Betting Strategy / Wayne Bailey / 01 July 2008 / 4 Comments

Our man has rooted through the stats to tell you when to get involved in Flat handicaps

If there's one thing I've learned since I started writing about horseracing - it's that a sense of humility is absolutely essential. Taking a knock to your ego is par for the course. As soon as you think you have this game sorted, you can be sure that a bad spell is right around the corner and you won't remain on a pedestal for long.

Some time back, I managed to turn a £1,000 starting bank into more than £30,000 purely from National Hunt handicaps, arguably the most difficult race type to tackle. I posted my selections daily on a site called win2win, run by professional gambler, Keith Driscoll.

The idea was simple; I was attempting to spot horses that, in my opinion, were treated too leniently in the weights and had a better chance of winning than the handicapper seemed to think. When the bank hit 30 grand, I was starting to feel invincible! Then the Flat season kicked in...

I soon realised, that analysing flat handicaps is a hell of a lot different than jumps, and lost around 14 grand in the process. To say that I was kicked off my pedestal would be an understatement; it was more akin to being kicked of a ladder three storey up - and left hanging from the drainpipe!

Still, a profit of 15 grand overall is not to be sniffed at, but you can imagine my new found hate of Flat handicaps. I must admit, I've licked my wounds since, and tried my best to avoid that kind of race. Until that is, I was looking at some figures for trainers who run just one horse at a meeting.

There's a lot of hype, and quite frankly, a lot of bull spun about when a trainer has a single horse entered at a meeting. Punters often latch on, thinking it's a sure sign of a good thing.

"Why would he go to the bother of sending just one horse to the meeting if it's not out to win" - or so the mantra goes.

I was thinking of the significance or otherwise of such situations, and then it hit me - surely the best type of race to raid with a single horse at a meeting would be a handicap race? They provide value for the punter, and after all, the weight carried is simply someone's opinion and open to error. And if so, surely some trainers are better than others at finding the right handicap races?

I was stuck in traffic when the thought entered my head, but I always keep a notebook in my top pocket as ideas can strike at any time. Quickly, I scribbled down:

• Trainer has only one horse at the track that day
• Race is a Flat handicap

When I got home, I had a look at the above for Flat turf and all-weather, and indeed, certain trainers did stand out. There were nine trainers that showed a win rate of 20% or more in such races, namely:

• Prescott, Sir Mark
• Callaghan, S A
• Stoute, Sir Michael
• Cunningham, W S
• Kiely, John E
• Dascombe, Tom
• Meade, Noel
• Tallis, Patrick
• Suroor, Saeed Bin

But when I looked at each trainer's record individually, some were consistent, some weren't. This of course, just wouldn't do for betting purposes. Therefore, I only wanted to include trainers that kept a steady strike rate year on year, and also showed a profit in four of the five years researched. That left three trainers to follow:

• Prescott, Sir Mark
• Stoute, Sir Michael
• Dascombe, Tom

The results of backing each of those trainer's horses in handicaps (when it is the only horse they have entered at the track that day) are as follows:

With a consistent profit, and a very decent strike rate for handicap racing, the above figures will help me ease back into flat handicaps once again.

If the strategy goes downhill however, can we just forget this article ever existed? Losing half the 30K bank has been torture enough!

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As usual, we welcome your comments and suggestions, so share your thoughts below.

Tags: Noel Meade, Patrick Tallis, Saeed Bin Suroor, Sir Mark Prescott, Sir Michael Stoute, Tom Dascombe