Andrew Mount looks into a horse’s campaigning in his latest Myth Busters article, pondering whether horses switching from fences to hurdles make bad bets…
When I first started to take my betting seriously in the early 1990s, I remember reading an article by Nick Mordin regarding horses who were reverting to hurdles after running in a chase. The general gist being that they would need a run to get used to negotiating the smaller obstacles again and might lose ground at the hurdles by jumping too big, as they had been conditioned to jump a fence. This was probably the reason why I was quick to dismiss the claims of last season’s Lanzarote Hurdle winner Jay Jay Reilly (33-1 from 66-1) who arrived at Kempton on the back of nine runs over fences. Dan Skelton’s eight-year-old was allowed to compete off his 7lb lower hurdles mark and scored by just over one length from Nemean Lion, with five lengths back to Impose Toi in third. I want to use this article to discover whether such winners are common or whether we should avoid horses with a similar profile.
Since the beginning of 2021, 6748 horses ran in a hurdle race in Britain/Ireland having contested a chase on their latest outing and the following table shows how they fared…
…only 457 of the runners were successful (6.77% strike-rate) and backing them blind to a £1 level stake at SP would have returned a huge loss of £2211.64 (-32.77% on turnover). The expected number of winners (EX Wins in the table above), based on their odds, was 522.19, giving an actual winners over expected winners score (A/E) of 0.88 (anything below 1.0 is poor).
Next, I looked at days since last run (DSLR in the table below), thinking that a long break between those chase and hurdle runs would have given the trainer plenty of time to re-school over the smaller obstacles…
…however, the strike-rate was lowest of all (4.68%) for those who had been absent for 150 days or longer.
What about price? Surely those who started at SP favourite would show a profit?
…this was not the case. The favourites (including joint and co-favourites), i.e. those with an SP rank of 1 in the above table, won 27.96% of their starts (118 winners from 422 bets) but that was well below the expected number of winners (139.09) and backing them all resulted in a loss of £108.73 (-25.76%).
I also looked at what happened to those who were quickly put back over hurdles after their chase debut, but they lost 37.91% on turnover.
We often hear the phrase “horse X has been mixing hurdles and fences to good effect”, so how did last time out winners fare? Not very well is the answer….
…those who ran second, third or fourth over fences last time also returned a big loss.
Age wasn’t a factor either, though certain trainers seemed more adept at pulling off this trick than others. The following table shows the handlers with a WAX (winners against expected) score of 2.0 or bigger in the study period…
…all made a profit at Betfair SP and nine of the ten listed above returned a profit at SP.
However, it seems that the switch from chasing to hurdling remains a universal negative and this could be a good lay system. We’re going to bump into a Jay Jay Reilly occasionally, so the angle might be to concentrate on opposing the qualifiers who were relatively short in the betting – those with a Betfair SP of 9.0 (8-1) or shorter…
….this would have returned a profit of 17.16% on turnover after 2% commission.
Another angle is to oppose those who were in the top five in the betting on their latest outing….
…this produces more bets but increases the profit to 20.13% (after comm).
Summary
- As a general rule, it pays to avoid horses who are running over hurdles after competing over fences on their latest start.
- A handful of trainers do well under these conditions (see table above)
- If attempting to use this as a laying strategy it might be best to concentrate on those near the head of the betting and/or those who were prominent in the betting last time out.
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