Summer Jumping – July 2024 Edition
As we hit the warmest months (hopefully !!!!!), most horse race punters in this country are focused on the flat what with Glorious Goodwood, Newmarket July meeting, the York Ebor meeting and so on.
I certainly count myself as someone into that category, but making money from racing is often achieved by going against the crowd and hence in this piece I am doing a dive into summer jump racing in the UK. National Hunt data has been taken from the months of July and August going back to 2015.
For the record, there were no races in those two months in 2020 due to Covid restrictions. All profits and losses have been calculated to Betfair Starting Price less 5% commission.
On average there have been around 300 jump meetings during this two-month window so there are plenty of stats to get our teeth into.
Market Factors
– let me start by examining different position within the betting market. I have used Betfair market rank for this.
Here are the findings:
As you can see favourites have just edged into profit. They have a strong A/E index at 0.98 which is suggesting favourites are close to being value.
If we split the results for favourites into different Race Types we get the following results:
Races over the bigger obstacles have offered favourites a nice edge with returns of over 5 pence in the £, coupled with an A/E index above 1.00.
Most of the chase races at this time of the year are handicaps, (781 of the 865), and handicap chase favourites have provided a return of 6p in the £.
Non handicap chase favs have essentially broken even to BSP.
Sticking with these market leaders, Sedgefield is a course where favourites have managed to score over 50% of the time. They have provided 26 winners from 51 (SR 51.0) for a profit of £16.09 (ROI + 31.5%). The A/E index has been excellent standing at 1.27.
Here are all the courses with their specific favourite stats:
Four other courses have seen the market leaders provide backers with a profit – Market Rasen, Southwell, Uttoxeter and Worcester.
Finishing Position Last Time Out
– it is now time to look at the most recent bit of form available in terms of finishing position on their most recent outing.
Here are the figures (N.B. horses 6th or worse only qualify for that group if they finished the course):
Last time out winners have hit a win rate more than one win in every four but have still accrued losses of over 7 pence in the £.
Horses that finished second LTO have got close to breaking even and do look to be a group of runners that would be worth a second glance.
Horses that finished fourth LTO have made a profit although a few large, priced runners have skewed the bottom line a little. The ‘sixth or worse’ group have made a healthy profit, but these figures are properly skewed by ten winners priced 100 BSP or bigger.
It seems that there are three groups of runners to avoid, and they are horses that either fell, unseated, or were pulled up last time out.
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