Class 1 and 2 Non Handicap Chases

The National Hunt season is now moving into gear and this article, as the title indicates, is going to take a deep dive in the better class of chases focusing on Class 1 and 2 Non Handicaps. On average in the UK there are around 80 such contests each year.

The data has been collated from 1st September 2016 to 17th September 2024 for UK National Hunt Racing. Profits / Losses will be quoted to both Industry Starting Price and Betfair Starting Price to help give us a comparison:

I would like to kick off by looking at Market Factors. I am splitting the results into different Industry SP Odds Ranges:

Very short odds–on shots under 1.50 (1/2) have struggled, but generally horses 5.00 (4/1) or shorter have performed above expectations, with their combined A/E index standing at a decent figure of 0.95.

Also, they have also made a tiny profit if betting all qualifiers blindly to BSP. Ultimately if your horse is well fancied in these contests, they seemed to have offered punters reasonable value.

On the other side of the ‘market’ coin, with just 12 of the 680 runners priced 23.00 (22/1) or bigger winning, I think it would be sensible to ignore these outsiders.

This is despite the skewed BSP profit for horses priced more than 51.00 (50/1).

Sticking with the betting market, let me share the stats for favourites. This including joint and co favourites:

At BSP all favourites have been very close to breaking even; just half a penny shy. The numbers are suggesting that being favourite in these races has been more a positive than a negative.

Sticking with favourites, here is the favourite data split by course.

I have used a minimum of 35 runs at each track to qualify:

Cheltenham favourites have made a small profit to SP, which is almost doubled when backing to BSP.

This may come as surprise given the competitive nature of the racing at the course, especially at this level of contest. Favourites racing at Aintree and Newbury have also offered us fairly good value.

Now let me share the records of trainers when saddling the favourite. To qualify a trainer must have saddled 30 or more favourites:

Henderson’s figures are just off the chart – over 62% of his favourites have prevailed and they would have returned punters over 17 pence in the £ to SP, just under 21 pence in the £ to BSP. Even the mercurial Willie Mullins has not managed a profit with his jollies, albeit he is close to BSP. A switch of focus now and I would like to look at the Age of the runners next. Here are the splits:

4-year-old runners are extremely rare as they are often not mature enough to contest such good quality races. However, ignore these runners at your peril as their record is excellent, albeit from a small sample. 10-year-olds have proved profitable to both SP and BSP, but this is essentially down to three of their winners all priced at 66/1 (SP); to BSP the winning prices of these horses were 110.14, 224.95 and 190. Hence the 10yo BSP figures are badly skewed.

The older generation of runners have struggled especially once they hit 12 or older. This should come as no surprise, but the stats strongly suggest that it makes sense to ignore these runners.

I want to look at some last time out factors now starting with whether the last race contested was a handicap or a non-handicap. If we examine the strike rates of the two, we see quite a difference:

As you can see, horses that ran in a Non Handicap LTO have outperformed those that ran in a handicap last time by over 5.5%. These win percentages correlate positively with the A/E indices for each group which stand at 0.92 (LTO race = non handicap) versus 0.84 (LTO race = handicap). As you may expect then the profits and the returns vary significantly between each subset:

The profits / ROI figures also correlate well with the strike rates and the A/E indices with a significant difference in returns between each group. Also, a blind profit has been made to BSP if backing ALL LTO runners in a Non Handicap.

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My racing interest started when I was studying for my Maths degree. I went to Goodwood for the first time with a friend from college and I ended up winning on a 33/1 shot. I was hooked from there. In the late 90s I wrote a couple of self-published books on draw bias and a few years later I collaborated with Andrew Mount and Graham Wheldon on the Raceform published book Sprintline 2002. I started an advisory service called drawn2win in 2001 where I gave daily race insights and tips which I did for 6 years.

I worked on the Racing Post for a short time as a Spotlight writer and then spent just over 5 years working on the Racing and Football Outlook as a trend’s writer.

Finally, I have written for numerous articles for different publications and website and at the last count they totalled just over 850.

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