Mudslingers Revisited
It’s time to revisit an old article. We’ll take a look at how some of the system ideas from there look now, using the last eight years of data and see if there is anything new to learn and whether other trainers have come to the fore in the intervening time.
The basis of this was to see whether there were trainers whose runners excelled under testing ground conditions, namely Heavy and Soft to Heavy.
At the time Willie Mullins was streets ahead in terms of finding winners in the tough conditions.
Let’s see how things look now, some eight years on.
Our preset criteria are National Hunt races, Years 2018-2025 inclusive and going is either Soft to heavy or Heavy. Here’s how the whole lot look year by year.
Betting every runner would have turned out rather nice this year! Less so in other years!
In the original article it was mentioned at the start about how certain sires might produce progeny that are suited to heavier ground. I want to take a little delve into that and attempt to bring the dam into the mix as well. So, if you’ll allow me to indulge my curiosity I will begin!
First, we’ll go through the stallion records for this time period and going conditions and select all those whose progeny have ten or more wins. The main reason for going ten and above is that gives us over one hundred stallions to work with.
Next, I will select all those dams that have two or more wins with our group of stallions but remove any who do not have at least a 20% strike rate. The thinking here is that if their progeny really are good and like the going then they should be winning at least one in five to suggest there really is a liking for the ground.
I’ll then tidy up the stallions, removing any that fall below our 20% strike rate target and likewise recheck the dams for any that have gone below with the stallion removal.
Here’s how that all looks.
Naturally it is pretty impressive because I’ve taken all the best performing stallion/dam combinations over the past eight years. The question is will that project anywhere near as successfully into the future?
ROIs are consistent as is A/E so that is encouraging but again, is the future going to be good.
I think I will test it out for very small stakes. It’s worth noting that place profit is also excellent as well.
For the record, although it means little really, the longest losing run on wins was 14 and on places it was 9. I’d expect it to be a lot more than that in a live test going forward but it will be intriguing to find out.
From this large list of stallions and dams I will use the dig function on the excellent www.horseracebase.com and break down some pairings that have produced successful progeny, and that have had wins in at the last two years so, as they have had relatively recent success. From there I will get the list of horses and add it to our data.
Once all of that was done, we find ourselves with 42 horses to follow in 2026 when conditions are met. Below is their record to date.
And here is their record when running under any other going. This makes for very encouraging reading and certainly appears to back up their preference for ‘mudslinging’!
They have a 52% strike rate compared to 17%. They show a profit of 655 points compared to 63 points in just 20% of the number of races. Places are 73% compared to 39% and BF A/E 2.30 compared to 0.91.
I must reiterate though that the data has been picked from past good performance under the conditions we are looking for. That doesn’t mean things will continue but I do think in as far as we can tell everything looks favourable with these horses and, in particular, their performance away from the ideal conditions is markedly worse which would seem to back up the fact that they perform well in tough conditions.
I’m going to run this one in 2026 to small stakes and see how it gets on. It looks like it shouldn’t be more than around 50 bets unless the weather is really awful.
|
The rest of this article is for Platinum members. You've just seen what our experts do with publicly available data — the Platinum section is where the specific angles, numbers and actionable conclusions live. Platinum members also get daily system selections in their inbox by 2am, tips from top tipsters, Win Big Golf selections, and access to 11 years of magazine archives. |
