Betfair Official Blog

Irish Racing Betting: Wayne Bailey's 'favourite' Irish tracks

Wayne Bailey's analysis of how successful the favourites are at UK tracks has been nagging away at him, so he decided to repeat the process on the other side of the Irish Sea.

Some time late last year, I published an article on the fate of the favourite in the UK, and noted how the 'jolly' does consistently well at some tracks regularly churning a profit, while at others, the favourite has a poor win rate, and loses plenty of money to boot!

I was reminded of this article as I passed Naas racecourse recently en-route to Punchestown to help out at the Betfair stand (a big thanks to all those who came over and said hello by the way!).

Naas has earned the nickname 'The Punters' Graveyard', and there's a perception that horses find the track a difficult one to navigate - therefore shock results are more likely and plenty of favourites get turned over in the process. The fact that there is a real graveyard situated across the road from the track adds colour to the story, but probably compounds the myth to a degree!

There were certainly some very interesting findings in the UK study that I carried out, so when passing Naas, I wondered if it really was a punters' graveyard, and if so, were there any tracks that proved to be a punters paradise?

Armed with an idea, I got to work analysing the fate of the favourite in Ireland (flat racing only) from 2003 to the present. The results were quite surprising, not least at Naas! Here is the full breakdown of how the favourite performs in Ireland by track. The format is:

Firstly, Naas is not the punters' graveyard that everyone seems to think it is. Now that we know this fact, we can exploit the myth. Secondly, as pointed out by a racing friend of mine when discussing the results, our two biggest and best tracks in Ireland (the Curragh and Leopardstown) show heavy losses for the backer. My theory behind this is as follows...
Big meetings at the big tracks attract a lot of press attention and tips. Therefore, there is increased betting activity leading to the favourite being 'overbet', and the prices comes in as the layers get plenty of willing backers to match with. Of course, my theory could be wrong, but that doesn't matter one bit, as the raw facts are here to see in black and white.

Another interesting finding is that Ireland's first all-weather track (Dundalk), which only opened last year, is down near the bottom for winning favourites. It's obvious that punters haven't quite figured out this new track as yet. There are nine tracks that have a strike-rate of under 30%, so beware of following the money there for obvious reasons.

Taking it on another step, I isolated the profitable tracks to analyse the results further. I wanted to find out which tracks showed profit in four out of six years. The tracks that did were:

* Tipperary: Only showed a loss in 2003
* Naas: Only showed a loss in 2004 and 2005
* Navan: Only showed a loss in 2003 and 2004
* Sligo: Only showed a loss in 2003 and 2004