Betting Strategy: Confidence is key for in-form jockeys

Betting Strategy / Wayne Bailey / 11 December 2008 / Leave a Comment

Despite what Jack Houghton claims, jockeys are more complicated than lotto balls so their form cannot be put down to mere numerical sequences and, as winners breed winners, psychological advantage can be everything, says Wayne Bailey.

As discussed here and elsewhere, poor old Sam Thomas hit a poor spell recently, and ended up losing the big ride on Master Minded in the Tingle Creek. His confidence was bound to be low and connections of the horse, it seemed, did not want to risk putting a jockey on board who wasn't quite full of aplomb.

While reading of Thomas' woe, my mind cast back to something I read in Frankie Dettori's autobiography some years back. I don't have the book to hand, but the gist of what he said was that when your confidence is high, the winners come. Winners breed winners and you end up on a roll. You go in to each race full of determination and take it by the horns. Similarly, when confidence is low due to a lack of winners, it stays low for some time and each race seems much more difficult.

It's not only jockeys of course. Most sportspeople would agree that when you are performing well, you gain a psychological advantage over your rival which invariably helps you to win again.

But are winning and losing runs simply something we should come to expect from any long sequence of events? After all, even lotto balls go thorough hot and cold spells! If a lotto ball has come out in every draw for a month, does it have more chance than the other balls of coming out again next week? Of course not! On that reckoning then, the recent win-rate of a jockey should not affect his chances in his next race.

But it's not so straightforward with humans however, and I believe that losing and winning jockey runs are not as simple as basic numerical sequences. Recent form can indeed have an impact on his chance of winning the race. As with all theories, the hard part is trying to make money out of it.

Firstly, we need to define an in-form jockey. A jockey may have had just two rides in a week winning both, (giving him a 100% strike-rate), but such a small sample can hardly be trusted. So I only looked at jockeys who had 25 rides or more in the previous two weeks.

If the jockey won 40% or more of those rides, I think we can safely say that he's in-form.
Since 2003, there's been thousands of occasions where a jockey will have had 25 rides or more in the previous two weeks. The bare stats show his chances of winning his next race are just over 11%.

So do in-form jockeys perform better than 11% on their next ride? The answer is yes, they do. In-form jockeys have a win rate of nearly 29% on their next ride, significantly higher than jockeys who are having an average or poor spell. Of course, there are any number of variables that may be in play here, including the form of the trainer he's riding for, but I think the raw data tells us something - confidence breeds winners.

Of course, an in-form jockey is bound to be highlighted by the press, and prices are often short. But the results of backing in-form jockeys have been quite reasonable, and you can expect to get a decent run for your money at least. All told, since 2003 you would have had 44 winners from 157 bets (28.57%) and shown a profit of £178.70 to £10 stakes, had you followed jockeys matching the above criteria. A jockey's two-week form by the way, can be found on the Sporting Life website. I'm interested in getting readers' thoughts on this, so feel free to make a post below.

I'm not suggesting that this be used as some sort of system, but perhaps recent jockey form should form at least a part of your betting armoury. Interestingly, I've been doing some early work on the same theme using trainer data - but the results are not as positive suggesting it's a more of a numbers game there.

We can never truly quantify how human emotions affect races, but perhaps this goes some way to proving that jockey confidence is, in fact, a significant variable?

Let's hope that his win on Noland gives Sam Thomas back some of his.

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Post script: I see that Tony McCoy has hit a 40% strike-rate in the past two weeks - watch this space!