WINNING EDGE PODCAST

In one of his latest interviews with Nadia Horne on RSN Winners, Dean the Trial Spy discusses some statistics regarding backing horses off a 7 day backup.

Read the Interview transcription here:

Nadia Horne: Dean the Trial Spy is with us. How are you, Dean?

Dean Evans: I’m great, Nadia. How are you going?

Nadia Horne: Extremely well. Look, today we are going to talk about stats around horses who are on the seven day backup and it can be something, mentally, that we walk away from and we give it a bit of a negative perception. It just seems to have that sometimes.

Dean Evans:Yeah. That’s right. That’s what the market seems to do. You know, two weeks between runs has sort of been the standard approach for Australian trainers for many years and there’s three times as many horses that race off a 14 day break compared to any other breaks.  But, I wanted to sort of focus on horses backing up exactly 7 days later and, you know, the quick back up can actually signal the trainers confidence that the horse is really going well and, you know, it can often be the peak run of their campaign. You know, when we looked at some stats for the horses that were running two week between runs, they actually lost 10% on turnover, which is marginally worse than the 8% loss recorded by all runners that were under 10 to 1. So, if anything the market’s actually over betting horses that have the two week break, even though that’s what we sort of think is the ideal.

Nadia Horne: Okay, so the way that you look at it, in comparison then to that two week back up, is the market overstates that importance and sometimes it’s better to find value in the 7 days.

Dean Evans: Yeah, that’s right. You know, of the 7 day backup with runners under 10 to1, there were 6400 runners which is, you know, a big sample size and they were only a 4% loss on turnover, so that’s almost a double better performance than the all runners record of sort of an 8% loss, and a 10% loss on turnover of runners backing up from two weeks, so there’s definitely an edge to start with, simply looking at runners off a 7 day back up.

Nadia Horne: What about number of runs since a spell?

Dean Evans: Yeah, it’s quite interesting. Horses that have only had one or two runs from a spell are really unprofitable, you know, sort of 17% and 10% loss on turnover. If they’ve had three runs from a spell, that’s sort of around 4% loss on turnover which is about the mark of all runners. But interesting, once you sort of get to four runs from a spell and further, you start getting sort of between breakeven and making a profit.  You know, runners who are sort of eight or nine runs from a spell are between 2 to 5% profit on turnover just on that alone. So, that’s quite significant, you know, and it sort of shows that backing horses off a 7 day backup, you really want them to be fit and well and have had a few runs, preferably at least four, to cope with that quick backup.

Nadia Horne: The age and gender of a horse, is this much of a variable?

Dean Evans: It is! It’s a really big one. Colts and fillies just don’t seem to back up. With the two or three year olds, colts have a 30% loss on turnover and fillies have an 18% loss on turnover, backing up after 7 days. Mares also an 8% loss on turnover. So, it’s the geldings and the entires that are about break even. You’ll be 2:07 backing even gelding or entire blindly that’s on a 7 day backup. So, it shows you sort of want those tough and resilient sort of geldings and entires if you’re looking for horses off a 7 day back up and you can lay the younger horses trying to do it.

Nadia Horne:  The finishing position last start, now this is an important one, because there is a theory out there with a lot of racing people, that horses that perform well, they can then take that figure onto the quick back up. But horses who perform poorly, it’s a lot harder for them to recover on the quicker back up.

Dean Evans: Yeah, it’s quite interesting how the stats lay out. Unclear 3:32 that if a horse wins its last start, it’s a 2% loss on turnover which is an improvement again on the overall 7 day back up numbers. So, if a horse wins, you hear the trainers say a lot of the time, when a horse wins they do seem to pull up better and certainly the stats show that. What’s interesting is if a horse sort of runs between second and sixth, it’s actually, you know, the number’s sort of between a 5% and 11% loss on turnover. So, horses that sort of run in the money and then back up, perhaps are being quite over bet in fact by the public and what is interesting is when a horse sort of runs 7th or worse, then it starts getting back into possibilities. 7th and 8th are between breakeven and 1% profitability and when they finish 9th or worse, there’s actually an 11% profit on turn over simply backing horses running 9th or worse off a 7 day back up. So, I guess there’s two theories you can unclear 4:29. Firstly just that, when a horse runs so cool it comes off at really big odds the next time and the market’s just underestimating it and  I guess the theory behind it might just be that, sometimes when they run that poorly, there’s just something wrong and they pull up and they just haven’t really gone around, they haven’t actually had a hard run and so the market sort of factors in the bad run and unclear 4:47 decent price about it but the horse is actually able to back up because it hasn’t really done much in that run previously. 

Nadia Horne: Interesting point there. Just summarizing though, how do you overall rate horses off of a quick 7 day back up?

Dean Evans: No, they’re definitely stronger. You know, as we always say, you don’t want to, we don’t suggest blindly following any small category of horses that might have a history of being underestimated by the market, you know, that approach is too simplistic and long term punting success required a comprehensive approach to form analysis however, the proper figures for horses racing off a 7 day backup suggest, you know, they certainly look for the bonus 5:19 when you’re doing your form and you should pay particular attention to the geldings or entires that either won or ran very, very poorly last start and had an easy run, and are fit a well and have had at least 4 runs from a spell. And, if you do that, it looks like a very, very profitable edge. 

Nadia Horne: Brilliant. Thanks Dean.

Dean Evans:Thanks Nadia.

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