Betting Strategy / Wayne Bailey / 07 January 2010 / 3 Comments

How important is previous course and distance form at Prestbury Park ? Wayne Bailey has been looking at the figures...

"If you had backed all the horses matching the criteria rather than laying, you would have shown a profit of over £200 to a £10 level stake.

I'm not quite sure what exactly 'motivational mind reading' is to be honest, but there's a guy named Rex Steven Sikes who claims to have pioneered the 'science'.

I don't know much about the bloke, but I once came across one of his quotes somewhere that stuck in my head and I was reminded of it the other day when doing some research for this article:

"A stop sign is a gift for you to learn that moving in the same direction won't take you any place new."

I was looking for some lay angles for the Cheltenham Festival but I was getting nowhere to be honest; however a quick change of direction produced some interesting results.

My first idea was to check if it was worth opposing horses at the festival that have previous course and distance form - as every year, you read and hear journalists and punters talking about the 'all important' Cheltenham form. It's my opinion that the importance of Cheltenham form is often greatly exaggerated and as such, there should be some way of making some money on the lay side.

I've no doubt that a proven track record at Cheltenham can help, but I'm not so sure that course and distance form is as important as it's made out to be and I'd much rather see the letters CD beside my horse at other courses like Ayr or Cartmel.

If the letters CD on the Cheltenham racecard can help shorten the odds, so too does a win last-time-out. It's acceptable that horses with a win last-time-out are usually shorter prices - but they are almost always over-backed as people get carried away with the animal's latest form. Looking for a lay angle, I decided to research horses matching both criteria hoping to find that their prices are artificially low (and therefore worth laying). So into the data-crunching machine went the following:

* Race is a non-handicap at Cheltenham (March)
* Horse is a course and distance winner

As regular readers will know, I don't like taking on big liabilities when laying and am more comfortable at the shorter end of the market so I clicked the button to only include horses priced [11.0] or less. I also excluded handicaps to keep things simple. The machine crunched the numbers and told me that 68 horses matched the criteria since 2003 with 46 of those losing.

But to my dismay, the horses that did actually win produced a decent profit - and it turns out that if you had backed all the horses matching the criteria rather than laying, you would have shown a profit of over £200 to a £10 level stake. So much for my great lay strategy!

Here's a quick look at the data broken down by year from a backing perspective:

The above results are to traditional SP but my own records show greater backer returns to Betfair prices, making the laying option even less attractive.

Now I don't want to call this a backing 'system' and as you can see, 2004 was a particularly bad year - but my lay strategy is definitely a non-runner judging by the results, and clicking blue instead of pink for the qualifiers would definitely have been the better option in the long-run.

Obviously, it might be time to review my opinions on Cheltenham CD form, especially on certain runners and course form is something I'm going to look into further.

My data was confined to the festival so I decided to re-run the numbers to take in all meetings at the course. I ticked the following boxes to see what came up:

* Race is a non-handicap at Cheltenham
* Horse is a course and distance winner
* Price is 10/1 or less

The overall results since 2003 were as follows:

Again, I'm not saying that this is to be used as some sort of system but it has got me thinking more about course form and how it relates to other factors. Is Cheltenham form more important than I had given credit for? A recent confidence building run can make all the difference too it seems and confidence must be paramount for jockeys and horses to perform in the top class races in March.

I know the variables interact so the data is conflicted in some ways - but I still think it's worth publishing here in its raw form. We must also remember that some races would include two or more qualifiers (Kauto Star and Denman for example) so this would have to be accounted for.

I don't want to over-analyse the data and but I'm certainly interested to see how well or otherwise it works in 2010 as it looks like there will be a fair few qualifiers this time around. Thoughts and comments most welcome!

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Tags: Ayr, Betting Strategies, Betting Strategy, Cartmel, Cheltenham Festival, Course and Distance winners, Wayne Bailey