All-Weather Betting: Exploring the track bias at Wolverhampton

Betting Strategy / Simon Rowlands / 27 January 2009 / Leave a Comment

Simon 'The Curse' Rowlands was conducting an in-depth analysis of the draw at Great Leighs but they won't be running there for a while, so he turned his attention to Wolverhampton instead.

I have been unlucky with the elements over the last few weeks, having meant to attend three sporting events in that time - Sandown races on January 3rd, Fulham v Blackburn in the Premiership on January 10th and a rugby game involving my nephew on January 24th - only to see each of them fall by the wayside due to circumstances beyond my control. I promise not to go anywhere near the Cheltenham Festival this year.

The trip to see my nephew play would have been combined with a visit to the stables of Jeremy Gask in Wiltshire, about which I hoped to write in this week's blog. But that will have to wait for another day.

The yard, which ex-Timeform man Kevin Blake recently joined, is now in fine form after a period in the wilderness and is one to keep a close eye on.

As an illustration of how fortunes have changed, Gask trained a mere two winners from 85 runners in the 13 months to the end of October 2008 but has sent out 11 winners from 52 runners since. Plenty of the losers have run well and/or shaped well, too, and runners from the stable are still generally being underestimated in the market: they have gone in at 11/2, 6/1, 7/1, 8/1 and 9/1, and there was a 33/1 second recently. Gask has several horses entered over the next few days.

The winners have not been flowing quite so freely from the stable of Peter Hiatt - the subject of a blog entry earlier this month - but anyone who kept the faith has been rewarded handsomely in recent days, with successes at 11/1 (Ben Bacchus: Betfair SP [16.0]) and 11/2 (Blue Hills0: Betfair SP [7.86]). There have also been 11 losers on the Flat, but they have included places at big odds from Very Well Red and They All Laughed.

Hiatt remains a trainer to respect while others top up on their tans in the Caribbean - what I previously described as the sun-lounger effect - and I thought his Coral Shores shaped as if her time may be near when making late headway into midfield at Lingfield recently.

I am also beginning to wonder whether I played a part in events that recently saw Great Leighs go into administration, as I did an exhaustive analysis of the effect of the draw at the course a mere two days before racing there was suspended with no clear date for resumption, if resumption there is to be. I am not a superstitious man but am now trying to figure out if I unwittingly did something to spark the global financial crisis...

I could inflict the Great Leighs draw analysis on you now, but I think we are both agreed that it can wait, possibly forever. Instead, I did a slightly less exhaustive analysis of the apparent effect of the draw at Wolverhampton (to which some of the Great Leighs fixtures have been moved) since the end of October, which should be viewed in the context of the comments I made on draw analysis here previously.

The upshot was that there seems to be a bias at the shortest trip (figures reproduced below), as well as against numbers higher than 10 at an extended mile and an extended nine furlongs, but that anything else is negligible. It can be useful to know that there is little or no bias if that knowledge gives you a different perspective on things to much of the rest of the betting public.



As it happens, I too am off to grab myself some Caribbean sun for a few weeks, and Ian Dean will be writing here in my place. Who knows, maybe I will bump into an absentee Flat trainer while I am out there: if so, I'll be sure to pass on any tips on how to train winners, or how to reserve the best sun-lounger, when I am back.