Predicting Run Style

In the last six months I have written four articles looking at run style in some way or another. It is a topic that I am most interested as it is still under researched but importantly, I feel there are betting opportunities to be exploited using it.

For new readers I use the term ‘run style’ when I am talking about the position that each horse takes up early in the race, usually within the first furlong. You can see this happening in front of your eyes if you are watching a race, but in terms of examining past races / data you can extract this information in a few ways.

Firstly, by the in running comments you can find in the results section of numerous sites such as the Racing Post, Sporting Life, At the Races, Geegeez, Horseracebase , etc.

Secondly there are some courses where you can use Sectional Timing data which gives the positions of the horses at numerous points in the race including early on (the time in the race when I am interested in). These are the most accurate as they give the precise positions of the horses.

Thirdly, some sites have racing software built in where they assign letters or numerical values depending on the position a horse took up early in the race. This can speed the process of back checking ideas which with horse racing research like this is handy!

For this piece my aim was to see how relevant recent run style data was in terms of predicting future pace. I have touched upon this before in articles for other publications but have never got close to number crunching the amount of data I have done here.

In terms of the data, I wish to share with you, I have ‘crunched’ every single UK race run in 2023 – National Hunt, turf flat and the all–weather. That is over 10,000 races and over 85,000 horse run styles pulled from these races.

The reason run style prediction interests me so much is that I know that one specific run style can have a huge edge over the rest. For those of you who have read my previous run style articles then the answer will come as no surprise …………………… it is front runners – those horses that get to the front early.

Let me back up this quote with some numbers taken from http://www.geegeez.co.uk.

In 2023 this how ALL front runners / early leaders performed when combining their results:

Remember these figures include ALL race codes, all race types, all distances. Not only that the profit / ROI figures are to Industry SP – my calculations to BSP are off the chart standing at just over £5000 giving a return of around 39 pence in the £ (ROI 39%).

Before moving on, I do want to show you the differences in certain races when it comes to front runner performance.

Here is a comprehensive if not exhaustive list – rows in green show a positive return to Industry SP, those in red show a loss:

What this data shows is that front runners could be termed (in some circumstances) as a license to print money. Hence, it makes perfect sense to try and find a way that gives you your best chance of predicting the front runner for any given race.

Now, before we all get too carried away, horses are not machines, so the ‘dream’ of predicting all the front runners in every race can only remain a dream.

However, my personal remit before starting this was, how high can I get a ‘prediction percentage’ for front runners? It was not just front runners I was interested in, I wanted to check out this type of data for hold up horses as well.

Time to share my findings. I decided to split my run style data into three. Previously I have split into four or five run style groups, but with such a huge number of races, I needed to simplify things somewhat. Hence the three splits were:

Front Runners / Early Leaders – horses that go to the front early (within the first furlong).

Prominent Runners – horses that tracked the early pace / raced in the front half of the field.

Hold Up Horses – horses that raced in the second half of the field early.

Where appropriate, I will use the following abbreviations for the three run style groups :

Front Runners / Early Leaders (L); Prominent Runners (P); Hold Up Horses (H).

Last Race Run Style analysis.

Firstly, let me look at horses that had front run last time out, and what run style they showed on their very next start:

Therefore, roughly a third of horses (32.5%) that led early last time out, went to the front early in their next run. That 32.5% figure is well short of the 100% ‘ideal’ if impossible figure we are looking for.

What we need to remember though is that in virtually every race there are more hold up and prominent horses than early leaders. Yes, you can get more than one horse vying for that early lead, but more than half of all races will have just one front runner. Hence, as an example, a 10-runner race could end up with 1 early leader, 4 prominent runners and 5 hold up horses.

In this scenario, each horse in the race had just a 10% chance of leading. What I am alluding to, or at least trying to, is that the 32.5% figure is still quite high when taking this into account.

What about hold up horses last time out? What run style did they display on their very next outing?

As you can see very few hold up horses end up going ‘from the front’ next time. This is understandable as a decent percentage of horses tend to have a preferred run style.

Because of this then it is rare to see a horse with run style abbreviations for the past 10 races such as L, H, L, H, L, H, L, H, L, H.

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