Trial Races

[pawras]

People talk about trial races for major races, including my old man, but it’s not something I look at ‘yet’.

I’m always open to assimilating further thinking into my own analysis but I’m not the sort to take things at someone’s word, I like to have a good look at it and make my own judgement on how much water something holds.

I was reading an article a while ago re trial races for the Cheltenham festival and the writer quoted quite a few races so I thought this is a good opportunity to do a bit of prototyping and testing.

So I picked one of the races (JNwine.com Champion Chase) flagged as trial race for the Cheltenham Gold Cup and set out to do a bit of analysis.

Below is my very initial dabble.

I’ll work my way through all the races flagged as trial races for the Gold Cup and see what conclusions I come re how relevant they are. I imagine it will be end up being another column in my previous winner stats report e.g. have they previously ran in trial race etc.

But what I’d really like to do and I think would be potentially very interesting is to cross reference as many significant races as possible against each other to build my own view on what races are relevant etc. Building the report is fairly basic stuff but the arsehole time consuming bit is reliably identifying programmatically all previous instances in my db of a race being run given that names can change slightly and even when they run.

I have a list of about 600 races in UK/IRE that are considered 'significant' and having done it for about 20 or so I have an idea of how long it will take to build the base data for the whole list i.e. a long time considering I’m not full time on this.

What comes out of the Gold Cup analysis will determine whether I’m willing to go the whole hog…..

 

[archie]

Thanks for sharing.
It's an interesting and reasonable approach but the key thing is selecting the races that are trials rather than just looking at G1s through the season. Personally, I wouldn't include the Down Royal race because it's run too early in the season to have much relevance in March. I wouldn't even bother with the Betfair Chase and I'd start my trawl with the Christmas races (KG & Savills) and move on to the Irish Gold Cup, Cotswold and Denman.

 

[simmo]

I could save you a bit of time as I've done some analysis on this myself in the past - The King George is the important trial - the rest have their winners in turn - leaving one with the conclusion that it's the horse that matters, not the trial - and that the best tend to run in the KG (but not exclusively).

 

[pawras]

I've done a few more races with the Gold Cup, such as the Charlie Hall, Denman Chase , King George VI i.e. gradually working my way through the list of ones I have that are supposedly trial races for the Gold Cup, then I'll compare and contrast at the end. Plus as some runners can be deemed to have run well even if they didn't strictly place I'm looking at adding an extra column to flag if they finished in the first quartile.

I'll post results later when I'm back at the relevant machine but the Charlie Hall seems to be fk all relevance, The Denman Chase to a degree but more so in the past, and the King George the best so far.

As I mentioned this is a prototype before setting about cross referencing 100s against each to see if I can find some paths not widely know.

 

[Warbler]

Personally, I wouldn't include the Down Royal race because it's run too early in the season to have much relevance in March.

Proximity to the target can certainly be a factor in from and fitness, but races run in October can also involve something closer to the good to firm ground that Cheltenham is often run on too (not what Claisse declares).

A couple of years ago now Cole Hayden won that Weatherby stayers hurdle in impressive fashion in a very fast time (the product of good to firm ground - and a questionable race distance). He went a bit AWOL during the winter on heavier stuff, but met the same conditions again for the first time since Wetherby at the festival and duly reward the insight at 16/1

Don't overlook the value of spotting a horse with a ground preference in the earlier season (especially handicappers) as they can conceivably get lowered during the winter when not running their optimal conditions

 

[archie]

Certainly a point for handicappers but so few of the G1 chasers are properly ready to go in October and early November that I just wouldn't be looking at those early races for champions. If anything, in Ireland races at shorter distances like the Clonmel Oil and Durkan are preferred introductions but I don't think that there are any/many suitable 3m chases between mid-November and Christmas.

 

[pawras]

I'm not really expecting one race to be THE trial race but more like a collection where by say 90% of the winners of a target race previously ran in, placed or won one or more of those trial races. Then use that in conjunction with other stuff to come to a decision.