Specialising over a specific Course & Distance Revisited

Back in the January issue I looked at a specific course and distance to see what patterns or angles I could find. The C&D I chose then was Wolverhampton as it had (and still has) a good number of races each year. I am a big fan of specialising when it comes to horse racing and focusing on a specific C & D is the ultimate in specialisation.

I feel now it is a good time to revisit this idea with the all-weather season starting to click into gear. For this piece the focus is Kempton Park over 6 furlongs.

I am going to add the same two filters that I did previously which is sticking to handicaps only and ignoring 2yo races. The reason for this is to try and avoid too many shock results. I decided to include races from the start of 2019 up to 23^rd September 2025 which equated to 339 races – certainly a good enough sample size.

All profits and losses have been calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP) with 2% commission deducted from any winning selections. To make it easier to pick out profits and losses, any profits will be coloured in green, losses in red.

Betting Prices / Betting Market

My first port of call was look at the spread of prices in terms of the winners. The Starting Price bands are based on Industry SP not BSP.

Shorter priced runners (9/4 or shorter) have had a poor time of it in terms of offering punters very poor value. Losses of 19 pence in the £ are really steep for prices that short. The value seems to have been with horses priced 13/2 to 12/1, with those in the 13/2 to 8/1 band performing well above the norm.

Sticking with the betting market, let me compare the record of the first five of the betting.

Here are the splits:

This shows us arguably a clearer pattern than just focusing on the prices, with those third to fifth in the betting market offering huge value. Decent profits across the board and excellent A/E indices to boot.  On the flip side favourites have struggled which is no surprise given the earlier 9/4 or less results.

Gender of horse

The sex of the horse does tend to make a difference on the sand with male runners generally running more consistently than female runners. That was certainly the case when we looked at Wolves over 7 furlongs. Do we see the same here?

We do see an advantage to males, but it is a modest one. Males have an edge across all metrics, but it is not as significant as it could have been. However, male runners have been much better value than female runners when we compare the stats for horses that were shorter prices.

If we impose a BSP 12.0 or shorter price limit, we see the following splits:

Under these circumstances, males do have a clear edge across the board.

Draw

For the draw I have split it into quartiles / quarters with Quarter 1 being the lowest draws, Quarter 4 being the highest draws.

It is impossible to split the draw evenly unless the number of runners is a multiple of 4 so that is why there will not be an equal number of runners in each of the four quartiles / quarters:

The strike rates clearly show that we have a very strong low draw bias here.

It is a well-known bias, so it is quite surprising that despite a high win rate, the lowest quarter have produced a blind profit to BSP.

Quarter 3 has also been profitable, but these stats include races with any number of runners which potentially can skew the figures slightly.

Hence, let me share the data for races with the biggest fields (11 or 12 runner handicaps). Races with more runners gives us a better view of the actual draw bias:

Here we do not get the Quarter 3 profit outlier as before, and we get more even splits in terms of number of runners across the quartiles. Quarter 1 includes the three lowest draws and therefore I would suggest these are ones to concentrate the most on.

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