 2021.
Don’t be fooled when seeing that Dundalk had the lowest strike rate; their races had the biggest average field size compared with all the courses. There were blind profits for Dundalk and for three other courses, with only Kempton TS top-rated runners producing disappointing losses. I am not sure why the Kempton figures were so disappointing compared with the others.
A look at the results across different distances now. The figures were as follows:
TS top-rated runners performed well at the minimum distance, which may be because five furlong handicaps are generally run at a good clip and hence speed ratings should be fairly accurate. All in all, though, the table suggests that speed ratings work to a similar level regardless of distance. [The six furlong data looks an anomaly and is hard to explain otherwise]
My next question was could anything be gleaned from the data for different field sizes? It was a slight surprise to me that the number of runners in a race did seem to make a difference. Below are the ISP A/E indices for different field sizes:
As can be seen, the better value has clearly been in smaller sized fields as far as the TS top-rated all-weather handicap runners have been concerned. This was also reflected in the profit and loss figures as the table below shows:
Based on the past few years it does seem that fields with eight or fewer runners provide the best value when it comes to the TS top-rated runners. The performance of the 6-8 runner group was extremely good.
The splits between the number of TS top-rated runners that wore some sort of headgear / equipment and those that didn’t were almost the same. Hence, I thought it was a good idea to see what the results were for each group. They are shown in the table below:
The numbers clearly favour horses that did not wear any headgear securing a better return - over 8p in the £ - coupled with a 3% better win rate. This is something to note for the future I feel.
When I looked at the run style for TS top-rated in all-weather non-handicaps, I noted the traditional edge to more prominent styles of runner. Hence, let me take a look at the win strike rates (within their specific run style groups) to see if the usual pattern has been repeated:
In terms of win rate early leaders have done best, albeit the gap between them and prominent racers has been closer than we usually see. There was a clear dip in strike rate from prominent racers down to horses that raced midfield or were held up.
As I mentioned in the first article, we do not know pre-race what the run style of each horse will be and hence any profit/loss data shared in this section is essentially hypothetical. However, if we had been able to predict which TS top-rated runners took the early lead in handicaps when priced 12/1 or less, they would have made a decent BSP profit of £359.41 to £1 level stakes. This equated to an impressive return of over 17 pence in the £. Prominent racers made a profit also with returns of just over 6p in the £.
I want to share the A/E indices next for the TS top-rated runners in terms of run style. They are shown in the graph below:
Early leaders / front runners have offered the best value, surpassing the 1.00 figure. Indeed, these A/E indices are calculated from ISP so the BSP A/E index would be around 1.16 which would be considered excellent value.
What was especially interesting was when I looked at the performance of TS top-rated horses that had led early in 5f handicaps. If we had known pre-race which TS-top rated runners would have led in these sprints, we would have seen 104 winners from 308 runners (SR 33.8%) for a huge profit of £330.41 (ROI +107.3%); PRB 0.69.
Finally, one last run style fact worth sharing is that when we look at all runners priced 12/1 or less roughly 14.3% of these runners led early. In 5f handicaps however, the TS top-rated runner led early 20% of the time. Hence, when trying to predict the front runner in 5f handicaps, the TS top-rated horse will lead much more often than those runners TS ranked 2 or lower. Combining this information with the Geegeez pace score totals for each 5f handicap should enable us to improve our chances of predicting the front runner more often – should we wish to do that.
*
Before embarking on this research, I had not expected the Topspeed top-rated runners to have performed so well in all-weather handicaps. For a set of public ratings, the top-rated performance has been extremely good. I, for one, will take more stock of them in the future, especially on the sand; and the beauty is that they appear right where I need them, on the Geegeez racecard!
In the near future, I will dive into Topspeed ratings for NH racing. This will happen probably sometime in January 2026. Until then...
- DR
At a time when interest rates for savers seem woefully low, especially if those savers enjoy having a bet, there must have been people enviously looking across to Sha Tin racecourse early yesterday, writes Tony Stafford. They were calculating what they might win on the Dream Double.
Yes, here was the chance to couple Hong Kong’s two international-class stars. Ka Ying Rising, the world’s best sprinter fresh from winning the £3.46 million Everest in Australia (and a cheeky domestic Group 2 in between), with Romantic Warrior, winner of 19 of his 25 turf starts. They both won, of course, and I can reveal that the safe-as-houses double would have realised £15.50 profit for every £100 staked.
There were few alarms during either race as Ya King Rising (1/20) pulled almost four lengths clear of his field under Aussie Zac Purton to mop up the £1.613m to the winner Longines Hong Kong Sprint over six furlongs. Three races later 1/10 shot Romantic Warrior and regular New Zealand-born partner James McDonald was as efficient as usual running almost two lengths clear of the field for the £2.304m Hong Kong Cup over ten furlongs.
So a 15.5% yield with a little less than two hours between the races for the racing-mad Hong Kong public to work out their expected profits. A handsome windfall indeed for the mathematicians who could translate it to 180% in a day while the present interest rates worldwide equate to nearer 0.01% per day.
Of course, all that is nonsense. They have to win! Romantic Warrior paid 11 HK dollars for a 10 dollar win bet and understandably, only 10.10 dollars, that’s 100/1 on, for a place.
Ka Ying Rising also paid 100/1 on for a place as he sped home for win number 17 of 19 starts, the last 16 in a row. Indeed, his two reverses came in races two and three in January last year, by a nose then a short head!
He is now on £11.7 million for those wins, a figure dwarfed by Romantic Warrior’s £24.3 million after the latest windfall yesterday. That son of Acclamation is a testimony to the veteran UK-based sire and an encouragement to a friend about to go into a partnership with trainer Roger Varian in a yearling by the stallion.
Ka Ying Rising’s win bet, in arithmetical terms, depending on how close to the off it was placed – let’s say within a couple of minutes – took 67.70 seconds to come to fruition. So 5HK dollars’ profit (from the 100 HK dollars stake) in three minutes equates to a rate of 100% in an hour. The snag? You need to find another 19 certainties to maintain that rate.
https://youtu.be/30tScLujPP8?si=VN7Vsd-Sq5aKIecz
It is extraordinary how consistent these two champions have become. Romantic Warrior lost little of his sheen with two defeats early this year, both at the hooves of Japanese-trained horses. First, he was collared late on by subsequent Breeders’ Cup Classic winner Forever Young in the £8 million to the winner Saudi Cup in Riyadh; then Soul Rush denied him, again on the line, in the Dubai Turf on World Cup night at Meydan in March.
Trainer C S (Danny) Shum gave him an eight-month break after Meydan, and he returned with an easy win on his home course last month. Had he won the other two races where he was so narrowly denied, his earnings would have been boosted by another £7,720k, thus a mind-bending £31.5 million!
Both horses are geldings, Romantic Warrior a seven-year-old and Ka Ying Rising two years younger. They are the best examples of the Hong Kong Jockey Club recruitment system in Europe, Australia and the United Stakes, principally confined to geldings, that has proved the blueprint to success.
Further east, Japan’s racing culture produces horses, like these two Hong Kong examples, capable of mixing it with the best that Europe and the US can muster. There, though, it is with a vast preponderance of entire horses that stay effectively in training for many years yet continue to run at a high level.
In all, seven Japanese geldings travelled across to contest the four international races, and their connections will have been delighted with a couple of second places. Soul Rush, avoiding Romantic Warrior this time, didn’t have the chance to confirm that win last spring, switching instead to the Mile race. He was denied by half a length by another local winner, Voyage Bubble, a second victory after Ka Ying Rising for Purton.
Harry Eustace’s Docklands was a creditable fourth here, but the Lion In Winter and Ryan Moore were never in contention and finished only eleventh.
Bellagio Opera also did extremely well for Japan, following home Romantic Warrior in second place and collecting more than £800k as a result. Only a five-year-old, he can be expected to be back again for the big races – probably in Riyadh in February and on World Cup day in Dubai the following month.
Harry Eustace has been enjoying a wonderful time over the past 13 months or so with Docklands, who apart from unexpectedly winning the Group 1 Queen Anne Stakes at Royal Ascot, has also performed well in Japan, Australia and Hong Kong, to where this was a second visit.
This trip will have given him time to catch up with brother David, who after a spell as joint trainer with Ciaron Maher in Australia, now operates under his sole proprietorship in Hong Kong.
David Eustace had a nice handicap win early on the card, whereas at the other end of the day, Hollie Doyle came very close to adding to her HK tally, finishing second in the finale on Drombeg Banner. She, Richard Kingscote, David Probert and longer-standing Hong Kong resident Harry Bentley, have a tough time getting on the right horses in this tight community.
The one major race that did evade the home team was the 1m4f Vase won by the Andre Fabre-trained Sosie, for the Wertheimer brothers. Sosie had been a strong fancy for the Arc where he was a fast-finishing third and that form ensured he would start favourite here.
In the event, the first five places went to the Europeans: Marco Botti’s Giavellotto, ridden by another recent UK export Andrei Atzeni, maintained his high level of form in second ahead of Goliath, Joseph O’Brien’s Al Riffa and Aidan’s Los Angeles.
Back in the UK, Saturday’s most valuable prize was the one-time Massey-Ferguson Gold Cup, the companion race in those days to the month-earlier Mackeson Gold Cup. It was very nice that a race of this stature was chosen as the vehicle for the Support the Hunt Family Fund, with Gold Cup Handicap Chase added for good measure.
Everyone has heard of the awful tragedy that John and his family endured, with his wife and two daughters killed in a pointless, brutal attack in their home just as John was driving back from his commentating duties at Lingfield that afternoon.
I bumped into John and his surviving daughter Amy the other day and for the umpteenth time wondered how they can keep control of their emotions as they appear to.
The race was something of a fairy tale, with Sean Bowen making all the running on a 33/1 shot for trainer Faye Bramley. Glengouly was 5lb out of the handicap, hence the big price despite the riding arrangements, and his history tells another tale.
After three wins during a busy career with Willie Mullins and an unseat when tiring a long way into the 2024 Grand National, he came up for sale in this May’s Tatts online sale, changing hands for 16,000gns.
He started off in his new yard with some modest efforts and then a wind op, but gradually things got better, yet hardly well enough to collect such a big prize. No wonder Sean Bowen reckons he can win 300 races this season, if he can have such a transforming effect on what might have appeared a tired old veteran. We never thought Tony McCoy’s best would ever be under threat, but Sean reckons otherwise. So far, it’s 155 and counting!
Dan Skelton didn’t win that one but collected another 13 during the past fortnight including a late double on the Cheltenham card. Harry looked especially good and he obviously gets a special kick coming up the hill first at Prestbury Park. Maybe he’ll think of a new celebration if that happens at the Festival. Perhaps standing up on the saddle as he crosses the line first after one of those minutely targeted handicaps?
- TS
An analysis of Racing Post’s Topspeed (TS) on the All-Weather, Part 1
One of the reasons Geegeez has won the Best Betting Website award eight times since 2017 has been because it has not stood still, with upgrades and improvements made on a regular basis, writes Dave Renham. We have seen that again this December with some new additions to the Query Tool. One of these additions is the subject of this article, namely the Topspeed Ratings (TS) from the Racing Post.
Topspeed ratings are the Racing Post’s Speed Ratings. The raw TS figure is a measure of the how fast a horse got to the finish in a particular race. It is amended slightly considering things like distance, weight carried, and the ground conditions. Essentially, TS is calculated by comparing a horse’s time against a standard time for the course and distance of the race. The TS figures we see in the Geegeez Racecard are known as 'adjusted TS ratings' with the main adjustment made for weight carried in the current race.
I believe the TS handicapper also tweaks this adjusted TS rating for the current race conditions. The adjusted TS figures we see in the Racecard are based on the best raw TS performance in the past 12 months. These performances must have occurred in the same Race Code, so for All Weather races only past TS raw figures in AW races have been considered. Likewise, for turf flat races only past turf flat raw TS figures will be considered. And, for the jumps past hurdle race TS raw ratings will be used for hurdle races only, while past chase TS ratings will be used for chases only.
It is not for me discuss the pros and cons of how the TS figure we see in the racecard is calculated. Ultimately, this is a method that the Racing Post have been using for many many years, so we need to assume they know what they are doing... or ignore it completely!
So where on geegeez.co.uk do we find the TS figures on a daily basis? In the screenshot below I have highlighted in the blue box where the adjusted TS figures can be found on the Geegeez Racecard.
My focus today is All-Weather racing and analysing the TS figures for this specific race code. The time frame used goes from January 1st 2019 to November 30th 2025, including both UK and Irish racing, with profit/loss calculated to BSP less 2% commission. This is the first of a two-parter and is slightly more of a general piece / overview, whereas the second will drill further into the stats.
I have spoken to numerous respected analysts who have compiled ratings in the past, be them speed or ability ratings and, for them, to judge the effectiveness of their ratings the win rate is key. The top-rated runner should have the highest win percentage gradually reducing for the others. Obviously, it is hoped the top-rated runner is the best performer in terms of returns. However, it is important to point out that regardless of how good a set of ratings is, be they speed or form-based ratings, we cannot expect the top-rated runner to secure a blind profit over 1000s of races.
Let’s start with looking at the win percentages (strike rates) for different rated runners. This covers all races on the all-weather over the near seven-year 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 win strike rate for top-rated runners has been slightly better than one win in every six races which is solid for any set of ratings. More importantly perhaps, the win percentages correlate positively with the rated positions showing the sliding scale I was talking about earlier.
If we look at the Each Way (win & placed) strike rates, we see a similar pattern:
The top-rated runner has the highest percentage once more, and the sliding scale is replicated showing strong positive correlation with the win only figures.
Finally, for this opening section, 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 during this timeframe were thus:
The same sliding graph appears again. So we can say that the TS ratings seem to have been accurate in terms of predicting the overall performance of horses in relation to their ordinal ranked positions.
From here, it made sense to mainly focus on the TS top-rated horses to see if we could find any positive or indeed negative angles. Hence let me look at the record of every single TS top-rated runner since 2019:
A loss of less than 3% at Betfair SP is a solid figure considering this has included every single qualifier over almost seven years. Time now to dig a bit deeper.
Let me start the digging process by comparing the yearly win strike rates, and the yearly win & placed (Each way) strike rates to see how they matched up. The graph paints the picture.
Both lines are fairly straight indicating that the performance of the TS top-rated runners has been consistent year in year out when it comes to winning and placing. In terms of the PRB figures they have ranged from a yearly low of 0.59 to a yearly high of 0.62, again highlighting their consistency.
I would now like to share the performance of the top-rated Topspeed runners in terms of their market rank. The splits over the period of study were as follows:
Although TS top-rated runners have not made a profit when they were also the market leader, it has seemed that a position nearer the top of the betting market has been preferable. Looking at TS top-rated runners that started in the top four of the betting we can see that they would have proved profitable if backing all ‘blind’. OK, a profit of £132.90 to £1 level stakes over 14,422 bets would not have been a massive return but it was a positive return, nonetheless.
I want to delve into class of race for a bit, focusing on the TS top-rated runners racing only in handicaps. The reason for using handicap races for class analysis is simple, because a non-handicap race could be a maiden, it could be a novice race, and when we get to class 5 or lower it could be a claiming race or indeed a seller. Hence, when we group non-handicaps together, we get a mix of different race types so it makes less sense. Of course we do see the occasional handicap selling race, but the horses are still carrying the correct weight that they would in a normal handicap.
Before looking at the TS top-rated runners, I first wanted to look at the average TS rating for the winning horses across each race class classification. To do this I simply added up the ratings of each individual winner within each class bracket and divided it by the number of winners. The graph below shows the results:
As we would expect we get a similar looking graph to previous ones. The higher the class the higher the average winning TS rating and there has been a similar differential between each ‘next door’ class classification.
Now it’s back to focusing on the top-rated winners and their averages. Let me share these splits.
Of course, these were always going to be much higher than the average figures for all winners, but these average winning ratings gave me an idea. What about looking at the performance of top-rated runners that had a TS figure higher than the winning class average for all top-rated runners? In other words, for class 2 handicaps where the average top-rated winner was rated 98.1, how did the TS top-rated runners rated 99 and higher do as a cohort? Likewise for class 3 handicaps where the average top-rated winner was rated 90.6, how did the top-rated runners rated 91 and higher do etc, etc. Here’s what I found:
In the higher classes of race (class 4 and above) we see positive profits and returns. The two lower classes (5 and 6) both showed losses, although the class 6 figures were close to breaking even. So perhaps the TS ratings work better in class 4 or higher as far as the TS top-rated runners are concerned? Indeed, if we look at those classes again and tweak the rating of the top-rated runners up a little more, we see even stronger returns:
Certainly, for classes 2-4, it seems that the higher the rating the better when it comes to the TS top-rated runners. Also, this has been the case too for class 6 handicaps where the TS top-rated runner was rated 70 or more (rather than the 63+ tested earlier). This cohort of TS top-rated runners would have secured 138 wins from 1058 qualifiers (SR 13%) for a profit to BSP of £76.77 (ROI +7.3%).
I now would like to examine the difference in handicaps and non-handicaps in terms of the TS top-rated horses. The splits were thus:
As we would have expected top-rated non-handicap runners have had the better win rate but overall losses have been quite steep, edging towards 10 pence in the £. However, if I introduce an Industry SP price limit of 10/1 we see a different story:
This time the bottom lines are very similar, with a tiny profit for handicap runners and an even tinier loss for those TS top-rated in non-handicaps. Unsurprisingly, non-handicap TS top-rated runners priced 11/1 or more have a shocking record, winning just 29 times from 1133 qualifiers (SR 2.6%) for hefty losses of £526.61 (ROI -46.4%). These look worth avoiding in the future based on this dataset.
For the final section of this piece, I am going to concentrate on some further non-handicap stats looking at the ISP 10/1 or less cohort.
Let me look at TS top-rated qualifiers in terms of Industry Starting Price bands with the limit of 10/1 in place. Below I share a graph showing what the BSP returns would have been in four price bands – 2/1 or shorter, 9/4 to 7/2, 4/1 to 6/1 and 13/2 to 10/1:
The shortest prices (2/1 or less) were close to breaking even to BSP, while the 9/4 to 7/2 and the 4/1 to 6/1 groups saw similar losses of around 3½ pence in the £. The best value across the timeframe were those priced 13/2 to 10/1 which showed a healthy return of over 11 pence in the £. This price band has definitely offered value since 2019 for TS top-rated runners in non-handicaps.
A look at the gender of horse now. Anyone who has read my previous contributions on geegeez.co.uk will know that male runners tend to have a edge on the all-weather. I wonder if we will see that happening again here. Let’s take a look at the splits based on the 10/1 price limit:
Males have outperformed females, by a fair amount in win strike rates but only just in terms of returns. Hence, there has been no significant edge to males under these circumstances over the past few years.
Onto the age splits now, and a table showing performance in non-handicaps of top-rated Topspeed horses by individual age group.
As can be seen, the majority of non-handicappers were aged two or three, and TS top-rated 3yos have performed well. They have secured a win rate close to one win in every three, while showing a small BSP profit of £60.49 (ROI +3.8%). Older top-rated runners, those seven and older, fared the worst in terms of both strike rate and returns with losses of around 7½p in the £.
Finally for this article I will share some data for run style – possibly my favoured area of research. Firstly, a look at the win strike rates (within their specific run style groups):
We see a familiar pattern to previous run style research where early leaders/front runners have comfortably attained the best win percentage within their group while hold up horses having the lowest.
As I have mentioned many times before, we cannot 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 in the hope that one day I buy a crystal ball that actually works!
Those numbers speak for themselves really. The PRB figure of 0.78 for early leaders has been the highest recorded in the whole article. If the TS top-rated runner leads early in a non-handicap when 10/1 or shorter, then we have a value selection.
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This article has uncovered some interesting and positive findings. From what I have gleaned so far, when looking for selections in AW races top-rated Topspeed runners should be noted and potentially shortlisted for further investigation.
In the next article I will delve deeper into the performance of Topspeed in handicap races. Until then…
- DR
A week ago, when talking to Nicky Richards in the morning when he had sent three horses to Ayr – he won in the afternoon with 4/1 on shot Upon Tweed - we had a quick chat about one of his other runners, writes Tony Stafford. Red Cadillac had narrowly won his previous race at Carlisle and as a result he was carrying 11st13lb in this £4k to the winner handicap hurdle.
“I expect our horse will run well, that is unless Gordon Elliott’s boys are coming with their betting boots on”. Like three other runners on the day, King Gris was to be ridden by Sean Bowen. Running off 73, therefore in receipt of 25lb from Nicky’s horse, King Gris, owned by the Sette A Milano Syndicate, was 5lb wrong, as his official mark was a bargain-basement 68!
By the time of the race at 2.45 p.m., as the Editor and I were just about on the dessert course at the Horserace Writers and Photographers Association lunch in London, Elliott and the champion jockey already had two wins on the board. At the off, King Gris, 5/2 against at one point in the morning, was 11/4 on and won comfortably doing only what was needed by Bowen to land the odds.
The official margin, which could clearly have been extended if Bowen (and no doubt Elliott) had wished, was two lengths. After that in the seven-horse affair over the minimum trip it was 7 lengths, 6½, 9½, 3¾ and half a length. Strung out like washing on the line as the pre-race market suggested they would be.
Probably struggling to keep a straight face afterwards speaking to Racing TV, Gordon Elliott said, “It was nip and tuck going to the last, but King Gris won which is the most important thing, and he has a good attitude. That was a low-grade race but hopefully he'll be able to win a couple more.” No doubt! Richards’ guess is that he could be a 120 horse.
Red Cadillac, of course, was second and having done his best against what clearly were virtually impossible odds, his connections are going to have to pay a price. As Richards said yesterday, “No doubt after this he’ll go up in Tuesday’s new ratings and from there it will be harder for us to find another race with him.”
Reflecting yesterday morning in response to my reminding him of the event, he said, “There’s been hell on about it. I’ve had calls about it, but I think the BHA are to blame for allowing such a situation to arise.
“This was a Class 5, 0-100 race. During Covid, the rules were changed to prevent Irish stables having runners in races over here at Class 5. That has since been rescinded, but why I’ve no idea. We struggle enough to beat their horses in the top races – look at what Il Etait Temps did to Jonbon and co at Sandown. If we must contend with apparent set-ups like King Gris, what chance do we have?”
So, how did King Gris, a former Irish pointer with a very close third as the best of three runs on his card for owner-trainer Denis Paul Murphy, manage to arrive at a jumps rating of 68, equating to a flat mark in the early/mid 20s?
A short time after that promising pointing third I referred to, King Gris was gelded and it was only a few weeks later that he turned out in a hurdle race at Bangor under the auspices of Merseyside trainer Patrick Morris. He was a 25/1 shot, reflecting that point-to-point effort just a couple of months earlier but finished ninth of ten and was beaten a mammoth 90 lengths.
Next came Morris’s local track Aintree, where King Gris was fifth of six, beaten 63 lengths at 150/1. The final qualifying effort was at Cartmel. There, starting 250/1, and ridden as at Aintree by Charlie Todd, he was last of nine finishers. Job done – three runs from April 24 to May 28.
That was the last we saw of him until Monday a week ago.
The most intriguing element of the story must surely be why he was sent to Morris after the gelding operation if he was eventually destined for one of the top Irish jumping yards. Indeed, the stable that is second only to the magical Willie Mullins.
Morris has been training since 2002 with runners on the flat since 2004 and, apart from two blanks during that time, he has been a regular winner. In 2025 he boasts a decent strike-rate with 14 winners, a tally beaten only three times with the peak of 19 coming in 2011.
Coincidentally, the day of King Gris’ Ayr coup, Morris had a winner later on at Wolverhampton, then one the following day at Newcastle, and another on Saturday back at Dunstall Park. No reason then not to send a horse to Morris? Maybe, but here’s another coincidence. The trainer has run only two individual horses over jumps last season and this. They are King Gris and the useful chaser Royal Deeside who has won twice this term.
The coincidence? Morris’s last jump runners before King Gris and Royal Deeside had been as long ago as in 2011, the time of his best flat season. In all, before 2024/25 he sent out a total of 29 sporadic runners over the quarter-century for a single jumping success.
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If you want a strike-rate at the other end of the scale, how about Sara Bradstock, widow of Mark Bradstock and daughter of my long-term Daily Telegraph colleague John Oaksey. After the Bradstocks’ Mr Vango won a 3m6f chase in testing ground at Exeter two seasons back by 50 lengths, I thought he would knock the Irish off their collective perches at Cheltenham in the National Hunt Chase.
That proved beyond him at that stage, but last winter he went unbeaten through a forensically chosen three-race campaign, culminating with success in the Midlands Grand National over four and a quarter miles at Uttoxeter, a couple of weeks before the Grand National.
Mr Vango will now have the big race on his agenda next March, having come through a trial go over the big-race fences in Saturday’s Becher Chase (3m2f). Having looked beaten and running off top weight of 12st, from a peg 32lb higher than when winning that race at Exeter and 9lb higher than Uttoxeter, he was as unlucky a loser as you can find.
That said, in Twig he met an equally determined and deserving runner from the Ben Pauling stable, ridden as usual by Beau Morgan, son of Twig’s owner.
Twig had been my long-priced nap for the 2025 Grand National and, in running tenth of the 34, was the second home-trained finisher intruding on the Irish juggernaut’s private carving up of the £1 million prizemoney. With Ben saying he “wouldn’t swop him”, for some reason I preferred to look elsewhere for my best bet on Saturday and grimaced as the close-up showed his head down with his rival’s up to get the better of a wonderful finish.
Every time Sara sends out a runner under Rules, I think back to all those years when her father and I comprised the Sunday Telegraph writing team at the Grand National.
While John was crafting his wonderful words for the larger, later editions in terms of readership, I was the “sprinter” charged with doing the fast version of events for the Irish, Scottish and Northern readership.
We operated from a house across the road from the track, with a phone in every room and shared with Brough Scott and others those facilities in Chasandi, the home of a very nice Scouser family. No phones in the track, no computers to put the words together, just a disembodied telephonist taking your words back in Fleet Street to send on to the printers.
One of the top writers at the time was Christopher Poole, a giant, genial, rotund chap who worked for the London Evening Standard. If you thought our system in today’s world would be considered tortuous, Chris had to relate his to his own travelling telephonist, Max, who would then repeat the words back to Fleet Street! If Mr Vango does beat all those Irish stars next spring, even I won’t be able to resist a tear or two remembering John and quite a few others too.
- TS
I have been researching horse racing for just over 25 years now, so I have delved into a lot of different areas and ideas, writes Dave Renham. Some have provided profitable angles, some have not. I tend to write up an article after I have done the research so that I have all the stats in front of me to help decide if it is worth converting into a piece. When ideas have offered little or no significant edge, I have tended to ‘bin’ them, as a fair proportion of readers are concerned more with profit than interesting ideas which do not offer any long-term edge.
This time, however, I am playing it slightly differently by researching and writing my findings up as I go. The risk here has already been mentioned: that there is little or no punting nutrition in the angle and associated research; but it is good to mix things up from time to time. I have penned one or two this way before, but it is a rare occurrence.
Today I am examining a new idea, for me at least. It is based around recent trainer form. This is regarded by many as an important consideration when it comes to betting on horses. Indeed, on Geegeez we offer Trainer reports where members are able to study 14-day or 30-day trainer form for all trainers who have runners on the day. The screenshot below shows an example of this:
My idea is to look at some individual trainers during specific months to see if their win strike rates showed correlation with their percentage of runners that had been pulled up.
The theory is that the fewer horses that were having to be pulled up, the higher the win percentage, and vice versa. Of course, I appreciate that the percentage of pulled up runners could impinge on the win percentage to a small extent, but we are not generally talking about pulled up monthly percentages of 30 or 40%, so the effect should be minimal. I estimate that in some instances it may make a difference of around 1% in terms of the monthly win SR%.
Data have been taken from UK National Hunt racing spanning from 1st Jan 2021 to 20th November 2025.
I will be looking at five trainers who each have a significant number of runners per year, which should make the findings more robust. The trainers are Nicky Henderson, Olly Murphy, Paul Nicholls, Dan Skelton and Nigel Twiston-Davies.
Let me start by sharing the overall percentage of horses for each trainer that were pulled up during the period of study:
As we can see there is a range of figures, with Nicky Henderson’s horses being pulled up roughly one race in every seven, whereas Olly Murphy’s runners have been pulled up roughly one race in every 14. These are the base figures I will work from for each trainer. I will move in alphabetical order and start with Henderson.
Nicky Henderson
We have seen that 14.1% of all of Henderson's runners were pulled up which seems quite a high figure. In fact, the overall percentage of pulled up runners for all trainers, not just these five, stands at just under 10%, (9.6% to be precise). Indeed, what inspired my research for this piece was the form of this particular yard in March 2024. It was when the stable was really struggling with an unexplained illness that saw numerous withdrawals and several very poor runs. Indeed, in March 2024 over 35% of Henderson’s runners were pulled up and they only had two winners across the whole month. Here we saw in black and white the possible strong link between the percentage of pulled up runners and stable form.
To test my correlation idea over the longer term I have come up with the following plan. For each stable I will use the overall percentage figure for pulled up runners as my starting point. So, for Henderson it is 14.1%. Then I will decide upon a lower ‘Pulled Up’ percentage (PU%) for specific months in an attempt to determine when the stable has potentially had a ‘much better’ month in terms of win rate, and then a higher monthly PU% when hopefully the stable has had a ‘much poorer’ month. The upper and lower figures I will choose for each trainer will be chosen by gut feel more than anything else. Also, once I have chosen these figures, I won’t tweak them in any way. It would be easy to back-fit the results slightly to help fit the narrative, but that defeats the object.
For Henderson then, my higher monthly PU% will be 19% and my lower monthly one will be anything under 10%. Hence, any month where the PU% was 19% or above, I will combine the results for all such months and work out the overall win strike rate across those months. I will do the same for months where the PU% was under 10% and work out the overall win strike rate across those months. My hypothesis, I guess rather obviously, is that we should see a much higher win strike rate in the months where the monthly PU% was under 10%. Here is what I found for Nicky H:
The results are at least the right way round in terms of the hypothesis. A 4.2% differential in win rates is fairly significant, especially as the sample sizes were large for each group – 488 runners and 609 runners respectively. It will be interesting to see if the other trainers follow a similar pattern.
Olly Murphy
Next, we head to the Wilmcote-based trainer, Olly Murphy. For Murphy the overall percentage figure for pulled up runners is much lower than for Henderson runners, down at 7.2%. Hence, I need to once more decide upon my PU%s in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ months. For a ‘bad’ month I will look at data where the PU% was 11% or bigger; for a ‘good’ month 4.75% or lower. Here are the strike rates based on these limits:
We see similar strike rates to the Henderson ones. Again, the figures are the way round I was hoping for with a 3.9% differential between the two. So far so good in terms of my original hypothesis.
Paul Nicholls
Paul Nicholls is approaching 4000 winners in the UK and has been Champion trainer a remarkable 14 times. It will be interesting to see what his stats show us. The overall percentage figure for pulled up runners from the Nicholls stable stands at 10.4%. Therefore, for a ‘bad’ month I will look at data where the PU% was 14.5% or bigger; for a ‘good’ month I will look for a percentage figure under 7%. Here are the relevant strike rates for both:
Wow! This is a significant difference. When the stable’s runners are being pulled up far less often than usual, the win percentages are off the charts. In contrast, when the PU% hits a much higher monthly figure than the average, the win rate drops markedly.
At this point, the research is showing what I had hoped for, but with two trainers left to check, this could 'go south' pretty quickly. Let’s see.
Dan Skelton
Dan Skelton has been banging in winners in vast quantities over the past few seasons. I wonder if this coming year will be the year when he finally wins the Trainers’ Championship. The overall percentage figure for pulled up runners from the Skelton yard over the period of study stands at 8%. Therefore, for a ‘bad’ month I will look at data where the PU% was 11% or bigger; for a ‘good’ month I will look for a percentage figure under 5.5%. The graph below shows the splits:
We see similar splits to Henderson and Murphy with a differential of 3.5% between the two strike rates. Again, the lower PU% group have the higher win strike rate.
Nigel Twiston-Davies
The final trainer to check is Nigel (and Willy) Twiston-Davies. His overall win percentage across all races is slightly below the other four so we should expect slightly lower percentages when we examine the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ month splits. The overall percentage figure for pulled up runners from the yard stands at 8.6%. Therefore, for a ‘bad’ month I will look at data where the PU% was 11.5% or bigger; for a ‘good’ month I will look for a percentage figure under 6%. The graph below shows the strike rates:
We see similar results to the ones we saw for Paul Nicholls with the ‘good’ month strike rate nearly double the ‘bad’ month one. All five trainers have seen a edge for the ‘good’ PU% months, with two showing a very clear win percentage edge.
So far so good, but there is another thing I need to check: Betfair returns (BSP ROI%) for each trainer. Obviously, based on the findings so far, I am hoping to see better ROI percentages for the months where the PU%s were lower. These figures will be in the middle column of the table shown below. The high figures will be in the column on the right. I have highlighted in green the best ROI% of each pair:
Four of the five have correlated positively with the win strike rates showing higher returns in the months where the PU% was low. Not surprisingly, two of them, Nicholls and Twiston-Davies, have a huge differential between their two respective figures. Both see a difference close to 40 pence in the £. The outlier is Dan Skelton whose figures are ‘around the wrong way’. However, it should be noted that two of the winners in his ‘high’ group were priced BSP 44.2 and 36.8. His ‘low’ group did not have winners anywhere as high as these two prices. Hence, the ROI%s are skewed a little based on this evidence.
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This has been an interesting journey, despite it not being that quick a piece to research and write up; I hope it's been an enjoyable ride. Ultimately, from my original hypothesis perspective, that proved to be quite a good one. If only the Skelton ROI% figures were around the other way, then I could claim it was a very good hypothesis!
Based on the findings of this piece, it does seem that the percentage of horses from a stable that are pulled up each month has an impact on the win rate of said stable.
- DR
A short post, with some video content if you'd like it, to let you know that we'll be updating Query Tool today. We're adding some new input variables as well as a new output column.
Details of those can be found in this recent post. Or in the videos below (first one is a general overview including the new variables; second one outlines a couple of important changes to the way QT Angles works).
IMPORTANT: QT may be unavailable for a period this morning (Tuesday 2nd December) while we make the upgrades.
These changes are also reflected in the latest version of the User Guide, which you can view here.
Matt
