Making The Best Out Of Free Resources

In this new series of articles I will be trying to highlight some of the excellent information and research resources that are available via the internet……and the good news for all of us is they are free.

To try and keep one step ahead of the bookmakers and exchanges it is necessary to investigate new angles and strategies, and the main way I achieve this is by using these free resources to test out theories.

In Part 1 I will be taking a closer look at the fairly well known “gambling” stable of Stuart Williams, who is based at the headquarters of Flat Racing at Newmarket.

He was involved with landing a lot of the big gambles that Patrick Veitch writes about in his really enjoyable book “Enemy Number One“, which was published earlier this year.  In the book Veitch puts forward a “tongue in cheek” laying method(page 243) which is basically to take on all of Stuart Williams runners, highlighting the fact that a healthy profit would have been achieved over the last couple of years on this basis.

He reasons that the market and press have managed to convince themselves that every horse the stable runs is a potential gamble, well lets take a closer look. 

By using the free access area of the www.racingpost.com we can pull up the trainers record by simply typing his name in the search function at the top right hand side of the home page.

The pop-up will initially show the last 5 years performance, but by selecting 2009 from the drop down you can see the results from the current year. These show that he had a combined total of 277 runners on the AW and Turf, of these 37 won giving a strike rate of 13%, and a level stake loss of £83.12 to a £1 stake at industry SP.

Even when we allow for the likely higher exchanges lay prices it is fair to say that a reasonable profit would have been made from this simple lay approach. However as a keen backer of horses I decided to delve deeper to see if a different approach could be found. If you look at the breakdown by the age of horse you will immediately see that  he only had 1 winner from 65 Two year olds, and most of the losses were from these runners.

When you drill further using the “Statistics” drop down(to the right of last 14 days) and select GB Flat, 2009 and race type, you will see that of the 37 winners 29 came from “Handicap” races, which gave a slight loss of £6.23 to level stakes(SP).

A further search by “jockey” will show that only 6 jockeys rode more than two winners for the yard, but there is a “stand out” stat…..Saleem Golan has produced his two wins from 73 rides!!!!!

What Stuart Williams is really adept at is finding an up and coming apprentice jockey who is allowed to claim a weight allowance, this season it was William Carson.

By combining all these pieces of information I concluded that instead of laying Stuarts runners we should actually back the ones running in handicaps when not ridden by Saleem Golam. This approach would produce a list of runners that we could then apply further checks such as form and race conditions, and also if they held steady in the market during the run upto racetime.(Most of the gambles landed were punted in the live market 10-15 minutes before the race)

I tested these theories out using another really useful site http://www.adrianmassey.com/tr/index.php and it showed 125 runners of which 27 actually won at a strike rate of just under 22%. Using the sites estimated betfair prices these would have produced a profit of 61 points and roughly a 50% return on investment.

Now I am not suggesting  that we all start piling into Stuart Williams handicap race runners but it certainly highlights how a little research can give some great insights into a trainers approach, and can point us in the right direction to find some potentially profitable angles.