Horse Racing – An alternative to the Cheltenham Festival

National Hunt Horse Racing is often all about the Cheltenham Festival, but sometimes we want an alternative. It is that time of year again where everyone turns their eyes toward Cheltenham and The Festival, but not for us this month. While everyone is glued to the big races we are going to be taking a look to see if we can find any angles we can use elsewhere.

Dan Skelton

Son of the excellent Show Jumping jockey Nick Skelton, Dan Skelton has progressed in to a respected jumps trainer and keeping it in the family many of his winners have been ridden by his younger brother Harry.

Operating in Alcester, Warwickshire just 15 miles or so outside of Birmingham in the West Midlands these guys have been making their mark in the racing circuit, but a large part of that success has been thanks to owners who possibly would not have moved to a relatively novice training stable had it not been for the prestige and confidence in their father Nick.

Nick Skelton has always shown a winner’s attitude to life none more so after having broken his neck just prior to the 2000 Sydney Olympics when he fell from his mount and landed vertically on his head!

No one could have expected his success at the 2016 Olympics in Rio when he became officially the oldest British Olympic Gold medallist since 908 at the age of 58! His son Dan though was convinced that his father would ride again after the accident, and he was right.

Dan’s training career started during a nine year spell as assistant to Paul Nicholls but when deciding to go out on his own he asked himself “What have I done?” Having planned to start with 12 horse’s things have now reached new heights for the Skelton yard but a trainer is only as good as their results.

Over the past 5 years Dan Skelton has had more than 2300 runners in National Hunt races, and of those 403 has been run at tracks in Central England close to his training ground, at Southwell, Stratford, Towcester and Warwick. A winning strike rate of 20.60% is good and a place strike rate of 43.67% makes us take a close look at these local runners.

Where quite often we can find clear differences when distinguishing between a trainers Handicap and Non Handicap runners we find with Dan Skelton that we have a pretty even split in terms of the win and place strike rates, and nothing in terms of profit.

Once we get past the first couple of months of the year the figures start to improve, and the place strike rates improve in to the region of 50% +

The figures above are for the last 5 years for the period March to May inclusive and the give us a foundation for further investigation.

Looking at the Non Handicappers to begin with shows a clear strong win and place strike rate, but the profits offered up of 10.50 points for 76 selections (an ROI of just shy of 14%) possibly won’t have us shouting from the roof.

Concentrate on the lower Class 5 and 6 Non Handicappers though and the return is definitely worthy of note at 91.40%.

Backing each way the profits are improved (39.34 points to Industry SP) and certainly worth backing but although we have seen profits each year over the past 5 these profits year on year have dwindled, probably due to popularity and awareness of Dan Skelton’s stable runners. That said an 80% place strike rate in 2017 has us backing each way.

Summary:- Back Dan Skelton Non Handicap National Hunt runners in Class 4 and Class 5 races held at Southwell, Stratford, Towcester and Warwick during the months of March and April.

So what about the handicap races?

We couldn’t really find an angle for Skelton’s Handicap runners and rather than  getting ourselves locked in to back fitting further and further we decided to take a look elsewhere to cover a bet in the handicap races.

As you will no doubt know by now we quite like our smaller trainers over on this section and in particular our female trainers who can on many an occasion get over looked particularly if they are a smaller stable.

One such trainer is Caroline Fryer.

A small stable with a handful of runners can very easily pass you by but don’t be misled backing her Handicap runners each way last year would have seen you make 45 points profit with a 50% WIN strike rate!

2018 Results To Date

Margaret Mullins and Pam Sly

January – No of selections 2
Winners / Placed – 1 (Winner)
Profit / Loss: +1.75 SP

February
No selections at time of writing.

Sue Smith

January – No of selections 3
Winners / Placed – 1 (Winner)
Profit / Loss: +0.80 SP

February – To Date – No of selections 4
Winners / Placed – 3 (2 Winners)
Profit / Loss: +2.32 SP

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