Cheltenham Festival – 10 year trends in Handicap Hurdles

It's that time again – Cheltenham Festival time! Now although I generally favour the flat, particularly from a betting perspective, I think the Cheltenham festival is my favourite race meeting of the year. I have been lucky enough to be there several times and I have some great memories. The racing is excellent and extremely competitive, but it is the atmosphere and happy faces that I remember best, as well as a few winners!

Now, around this time, you may have started to see different publications and papers publish Cheltenham trends for individual races – usually looking back at the last 10 years. In fact, these 10 Year Trends were something I used to do when writing for the Racing and Football Outlook. However, for this piece I am going to look at some general trends for one specific race type. In other words, I am grouping similar races together to give me more data to work with.

My focus is going to be handicap hurdle races at the Festival.

I will be looking at the last 10 meetings going back to 2012. All profits / losses have been calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP) using £1 level stakes.

The standard 5% commission on winning bets has been applied to the calculations. So, let’s get cracking ….

All Handicap Hurdles

There are 5 handicap hurdle races at the festival and the same 5 have occurred over the past 10 years. They are the Martin Pipe, the County, the Fred Winter, the Coral Cup and the Pertemps. Four of them are Class 1 events, while the Martin Pipe race is a Class 2 event.

Handicap races at the Cheltenham are notoriously competitive. This is partly down to the depth and quality of the runners, but also because the average field size over the past 10 years has been a humongous 24.

Time to break the data down so let me look at market factors first.

Market

With an average field size of 24, shocks are not an unusual occurrence. Many a trainer would be trying land a big, priced winner in these races. Over the past 10 years the value has been with horses priced 25/1 or bigger as the table below shows:

Shorter priced runners win more often as you expect, but the value has been with the outsiders priced 25/1 or larger. As a punter there are worse options than looking for 2 or 3 bigger priced runners in these races to bet on.

In terms of the front end of the market, favourites or joint favourites have won 5 races from 57 runners. Losses have been steep at £25.32 (ROI – 44.40%).

With the value seemingly with the longer priced runners I thought it would be worth digging a bit deeper into the 25/1 or larger group of runners to see if we could find any positives angles.

Dave Renham

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Featured Image: The Champion Hurdle