A One Horse Race
As we prepare ourselves for the mighty build up to The Cheltenham Festival (Tuesday 11th- Friday 14th March) we felt it prudent to take a little peak to see if we can come up with some useful trainer stats for February and the build up to the big festival.
Historically we have looked at those trainers who have chosen to send just one runner to a racecourse and it feels prudent, given the continuously increasing costs incurred by stables to sending a solo runner to a track, including transportation costs, the horses stable team and let alone the time of travel away from the yard to take another look at if there is any merit in backing these runners.
There are seven trainers we are going to look at who, over the last 5 years, have had a healthy strike rate (20% or greater) with their single runners and managed to turn a profit at Betfair Exchange Starting Prices and have a minimum of thirty runners during that time. (National Hunt races only).
There is no surprise to see the largest two trainers there in terms of Paul Nicholls and Nicky Henderson, so we’ll start at the top and work our way down.
Paul Nicholls
The Nicholls runners have seen a profit, but that 70.28 points profit at BFSP all came in 2020. Subsequent years haven’t been catastrophic and have been pretty much break even, but whether there is any real benefit in backing his runners now needs further investigation.
The handful of National Hunt Flat runners he has sent on their own performed below par generally with an A/E of 0.76.
So, we will look to avoid those runners for the time being.
In terms of the national Hunt Race Type we can clearly see where the highest strike rates are. Now although high strike rates do not guarantee high profits (it all depends on the prices you can achieve), we always feel more comfortable with a steady stream of winners. Long losing runs are difficult for most to swallow. So, we will concentrate our efforts on those race types with a 30% strike rate or greater.
And we will also concentrate our selections in Class 2 – Class 4 races which is where some healthy profits have been accumulated and all of which have offered a 40% strike rate or greater. This will result in around 20-30 bets a year from this system which may not seem many, but we are hopeful that the trainers to follow may be able to fill any gaps for us.
Ann Hamilton (Mrs. A Hamilton)
Our initial figures show that 2023 wasn’t the best of years for the Ann Hamilton yard but returns for efforts can’t be sniffed at otherwise.
Maintaining our opinion that a good strike rate helps make our betting experience more pleasurable we are going to restrict our race types to those shown below, which all offer a 30% strike rate (or thereabouts).
2023 wasn’t the best year, but 2024 recovered well.
Twenty eight of those winners came in Handicap races only and all but one of those were in Class 1 – Class 4.
Her string of horses is small so many will say, well she only has one horse to send, and very true you are, but that said, the results can’t be knocked given that she had eight winners from twenty four in 2024 and returned just shy of 16.00 points profit. That’s close to a 67% ROI to BFSP, and apart from 2023 she has exceeded a 10% ROI.
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