A Look at 2-Year-Old Nurseries Part 1
July will see the start of nursery races on the flat – these are handicap races for 2-year-olds. In this article I will be doing a deep dive into these tricky contests.
I have collated data from the last eight seasons of UK flat and all-weather racing (2018 to 2025) with profits and losses quoted to Betfair Starting Price (BSP) less 2% commission on winning bets. Profits in each table will be shown in black, while losses will be shown in red. Thanks to the excellent www.horseracebase.com site for providing all the numbers to crunch.
The Market
My first port of call is the betting market, and I would like to look at different price bands and how they have performed. I will be using Betfair SP (BSP) prices:
These stats suggest the value has been at either end of the betting market.
Horses priced at BSP 2.50 or less have performed above the norm making a small profit. Their Betfair A/E index stands at 1.06 which suggests they have been decent value.
At the other end of the price range those runners priced BSP 30.01 or bigger have made significant profits. Obviously, a few of these big priced winners have helped to skew the figures somewhat including winners at 436.20, 280.35 and 220. Take those three winners out of the 70 winners and that does account for nearly 87% of the profit figure.
Having said that, six of the eight years would have turned a profit if backing all horses priced over 30 BSP so if you have a good reason to back a horse in a nursery at a big price, I would not be putting you off having a bet.
For the rest of the article, I am going to impose a price cap set at BSP 15.0. I do this in most of my articles as this helps avoid any really big priced winners skewing the bottom lines.
Sex of Horse
Time therefore to compare the record of male horses versus their female counterparts. The table below shows the splits for races open to both sexes (mixed sex races) when priced BSP 15.0 or less:
There has been a small edge to male runners in terms of win rate, returns and marginally in terms of value. However, the differences are not too significant.
Let me now drill into the data for the male runners and compare the performance of colts versus geldings. This will include all races open the male runners namely mixed sex and male only.
Geldings have proved the better in terms of profit and loss – I am guessing most people would have expected colts to come out on top but that has not been the case.
Number of Past Wins
A look next at whether the number of previous wins in their career has made a difference. Here are the stats:
Horses that have won at least twice previously have done well hitting a win percentage in excess of one win in five as well as returning just under 6 pence in the £.
Horses yet to lose their maiden tag (0 previous wins) have roughly broken even to BSP. Horses with one career win have the poorest record losing close to 8 pence for every £1 bet.
Position Last Time Out
How about their most recent run in terms of LTO finishing position? Let me share these splits:
As we can see, horses that won last time out have been by far the poorest value despite having the highest strike rate. I am guessing this is simply a case of these runners being over bet by the betting fraternity.
The best value has been with horses that finished fifth or further down the field last time out. They have produced a small return on investment.
From this cohort of runners, if we focus solely on those that were well beaten when fifth or worse, so beaten by over 5 lengths, their record improves to 463 wins from 3003 (SR 15.4%) for a profit of £179.98 (ROI +6%).
I am guessing these horses have gone underneath the radar of most punters.
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