An In Depth Look at 2-Year-Old Novice Races
As we move into the warmer months, well hopefully ….... I want to examine 2-year-old Novice Races. It should be noted that there has been a recent change to the Race Conditions of 2yo Novice Races whereby any two-year-old that has won a race and has had three or more completed runs will no longer be considered a Novice.
This new rule will not have a major impact on the stats shared in this article, but it is important to share such information.
My research shared will look at the last eight full years (2018 to 2025) of these contests, with the focus being UK flat racing (including the all-weather).
All profits and losses have been calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP) less 2% commission on any winning bets.
The British Horseracing Authority (BHA) aim to have a 60% to 40% Novice to Maiden Races split.
This applies for both 2yo and 3yo races. So, it is time to get into the numbers.
Market Rank – Let me start with the betting market; specifically, the Betfair market (BSP). I want to share the stats by market position:
Favourites have made the type of loss you would expect at around 3p in the £, but second favourites have nudged into profit. Once we get to fifth or bigger in the betting the returns drop off quite markedly.
There has been a smattering of massive BSPs hitting the target, with 26 winners hitting a BSP of 100.0 or more. However, backing all 7090 qualifiers would have lost you over 28 pence in the pound.
Sticking with favourites for a minute, it is interesting to split their record up by previous career runs. The splits have been as follows:
Favourites with more experience have performed better than those on debut or those having had just one previous run. One caveat is that favourites who had run at least five times previously would have lost us over 11p in the £. Hence, the ‘sweet spot’ seems to be favourites who have had 2, 3 or 4 career starts.
Favourites have done extremely well in higher class Novice Races (those at Class 2 or 3 level). In these contests favourites have won 139 times from 300 qualifiers (SR 46.3%) for a healthy BSP profit of £43.22 (ROI +14.4%).
These better class races have been dominated by the market because second favourites have also secured a profit thanks to 67 wins from 301 (SR 22.3%) for a profit of £17.35 (ROI +5.8%).
For virtually all articles I write these days I implement a BSP price cap to try and avoid any huge priced winners skewing the figures. Hence, I will do that here and looking at the results, a price cap of BSP 16.0 or less makes sense.
For the record, here is the performance of all horses that were priced 16.0 or less:
This still leaves us over 16,500 runners to drill down into and it equates to 90% of all 2yo Novice winners.
Onto the stats with the price cap in place and my first port of call is looking at the record of male horses versus female ones.
The splits below are based on mixed sex races, those races open to both sexes:
Males have won more often, but there has not been much in it on the profit/loss/return front. I wanted next to look at male runners and split them by colts and geldings. I had assumed that colts would have outperformed geldings fairly significantly across all races, but I was wrong:
Colts have edged it, but not by much. However, digging a little deeper I found that geldings had a vastly different record depending on the sex of runners in the race. In open races for both sexes, they have done very well, but in male only races they have struggled.
The table below shows the splits:
As can be seen, geldings have made a profit in open races, but fairly steep losses in male only novice events.
This is something we need to note.
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