Betway Chester Cup – a pace analysis of Chester

THE subject of another article was the effect of the draw in the Chester Cup: surprisingly, despite seemingly incessant media conjecture, it still is not fully discounted from a horse’s price. An ante-post market is formed before the draw is made, and the evidence strongly suggests there is an insufficient reaction.

What about another meme of racing at Chester – early pace? It is intuitive that courses with relatively tight bends favour front-running horses who can gain an edge by nipping round them. And data like that in Table 1 only seems to strengthen the belief that backing front runners is an important approach for punters.

But a more strategic approach than simply backing all front runners is required. To establish it, let’s start with the record of all horses who get to the front on British racecourses in races since 1997:

Table 1: results for horses leading or disputing before halfway on British racecourses 1997-2014

It is worth studying Table 1 closely. ‘FS’ is field-size; ‘W’ is winners; ‘R’ is Runners; ‘SR’ is strike-rate; ‘IV’ is the most important statistic, impact value, which is strike-rate considering field-size (Chester’s IV of 1.53 means that horses in front early there win 53% more often than random chance)

Chester ranks sixth of 36 courses listed in Table 1; the horse who earns the early lead indeed has a sizeable advantage.  Remember, however, that the identity of the leader is not known before the race. And, Chester being a course where the pace advantage is well known, horses with early pace are more numerous at the track than on all racecourses in general.

So, what happens if you consider the performance, by track, of all horses who led in their most recent start? Well, the situation is captured by the data in Table 2:

Table 2: results on British racecourses 1997-2014 for horses who led on latest start

It’s a contrasting result. Chester doesn’t look so attractive a place for front-runners when you don’t know which horse is going to lead! And, unless you are betting-in-running, that is the reality of making a wager.

Horses who led in their most starts win more often than random chance (at most tracks the IV > 1.0) because early speed is correlated with racing merit. But horses who led last time don’t do particularly well at Chester compared with similar types on other tracks, because there are more front runners attracted there than on most tracks and they make life tougher for each other as a result.

In fact, once you start to drill down into the data, it becomes clear that the physical dimensions of some tracks which lead them to inherently favour front runners are soon eroded by the pace make-up of the race.

Figure 3: The relationship between number of front runners per race and their performance

The distinct, downward slope of the trend line on Figure 3 demonstrates that, in general, the more front runners who are attracted to a given course, the worse those runners perform.

In summary, knowing and understanding that Chester favours the horse who has taken the early lead (Table 1) isn’t much use because, before the race it is hard to know which horse will lead and those horses who have led in previous races don’t perform all that well (Table 2) because of the number of front runners per race (Figure 3).

In fact, horses who have previously led do often better on stiff tracks like Carlisle than at Chester because fewer front-runners per race are attracted there.

At all distances and on all courses, the effect of the layout and shape of the track is far less important that the make-up of the field in terms of horses likely to take the lead. Don’t get bogged down with betting front runners at Chester – unless you are confident they can take an uncontested lead with few similar types in the field.

Read James Willoughby’s analysis of the Betway Chester Cup here

For further analysis from James click here