Statman Reborn – Episode 3
As regular readers, dare I call them followers, will be acutely aware, the majority of angles I come up with are based on finding winners – and that may well stem from my pre-exchange upbringing where finding losers was the last thing anyone wanted to do, for obvious reasons!
However, a reader who asked to remain nameless suggested the (very basic) basis for a laying system, and who am I to argue with what people want?
What I was and am wary of is (for example) finding a trainer with a small string whose strike rate is horrendously low - what happens when he or she has a winner at a ludicrous price, how many readers have a betting bank that could handle laying for example 50/1 chance Perfect Sight at Leicester on Tuesday 15th October, with a Betfair Starting Price of 81.36 – not me, that’s for sure, so we need to find a better way ,with perhaps more rules than normal?
Concept:
The top National Hunt trainers are a class apart from all their rivals – we all know that, just look at the Champion trainer in recent years- Willie Mullins last year, but prior to that we have seen Paul Nicholls and Nicky Henderson win the previous 18 between them (14 for Nicholls and four for Henderson to be precise), following on from the retired Martin Pipe, who had won the previous 10 – so there is domination of a kind going on here.
But guess what - not all their horses win, and I suspect many of them are overbet and poor value for that very reason, perhaps understandably – so I am going to have a look and see what would happen if we laid their horses – and whether we can drill down further to find a laying goldmine – wish me luck!
The data:
No messing about here and straight to the detail. We will be looking at the last 10 years, National Hunt only, January 1st, 2014, to October 18th, 2024 (when I started trawling for facts).
All profits are recorded to Betfair SP for laying (NOT backing) and assuming 2% commission paid, with no need to include anything to do with industry SP on this occasion – but what we will do is add in longest winning and losing runs for those (perhaps sensibly) looking to utilise a betting bank.
All races are included unless annotated differently, for both the United Kingdom and Ireland for clarification.
The trainers I will be looking at are as follows (top 10 from last year only as we have some digging to do) – Willie Mullins, Dan Skelton, Paul Nicholls, Nicky Henderson, Gordon Elliott, Venetia Williams, Olly Murphy, Nigel Twiston-Davies, Ben Pauling, and Lucinda Russell.
The presentation: As mentioned every month, I am a huge fan of tables as they put all the information in front of you to do with as you see fit, as and when it suits you, the customer.
Each section will be clearly labelled, starting with an overview before breakdowns and with a summary below each section pointing out what may be the obvious to some- and giving my own views on how I would use the numbers, though after that it is all up to you.
Summary: Ok well this was always seen as a fact-finding mission – and so it proved.
The first thing I noticed was how similar the longest winnings run were with a variance of just three (4 to 7) but more importantly, we effectively have our first “sift” if we want to keep this as something we can easily handle.
I am sure there are profitable ways to utilise Willie Mullins, Paul Nicholls, Nicky Henderson, Gordon Elliott, and Ben Pauling but OUT they go for this month at least as we focus on the remaining five to look to fine tune for better profits!
Summary: Less than one bet a day (on average) and a Return On Investment of close to 7% total, though I do feel a touch guilty in effectively demonising these top trainers by looking for a way to make money from their losers!
A 16% strike rate is also pretty good (meaning an 84% success rate for us if we are laying not backing) but I am sure we can do better – see below.
Summary: Considerably less runners (no surprise there) and with the strike rate dropping a fraction and the Return On Investment going up to 9.3% we have a better angle here but we haven’t finished yet!
Personally (and it’s your money, your choice) I would drop Olly Murphy off this list and save over 2000 bets for the sake of £49.08 which in turn would change the Return On Investment figure to 10.79%.
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