Horse Racing Breeding and Pedigree Guide - The Top Five

This blog has started by looking at the top five sires of jumpers for the 2015-16 season. 

All horses have a sire and a dam and get 50% of their DNA from each, the reason for the focus on sires is that a stallion will have many more offspring than a mare, meaning that we have a lot more information to go on about any horse's sire their dam.

Knowing about breeding can help us daily in our horse racing form study. 

For example, Kings Theatre won the Racing Post Trophy at Doncaster and the King George VI And Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes at Royal Ascot and was second in the Epsom Derby behind Erhaab. 

He is one of two of last season's top five sires who were themselves by Sadlers Wells, the other being Kayf Tara who during his racing career won the Irish St Ledger twice.

Presenting is probably best known as the sire of Denman, one of the best steeplechasers of the last twenty years. 

Flemensfirth's racing career included two wins of the Prix Dollar at Longchamp and a win in a big race in Italy.

Beneficial is a son of Top Ville out of a Mare by Green Dancer, himself by the most famous sire of recent times, Nijinsky.

In order to try and identify under which circumstances the offspring of the different sires perform the best, this blog will take I'll the races from the 2015-16 National Hunt season and look at their strike rate and also the LSP that would have been made by blanket backing the horses under certain conditions. 

Not that blanket backing the offspring of any sire is going to be the recommendation, but a successful punter needs horses that are likely to win, but which are also priced attractively, LSP is a good measure of this.

It is very rare to find a type of race where a punter could make a long term profit from just blanket backing a certain sire's offspring. Nearly always we will be looking at level stakes losses when we look at all the runners over a certain trip or on a certain type of ground. 

Usually, these losses will be quite substantial; where we find a type of race that seems to suit the offspring of a certain stallion, where the hit rate is fairly high and the level stakes loss is relatively low with blanket backing, then if we can narrow down the selections, then we should be able to find a few profitable bets.

One of the most obvious distinctions between types of National Hunt races is whether the horses jump over hurdles or fences. When we look at the data for last season we see that the star over fences seems to be Kayf Tara. His offspring had a strike rate of 17.9% and blanket backing his offspring would have resulted in a loss of 19.3 points. Presenting also seems to have a preference for fences whereas Kings Theatre's offspring have performed best in hurdle races. 

There seems on the evidence of last season to be no preference either way for the offspring of Flemensfirth whose offspring have a roughly 14.5% hit rate over both type of obstacles.

Because of the relatively low number of races run last year on good to firm and heavy ground it is difficult to draw too many conclusions about the sires performance on those ground types. The best performer on good ground was King's Theatre who had nearly a 16% strike rate in over 230 races run on good ground. Flemensfirth was the sire whose offspring did best on good to soft ground with a hit rate of 15.9% and he, Kayf Tara and King's Theatre were all impressive on soft ground all having strike rates in excess of 15%.

In terms of distance, races have been grouped into six categories and in the shortest races (those below 2 miles 2 furlongs it is Kings Theatre and Presenting who would seem to have done the best, the latter having actually been profitable to blanket back last season. 

Whilst poor in the very shortest races, Flemensfirth was much better in races from 2 miles 2 furlongs up to 2 miles four and he was the best performer in the next category too. 

Although Kings Theatre's offspring seem to be the best at the very shortest trips, they also seem to be good at trips just below three miles as well and his offspring were only beaten by those of Beneficial over these trips, who had an 18.1% strike rate and whose offspring would have been profitable to blanket back over these trips. 

The undisputed king of races over three miles last season was Kayf Tara whose offspring had a 17.3% hit rate over races between 3 miles and 3 miles 2 furlongs, and who had a 26.5% hit rate in races over further than 3 miles and 2 furlongs. 

This last statistic should be taken with a small pinch of salt because his offspring only ran in 49 races over this distance.

When we take these three tables into a count we can describe the perfect race for the offspring of each of the top five sires:

• Kings Theatre - Hurdles races on good ground over trips up to 2m2f
  Presenting - Chases over trips up to 2m2f
  Kayf Tara - Chases on soft ground over trips above 3m
  Flemensfirth - Races on Good to Soft or Soft ground over trips between 2m2f and 2m6f
  Beneficial - Races Between 2m6f and 3m

When we look at potential bets on horse races there are many angles from which we approach the question. 

Breeding and Pedigree is an important one but any strategy based purely on this one angle is almost certain to fail. 

There are many good blogs on OLBG previewing individual races and also general betting advice at the betting school.

Micko70 for example approaches the big races by looking at trends for which types of horses have won the same race in the past. Scratville approaches the sport from the point of view of in-form trainers. 

Those who want an overview of the trends in racing and the way that they might apply to the cards over the coming days could do worse that read Robmull's very popular blog, Racing Trends.