Betting on Nurseries: Not child's play but a few simple truths seem to hold

Betting Strategy / Simon Rowlands / 09 July 2008 / Leave a Comment

The nursery season is now underway. Simon Rowlands has a few pointers for (hopefully) successful betting...

July sees the start of nurseries, handicaps for two-year-olds that have won or run a minimum of three times. The first one in Britain this year was at Hamilton on July 1st, and they come thick and fast from the middle of this month. The Irish nursery season starts on Sunday at the Curragh.

During my stint as two-year-old handicapper at Timeform I did very nicely thank you rating nurseries and betting on them, and I also wrote a few articles explaining some of the issues involved in dealing with such races early in the season. It was with no small interest that I returned to the subject recently after a few years "away", to see to what degree the old principles still hold true.

Early-season nurseries are the focus of one of the more enduring, and credible, of racing systems. "Back top weights in the first few weeks of the nursery season" is simplistic, even by the standards of such things, but is backed by a certain logic.

One of the underlying principles of handicapping is that it should be recognised that horses are ridden to win races (hopefully) rather than to achieve the highest possible rating. Sometimes these two goals coincide, often they do not.

In particular, they do not usually coincide when dealing with horses of varying abilities running at level, or near level, weights. This is exactly what happens with most two-year-olds before they go into nurseries.

A maiden race may well contain horses capable of ratings anywhere between 40 and 100, and yet, due to the nature of these things, the 100 horse will seldom beat the 40 horse by as far as the differential in their abilities might suggest. The same occurs with smaller differentials, just to smaller degrees.

A 100-rated horse running against 70-rated rivals off level weights - a familiar enough scenario in juvenile maidens - may well appear to be, say, an 85-rated horse on the face of it by winning by "just" four lengths. If running against those same rivals under a penalty it may appear to be, say, just a 90-rated horse. And so on. It is usually only when asked to concede significant weight to those inferior rivals that the horse's true ability surfaces.

This phenomenon (which has been referred to as the Concertina Effect in handicapping circles) applies throughout racing but is nowhere more obvious than with early nurseries, in which the better horses tend to be under-rated.

It was very much a factor some years ago and still seems to be a factor now, despite some tinkering with official handicapping procedures. In 2007, horses carrying 9-0 or more in British nurseries in July beat 63.0% of their rivals (when 50% would be the norm).

Having more weight does not make a horse run faster (despite what some people, bizarrely, have suggested) but is usually a reflection of superior ability. Sometimes, however, highly weighted horses are just badly treated horses. It is difficult to weed these individuals out, other than on an ad-hoc basis, but horses carrying 9-0 or more that had won already performed even better in Britain in 2007, beating 64.2% of their rivals. Interestingly, they also produced eight winners from 37 bets and a return on investment at SP (Betfair SP would have been much better, of course) of +17.0%.

I am not about to recommend that anyone backs such horses blindly - judge each case on its merits should be a golden rule of analysis and betting - but it is worth bearing in mind over the next few weeks that there are likely to be some notably well-handicapped youngsters around, and that they are more likely to have won already and to figure higher up the weights than otherwise.

Missile Dodger is the only such "qualifier" in the nursery at Lingfield on Wednesday (3:55), incidentally.

* * *

Mount Nelson was a pleasing result on Saturday, and this week's Newmarket July meeting gives a good opportunity to play up the winnings. I'll have to see what price he is - the market on Betfair may well be up by the time you read this - but I do fancy laying Papal Bull in the Princess of Wales's Stakes on Thursday.

Every dog has its day - and Papal Bull had not one but two of them last year, including in this race - but the Sir Michael Stoute-trained horse seems to be becoming an increasingly tricky ride, consenting to run on (after a fashion) much too late in the Coronation Cup at Epsom on his only run this year.

It would take a brave person to back him in the circumstances. Hopefully there are enough such people out there to make him a short price!