In another thread on pre-post favourites, Angel416 said:

"Some very interesting statistics I have only just noticed of late.The favourites in races 1 to 4 inclusive have a much better strike rate than the favs in the second half of the program."....."It would seem logical(to me anyway)that the favs would be far more successful in the earlier races,mainly because of the lower class factor."

Becareful then posted: "Initial thoughts are probably that the average div for favourite in those early races will be much lower than in the later races - so if you have a 40% SR with $2.00 div you get a 20% LOT, 20%SR with $4.00 div gives the same LOT. As I have said many times in the past Strike Rate by itself means nothing - you must look at it in combination with the dividend you are getting."


Anyway, following are the stats for Sat Metro racing over close to the past 4 yeard.
Race SR% POT%
1 - 33.9% : -14.8%
2 - 33.0% : -17.5%
3 - 31.6% : -11.1%
4 - 29.7% : -12.4%
5 - 30.6% : -9.8%
6 - 27.5% : -15.7%
7 - 24.9% : -18.6%
8 - 28.8% : -2.9%
9 - 34.3% : +31.6%
10 - 9.1% : -54.5%

You can see that there is a slight strike rate bias to the early race but the profit figures show little if any bias.

The higher average strike rate in races 1 and 2 in particular has got to do with only 1 thing....2 year-olds. The 2YO races on each card are nearly always programmed as races 1 and 2. 2YO favourites as a group have a much higher strike rate than any other.

So in reality favourite success has nothing to do with the race number (as logic would tell you).