‘SR’ Ratings on the Flat (Turf)

For this article I am revisiting the ‘SR’ ratings which can be found each day on the Geegeez Gold racecard for UK races, writes Dave Renham. I wrote a piece in February looking at these ratings on the all-weather and, as the turf season has been going for just over three weeks now, I thought it a good time to analyse the ratings on the turf flat. If you haven’t yet read the first piece allow me explain about these ratings in more detail. If you did read that piece feel free to skip the next two paragraphs.

The SR ratings figure is derived from Dr Peter May’s research. Peter is very well respected within the horse racing community and to have his ratings available daily on the Geegeez Gold racecards is yet another positive for subscribers. Matt wrote an article in September 2023 looking at the performance of the ratings in National Hunt racing. In that piece he explained that Peter’s ratings are not strictly ‘Speed’ ratings. He wrote,

Peter's numbers are derived from a neural network: he's been doing artificial intelligence (AI) since long before it became fashionable. And they're much more than a measure of speed; they include a number of form considerations making them a sort of composite of, in Racing Post terms, RPR (Racing Post Rating) and TS (Topspeed) - both of which we also publish on geegeez.”

Hence Peter’s ratings are unique.

As I stated in my opening salvo the focus for this article is turf flat racing. I have looked at a five-year time frame from January 1st, 2020, to December 31st, 2024. Any profit or loss has been calculated to Betfair SP less 2% commission on winning bets. When I refer to the ratings from now on, I will call them SR Ratings as that is how they appear on the racecards.

Now ratings are just that, a hierarchical set of numbers. The key to a good set of ratings is not whether the top-rated runners make a long-term profit or not. Of course that would be an added bonus but, essentially, to measure the effectiveness of ratings we need to look at the win strike rate. The top-rated runner should have the highest win percentage, the second highest should win next most often, and so on, gradually reducing for the other runners. Ideally there would be a significant difference in strike rate between, say, the top-rated and the fourth highest, and likewise with the fourth rated and the eighth rated, and so on.

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

The win strike rate for top-rated runners is 20% or one win in five. This figure correlates well with the AW top-rated figure noted in my first article which stood at 19.6%. The percentages correlate positively with the rating positions showing a sliding scale that we would hope to see. If we look at the Each Way (win & placed) strike rates, a similar pattern can be seen:

The top-rated runner is comfortably clear once more, and the sliding scale is replicated showing positive correlation with the win figures. The top-rated figure of 42.9% is just under the AW one of 44.6%.

Before moving on, it should be noted that there is a good proportion of horses that do not have an SR rating as they are either unraced or yet to race on flat turf in the UK. These unrated runners are far more prevalent in non-handicaps as you would expect.

Overall, 15% of all runners (non-handicaps and handicaps combined) do not have an SR rating. To give some context for their success, these runners have won 8.2% of races in non-handicaps and remarkably the same figure of 8.2% in handicaps.

Sticking with the SR rating ranks as a whole, I would like to share the A/E indices for different positions in the rankings. I have grouped the positions, so ‘1 to 3’ stands for the top three rated runners combined, ‘4 to 6’ is the fourth- to sixth-rated runners combined, and so on.

As we can see, the best value lies with the top three in the ratings and there is then a sliding scale as we progress through the groups, once more indicating that the higher the position in the ratings the better the value. Along with the earlier strike rates, this is a further positive as far as the SR ratings on the flat turf are concerned.

Let me now split the races into handicaps versus non-handicaps and compare win strike rates for the top-rated with the second-rated runners:

In non-handicaps the top rated has won over 27% of the time and is around nine percentage points clear of the second rated (about 50% relatively). In handicap races the gap is significantly closer at 1.4% (about 10% relatively), but this is to be expected given the competitive nature of handicaps.

Here are the overall results for these runners:

The top two rated in non-handicaps have combined to achieve a positive return, with 2^nd rated runners providing virtually all of those profits. The handicap top-rated runners would have lost us just over 1 penny in the £ which is very good going given the competitiveness of such races.

Non-handicap top-rated

I would like to dig deeper into SR top-rated runners in non-handicaps starting by splitting their results by age. Here are the findings:

Top-rated 3yos have won close to 30% of the time producing a small profit. The smaller 4yo group have produced the best returns coupled with a decent A/E index of 0.97. Once we get to 5yos and older these top-rated runners have performed below the norm and look a subset to avoid. Top-rated 2yos have made a small loss of 2p in the £ but considering that a fair proportion of 2yos are unraced (so cannot be rated) this is another solid ratings performance.

Next, I would like to split the results by price. I have done this by creating Industry SP price bands as these are the odds used in the Geegeez Query Tool:

Top rated horses priced Evens or shorter have just nudged into BSP profit, but the best figures have some from those priced 11/2 to 8/1 and 17/2 to 12/1.

It is interesting, too, when we compare the top-rated win strike rates for these two price bands with all remaining runners combined. We would expect the strike rates to be within a decimal place or two as we are effectively talking about the same price point. However, this is not the case as the table below shows (I have included the A/E indices too for comparison purposes):

These findings confirm that, for this price range at least, top-rated runners in non- handicaps have performed well above the norm and have offered punters excellent value.

A look at race class next to see if we can spot any patterns:

Top-rated runners in Class 1 and 2 non-handicaps have both made a profit, as has the Class 5 group. Class 4 results are comfortably the worst in terms of returns. I am guessing here, but it might be because class 4 non-handicaps have had the highest proportion of unraced horses which, of course, are unrated. This could mean we get a few more surprise results because of this.

Handicap top-rated

It’s time to move onto handicap top-rated runners starting as we did for non-handicaps with the age of runners:

The 2yo top-rated runners under-perform a little especially in terms of the bottom line, but 2yo handicaps (nurseries) are notoriously tricky affairs. In terms of returns there is little in it between 3, 4, 5 and 6yos – these are very consistent results. 7yos have a modest record, but I think this is probably a slight anomaly. The oldest runners, those aged eight and older, have turned a profit, but a BSP winner at 60.0 made a significant contribution to those figures.

Let’s now split the top-rated handicap results by Industry SP. I am using different price bands than earlier due to handicaps having less very short-priced runners:

Looking at the profit / ROI columns it seems that focusing on shorter priced runners, those 13/2 or lower, might be the way to go. That has certainly been the case over the last five years.

So, to race class next. There have only been two Class 1 handicaps, so I have ignored those. Here are the splits for the other grades:

The higher class of race for top-rated non handicappers was best, and we see a similar pattern here. Class 2, 3 and 4 handicaps have all made profits to BSP with very solid A/E indices to boot. Class 5 and 6 top rated have still performed OK, but below the level of those higher grades.

The final piece of digging is connected with run style. As regular readers will know, I consider run style to be very important in certain races, especially some handicaps. Here, then, are the win percentages for top-rated SR runners across the four run styles. This covers all handicaps at all distances:

Early leaders / front runners that were top rated on the SR ratings have won nigh on 25% of the time (one win in every four). This follows the pattern we have seen numerous times in the past. Of course, we only know the early leader after the race has started but if we had managed to predict when the top-rated runner would take the early lead in a handicap, we would have won £1006.01 to £1 level stakes. This equates to huge returns of over 51 pence for every £ bet. Nice money if you can get it and, importantly, a reasonable margin for error in picking top-rated runners that didn’t go on to lead in their races.

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Geegeez Gold has so many benefits for punters and these SR ratings are definitely one of them. I hope this article has uncovered some useful SR rating angles that can be deployed over the coming weeks and months.

- DR

Other Recent Posts by This Author:

• An Analysis of Geegeez Pace Ratings in 5f handicaps
• Two-Year-Old Sires in 2025
• When Horses Change Stable: Part 2
• When Horses Change Stable: Part 1
• From a Place, to a Different Place