Research Corner
Continuing the theme of trainer based content for this month’s piece we are going to take a much closer look at the habits and traits of the upwardly mobile National Hunt yard of Fergal O’Brien.
There are a number of reasons that we chose this particular trainer, firstly in last month’s article we highlighted a potentially profitable system involving backing the yards runners during November when competing in Handicaps, and secondly we uncovered a recent trend that seemed to indicate that the yard is punching above its market expectation….
The second point is explained by a feature on the Adrian Massey Horse Racing Pages which can be found here.
If you navigate to the trainer information section, the first item is headed Trainer Ratings.
You can read the full detail of how these are compiled on the Adrian Massey site, but a brief synopsis is as follows: –
“It is well known that some trainers train a lot more winners than others. That might be because they are better trainers, but it might be because they have more horses, or better horses, than the other trainers. Some trainers have many followers, so their horses, tend to have SPs which are shorter than they otherwise would be. Likewise, some trainers have few followers so their horses tend to have SPs which are longer than they otherwise would be. What is important for the backer (or layer) is to know whether the horses of a particular trainer perform better or worse than expected according to the SPs of the horses. For example, do the 10-1 shots of Trainer A tend to perform better or worse than those of Trainer B.
These ratings are an attempt to indicate which trainers are better or worse than average, taking into account the SPs of the horses that they train. A rating greater than 100 indicates that the trainer horses tend to finish in a better position than average, while a rating less than 100 indicates the opposite.”
During the last 12 months, at the time of writing, the Adrian Massey site have assessed the Fergal O’Brien’s runners of having a performance rating of 130 so, based on their analogy, we should be able to glean a decent amount of value by following the yards entries….
So, who is Fergal O’Brien: –
Fergal O’Brien
Fergal has been involved in racing for all of his working life since leaving Ireland in the late Eighties’ to head to England in pursuit of a career in National Hunt racing. Initially he was based with Captain Tim Forster and that initial tough regime proved to be a major asset on his own journey to becoming a fully-fledged trainer in his own right.
After his stint with “The Captain” Fergal moved to work at the Nigel Twiston-Davies’ yard in the Cotswolds where he spent 20 happy years progressing through the ranks to be head lad and assistant trainer. There were winners galore during that time with many high-profile horses which included winners of both The Gold Cup and The Grand National.
In 2011 after a brief, yet highly successful career as a Point to Point trainer, O’Brien took the decision to go out on his own and set up his own training business initially at Cilldara Stud near Northleach and then back at Upper Yard, Grange Hill Farm.
The winners began to flow, and in 2019 he upped sticks and moved to Ravenswell farm where the landlord, Rupert Lowe, has built a state of the art new training facility, with 80 stables, both an uphill and a round gallop, an owner’s room, office and 8 en suite bedrooms for staff accommodation.
The yard has already made a decent start to the curtailed 2020/21 jumps campaign which will run from June 2020 through to the end of April 2021.
To set the scene we will first take a look at the yard’s performance over the last five NH seasons…
The above table shows a decent strike rate across the three main codes of National Hunt racing and blindly backing all of the runners would have returned around 96 pence in the pound at SP and a solid profit of circa 15%+ at the returned Betfair SP, which provides us with a good start point.
We have already seen that the yard is adept with all race types so next we will consider the performance of the Non-Handicap and Handicap runners:-
If we consider the above table to SP returns, they clearly favour the Handicap runners but at Betfair SP the returns are very similar.
This can be explained by the 33/1 winner Feel The Pinch (June 2019) paying out a whopping 113.49 on the Betfair SP along with a few of the others providing inflated returns at BFSP.
If we take these outliers out of the equation it would lead us to conclude that the Handicappers are the ones we should focus our attention on, but which ones? Firstly, let us take a look at the results by Handicap Hurdles and Chases:-
The above would lean us towards following the Fergal O’Brien runners when competing in Handicap Hurdles based on the overall stats during the 5 year period, but how do the individual years compare?
Only 2018 saw a drop in performance with the other 4 years proving to be profitable at the returned Betfair SP so as a basic method you could keep it simple and just do the following:-
System 68 – Back the Fergal O’Brien runners when they are competing in Handicap Hurdles.
Happy punting and stay safe.
Steve Carter
For Gold members Steve has dug deeper to uncover additional angles that boost the ROI to a very healthy 69% ROI.
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