Research Corner – The 20% Club Revisited
The GB National Hunt scene has been dominated for a number of years by a select group of top performing trainers, with the likes of Willie Mullins, Paul Nicholls, Nicky Henderson, Dan Skelton and Colin/Joe Tizzard mopping up many of the big races throughout the racing calendar year.
The problem, or challenge, is that it can be difficult to profit when following their runners blindly because the cat is well and truly out of the bag, and the bookies will often try to price up their entries at odds below their runners’ respective chances of winning.
In recent years there have been a number of new kids on the block, so it seemed an appropriate time to revisit what we termed in Issue 63, the 20% Club.
To carry out the research we turned to our trusty friend, the system builder at www.horseracebase.com
The following trainers have recorded a strike rate in excess of 20% of their National Hunt runners in the UK over the last five years, 2021-2025.
Unsurprisingly the above table includes such stalwarts as Nicky Henderson and Paul Nicholls, but there are some interesting new additions such as Ann Hamilton and Sam Thomas, and it is the latter duo that we are going to be taking a closer look at. Both have produced a positive A/E over the 5 year period so that offers potential.
Let’s take a closer look at each of them in turn to see if we can dig out a few potential nuggets that will hopefully prove profitable to follow in the coming months.
Mrs Ann Hamilton
Ann Hamilton, the racehorse trainer, is based in Northumberland, in the north-east of England. She and her husband Ian train their small string of National Hunt horses from their family farm in the village of Great Bavington, near Newcastle upon Tyne.
This is a rural location off the beaten track; she’s known for training just a handful of horses from this farm rather than operating a large commercial yard. She began training horses on the side around the early 1980s and has built up a reputation for getting the most out of a limited string.
Unlike commercial yards with large stables and many owners, Ann typically trains only horses owned by her husband, a rare and personal setup in modern racing. Despite the tiny scale, she has achieved remarkably high strike rates and competitive results against bigger stables. For example, she posted close to a 40% winner rate with just six horses in one season, a figure many top trainers don’t match.
Some of the more notable horses that are of have been trained by Ann Hamilton include Tommy’s Oscar who has won multiple races and even contested at high levels, including the 2022 Cheltenham Festival’s Champion Hurdle. She placed Bavington Bob to win 7 races from 23 runs, whilst Nuts Well managed 13 wins at a 27% strike rate and you would have made a level stake profit of +42pts blindly backing him over his 49 races.
If we breakdown the 5 year period we find the following:
Blindly backing all of the yards National Hunt runners yielded a level stake profit in 3 of the 5 years of the review period.
If we next consider the type of race we find:
Clearly the few runners in bumpers need to be avoided.
When we checked the stats for Handicap and Non-Handicap races we found there were both fruitful so the next aspect to consider is how did the yard fare at particular racetracks?
All bar 1 of the winners can from a select group of 8 racecourses. That winner came at Ayr but overall that track was 1 from 8, and a blank return came at Aintree, Sandown, Perth, Sedgefield, Cheltenham, Catterick and Cartmel. Collectively the yard had 32 runners at the aforementioned courses and overall, these made a level stake loss at Betfair SP of -24.16.
If we take those tracks out of the mix, we find a very healthy 1.21 Actual V Expected, so clearly these types of runners are overperforming the market expectation.
Interestingly a duo of jockeys rode 38 of the 43 winners, whilst the record without either of those jockeys in the saddle was 5 from 43.
That is far too significant to ignore so that leads us to the following micro method.
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