National Hunt favourites January to March
By the time you read this it will either be the end of 2022 or the beginning of a New Year, and for National Hunt fans there is plenty of great racing to look forward to in the first three months of 2023. Everything comes to a head in March of course as we have the Cheltenham Festival to enjoy – arguably the best meeting of the year jumps or flat.
In this article I am going to look at the performance of National Hunt favourites in the early part of the year. I should state that I am primarily looking at horses that were CLEAR favourite. Joint / co favourites are looked at briefly at the end.
I have analysed races going back to the start of 2017 with the focus on UK National Hunt racing only during the months of January, February and March. All profit and losses have been calculated to Betfair Starting Price (less 5% commission) using £1 level stakes.
Clear Favourites
So, first things first – if we backed every single National Hunt clear favourite since 2017 in the first three months of the year, how would we have performed?
This is not a bad starting point with losses standing at just 1 pence for every £1 wagered Favourites often get a bad ‘rap’ as analysts will point to the fact that it is difficult to get value backing favourites. This is true but perhaps here is a case where we may have potentially found some favourite value. Splitting now into each individual month we get the following breakdown:
A small profit in January and February respectively; a small loss in March. These losses in March have nothing to do with Cheltenham Festival favourites as they have actually made a small profit in this time frame of £10.77 (ROI + 6.9%). A look at race type now and hence I will be splitting the data by chase, hurdle and NH flat races (bumpers):
I am not surprised to see that National Hunt flat favourites have the poorest record. From a personal perspective I find these races close to impossible due to the limited form on offer.
In contrast, hurdle races have seen favourites make a nominal profit so it makes sense to split these up into handicap and non handicap races to see whether that makes a difference or not:
A much lower strike rate in handicaps as one would expect, but this is where the profits have come from. Interestingly if you had focused on clear favourites in handicap hurdles who had NOT finished first or second last time out, you would have been rewarded with 258 winners from 782 runners (SR 33.0%) for a profit of £136.25 (ROI + 17.4%).
That would have given us a very tidy yield.
Time to move back to ALL races once again, and I am going to look at Betfair SP odds to see if we can find an edge.
I have split the odds into four groupings.
These groupings have given us at least 1200 races in each price bracket which gives us good size data sets:
These stats are quite eye opening with the bigger priced favourites clearly the best value. A return of nearly 12p in the £ for horses priced 4.01 or bigger is decent.
It should also be noted that each individual year these bigger priced runners have made a profit as the table below shows:
It is always good to break down overall results and see year in year out consistency like this. This should give us much more confidence in the overall data.
Hopefully 2023 will show similar positive results.
A look at trainers next to see whether any have excelled with favourites, or indeed struggled.
Here are all trainers who have saddled at least 50 favourites in the first three months of the year since 2017:
A huge differential between the trainer at the top of the table with the one at the bottom. Anthony Honeyball with a strike rate of over 53% and profits of 37.5p in the £ versus Ben Pauling with a 21.9% strike rate and losses edging close to 40 pence in the £.
Interesting to see the big guns of Nicky Henderson and Paul Nicholls both in the negative despite 40%+ strike rates. It seems that favourites from the Nicholls stable especially start a bit shorter than their true price.
All in all the stats we have examined suggest that it seems a good time of the year to at least consider backing certain clear favourites in National Hunt races.
Joint/co Favourites
Before I finish let me quickly look at the stats for joint or co favourites. First, the overall stats for all such runners:
A profit here albeit a small one. Just more fuel to the fire in terms of the positivity behind favourites at this time of year. They also made a profit when the BSP price was 4.01 or bigger – returns of 3.5p in the £.
Here are a couple of extra stats for joint favourites I would like to share:
1. Joint favourites in National Hunt flat races have a very poor record scoring just 20% of the time and losing a whopping 25 pence in the £;
2. Joint favourites in handicap races have replicated the profit made by clear favs in this sphere. They have had 193 winners from 810 qualifiers (SR 23.8%) for a solid profit of £53.94 (ROI + 6.7%).
Despite personally being a punter who tends to look for bigger priced horses, this article has shown there can be value at the front end of the market as well. I will be keeping a close eye on National Hunt favourites from January 1st to March 31st, and I suggest readers do too!
David Renham
