Horse Racing System Review

Don’t be fooled by figures

Posted on June 2nd, 2010 in false favourites by admin

These days it is very easy to be fooled by the claims made by some horse racing system promoters. One of the most misleading statistics can be the “success percentage figure. For example how would you like a racing system that gave you a 95% success rate?

Try this, lay every horse priced at 33/1 or greater to lose. I haven’t actually looked up the true success rate but I suspect that it would be around 95%.That mean 19 times out of 20 you would win, sadly on the 20th time you would have to pay out anything from 33 to 100 times your stake. Can you see the flaw in the “Baldrick” type plan?

Another option would be to lay the favourite because I am sure that you have read that only just over 30% of favourites win. In this case we should end up with 7 winning bets out of 10. Unfortunately to break even your losing bets would have to be at average odds of 2/1 but 25% of winning favourites are priced at 2/1 or more. Failed again Baldrick!

The answer is obvious, lay favourites because this keeps our liability in bounds but look for favourites who are really “false favourites”. The first thing to look at is the price we lay at. If we restrict our lays to favourites priced at 2.8 (7/4) providing we can average a winning bet percentage of 70% we will be in profit.

Next look at the number of runners because in large fields you have more horses running for you and statistically the larger the field the fewer favourites win. On the flat for fields with 16 or more runners the winning favourite’s percentage is down to 23% and 29% in National Hunt races. You see we are already bringing the percentages down.

Finally look at the type of race . Handicaps are by design the most difficult races to predict the winner. This is reflected by the fact that favourites only win 21% of flat selling handicaps and 26% of all flat handicap races. The figures are slightly better for National Hunt with around 31% of favourites winning handicaps.

Another factor I always like to consider is the distance. Favourites do less well in 5 furlong sprints because in such a short race that if they are slowly away or get blocked in there is no time to resolve the problem.

The percentage of favourites winning 5 furlong races over the last 16 years is 23% So if you want a simple system to find false favourites it is:
Look for a favourite at 2.8 (7/4) or less
In a 16 + runner handicap
If it is a 5 furlong sprint even better.

However, if you really want to find false favourites I would recommend you grab a copy of Jonathon Burgess. This is a 200+ page manual full of facts and information that will help you spot the favourites who are poor value for money.

For more information about False Favourites visit
http://bit.ly/cvynP9

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One Response to 'Don’t be fooled by figures'

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  1. Stuart Kay said,

    on September 11th, 2011 at 3:15 am

    According to statistics on http://www.flatstats.co.uk the favourite has won in 5f races 31.6% of the time betwen 2001 and 2011. In 6f races the figure is 31.7% and in 7f events 31%. This would appear to blow away your premise the 5f races throw up fewer winning favourites. Are you saying these figures are false?

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