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).

osulldj,

Thanks for posting that - saved me running the query on my database. Those results are pretty much exactly what I expected to see - a higher strike rate in the less competitive early races than the later more competitive (generally speaking) races but pretty much the same loss throughout the day. The one interesting point is the very low loss on race 8. I read the other day that favourites in the last race show a better profit (the theory being that the mug punters are looking for a big winner to win back their losses for the day so tend to back the outsiders more in the last race so the favourite starts at longer odds than it should). At the time I dismissed it but maybe there is some truth to it after all!

__________________
"Computers can do that????" - Homer Simpson

Hi Becareful,

I have read similar theories and the initial stats on Sat Metro favourites could bear an element of truth to that. If we look at races 8 and above the loss results are much better. I would ignore race 10 as there was only 11 instances in nearly 4 years.

For the interest of all I will do some further work and start another thread on that specific topic when done. (I can't stand it when multiple topics get written about under one thread).

[ This Message was edited by: osulldj on 2003-05-21 13:03 ]