Miscellaneous Jump Racing Angles

Dave Renham

3 months ago

Four Micro Research Angles

There are times when researching ideas for Geegeez that I find something worth sharing, but it does not lend itself to a whole article, writes Dave Renham. In this piece, then, I am going to share four areas I have researched – I’ll call them micro areas. Each will start with a question, which I will endeavour to answer. From there I’ll share any extra data that I feel may be useful to readers. The fourth question leads to a more detailed response.

The data for this article have been taken from UK National Hunt racing covering the years 2019 to 2025. Any profits / losses quoted are calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP), with a 2% commission being applied on any winning bets.

In this article:

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1 A horse has had at least 10 career starts but never started favourite; is it a positive or a negative when the horse subsequently starts favourite for the first time?

This is quite a niche question / idea, but I was interested to see what the numbers told us, and the table below shows what I found:

We have a positive starting point with a blind profit to BSP. I guess punters and perhaps bookmakers may feel that a horse that has not been favourite before after at least 10 career starts may be a slightly false favourite, and hence the price ends up slightly higher than its true price. The BSP A/E of 1.04 supports such an assertion.

I then wondered if any trainers have been particularly successful with this type of runner. I found that there had been a handful of trainers who had excelled albeit from small sample sizes. The five who stood out were:

There were a couple of other positive angles I found. Firstly, if restricting qualifiers to only those that had finished in the first five on both of their last two starts, we get the following results:

Returns have been a smidge above 10p in the £ for this cohort of runners. Secondly, male runners have comfortably outperformed female runners. Female runners would have lost us over 6p in the £, whereas male runners secured returns close to 9p in the £ thanks to 286 wins from 849 runners (SR 33.7%) for a profit of £75.17 (ROI +8.9%).

2 A horse that has been beaten favourite on its last two runs; when it starts favourite again next time will it be good or poor value?

My gut feeling as regards this question before looking at the numbers was to assume that they had probably been poor value. However, the stats did not back up my thinking as the table below shows:

Essentially these runners hit a break-even situation over the past seven seasons. Interestingly, horses that were beaten favourite on their past two starts and finished third or worse both times produced the best figures when starting favourite again. Of the 176 qualifiers 62 won (SR 35.23) for a profit of £16.63 (ROI +9.4%).

So how did horses that were beaten favourite on their last two starts fare when not starting favourite again? I assumed that these runners performed moderately at best and this time I was right! Their results read:

It is not surprising to see far more qualifiers, and losses were fairly steep at close to 13 pence in the £. These look runners to be extremely wary of.

I also looked at the same ‘finishing third or worse’ idea for this cohort, in terms of finishing positions when favourites on both of their previous two starts. The results were poor as I guess we should expect. This group of runners managed just 78 wins from 745 runners (SR 10.5%) for hefty losses of £155.29 (ROI – 20.9%). This included a BSP win at 66.10, so take that out and losses would have been far worse.

3 How did horses perform in NH races they won the previous year?

It seems that certain trainers target certain races each year and a good proportion of horses end up contesting the same race as they did the previous year. The table below shows the results for horses trying to repeat an NH win in the same race as they won 12 months previously:

Overall, these results are much worse than I had expected. We see fairly significant losses of over 15p for every £1 bet. Even the iconic trainers Nicky Henderson and Paul Nicholls made significant losses when sending last year’s winner to contest the same race again. Henderson would have lost us 45p in the £ (from 31 runners), Nicholls 34p for every £1 wagered (from 54 runners).

Digging a bit deeper I noticed the same type of outcome (in terms of ROI% / value) when comparing handicaps versus non-handicaps, chases versus hurdle races, and the main season proper compared with the summer. The graph below shares some A/E index splits, with all lying quite close to the overall figure of 0.91:

I wondered if runners-up in the previous year fared any better, but the splits suggest their performance in terms of ROI% has been marginally worse:

Here we would have seen losses of just over 18p in the £ coupled with a slightly reduced win rate. The last split shows horses that finished third or worse in the contest the previous year, but we see a similar bottom line once again:

Everything is pointing towards the fact that horses who contest the same race the following year have been overbet – for the past seven years at least. This could work to our advantage with potential value to be found on other runners. It's perhaps something to keep an eye on for the remainder of 2026.

4 How have NH horses performed on their first three career starts?

I have done a significant amount of digging on this subject for flat racing, especially for 2yos. On the flat there is a significant rise in win rate when comparing debut runs to second and third starts. Debut runners on the level score around 8% of the time, and this improves to 12% on start two and 12% on start three. I had expected the same uptick in the NH sphere, but I was somewhat surprised when the win strike rates were as follows:

Horses on debut edged it when it came to the highest strike rate. Not only that, when we look at the ROI%s for each group we see the following:

Debutants have essentially broken even while horses having their second and third career starts have lost around 15p and 23p in the £ respectively. Fourth and fifth starters have both edged into profit and the graph below shows the BSP returns by number of career starts, from debutants through to those having their tenth run:

As the graph clearly shows these second and third time starters were completely out of sync in terms of returns when looking at early career runs. The reason why comes down to the success of outsiders. When we look at NH runners priced BSP 25.0 or bigger on any career start other than their second and third, they won 1.9% of the time losing just 1p in the £.

Compare this to second and third time starters using the same BSP 25.0 or bigger requisite – they won less than 1% of the time (0.95% to be precise) losing over 32p in the £. The messaging here is clear, those of us who like a poke at big odds, and I count myself as one of these, should not consider horses at big odds having their second or third career starts. The only second and third time starters to consider are those sent off at much shorter prices. Backing single figure BSPs blind for both would have hit a near break-even point.

Trainers with NH Runners on Debut

I thought it might be interesting to share some trainer performance with NH runners on debut. I have picked nine trainers and below are their results with debutants who were priced 10.0 or less on Betfair. Using this price point was to avoid skewed bottom lines:

We see some decent strike rates, which would be expected given the trainers in question. Olly Murphy has had a surprisingly poor time of it though in terms of his ROI, losing close to 38p in the £; while Harry Fry and the O’Neill stable have achieved decent returns.

Trainers with NH Runners on 2nd Start

Here are the same nine trainers with the same price cap for runners on their second starts.

Both the Fry and O’Neill yards have secured blind profits once more. Paul Nicholls also has a very solid record from a decent number of runners. David Pipe’s runners have seemingly struggled on start two.

Trainers with NH Runners on 3rd Start

On to start three:

Eight of the nine handlers were now in profit which is worth noting. Dan Skelton, on the other hand, has seen some very disappointing returns especially considering the odds of the horses in question.

This article has allowed me to pull together some micro angles, which I hope you've found interesting. If any reader has a niche area that they would like me to try and unravel, please leave a message in the comments. If I get enough questions that I am able to research, I’ll aim to combine them in a similar piece to this. Until next time...

- DR