Profiting from the Slow Boats (2)

Last month I tried to summarise why I feel concentrating on flat races of 13f & upwards is such a profitable area to concentrate on.

One of the key questions that is often heard, especially before the form kicks in post Royal Ascot, is “Will It Stay?”

You often hear this because often half the field at this time of year is trying the distance for the first time & we’re looking for clues as to whether it will stay. You will often see decent horses cruise up 3f out only to find little & be beaten by a seemingly inferior horse.

I mentioned looking for small clues such as its 2 yr old career. If its lightly raced it may well have been unsuited to the speed tests that many 2 yr olds are subjected too. Many of the longer 2 yr old races ( 8f +)come later in the year, so those truly stamina laden often only get 1 or 2 chances to run at 2. If your horse raced at a mile or more early in its career I see this as a good sign.

The other key thing you can look at is its breeding.

We don’t have to be bloodstock experts to take a decent guess whether a horse is bred for stamina. Writing this, we have a 2 mile Ripon race running tomorrow where a lightly raced 5 yr old, Shuubat is running at 2 miles for the 1^st time. Will it stay? I would say almost definitely. Unraced at 2 it started at 12f on its 3 yr old debut which immediately screams stamina to me. Raced 4 times at 3 its best speed rating was its only time at 14f & only time on soft – another huge indicator that staying is its game. What about its breeding?

His sire is Monsun, a German sire,  who has a distance rating of 12.1 which is very high for an average winning distance ( 10+ is often an indicator of stamina) I’ll come back to Monsun later but German sires often are bred more for stamina than their GB or US counterparts.

Its dam is by Unfuwain who has a rating of 10.1, so there is stamina on both sides of the family. So without it ever racing at the distance I would be very confident that 2 miles in the soft can only improve it. All you need to work out now is if its good enough!

Mentioning Monsun brings me to the sires that do well in these 13f+ races. Opposite are the top 30 such sires (minimum 25 runs) for the last 10 years races on turf ( all my other reports are 6 yrs but it’s better to get as big a sample as possible for sires

As you can see Monsun comes in at number 2 behind an old favourite of mine Bollin Eric ( if all else fails just back all stayers called Bollin something trained by the Easterbys when they go over a trip!)

What I also want to look at is whether the sire gets similar results at less. If it doesn’t then it helps us as they are often under estimated until stepped up in distance.

Taking Kalanisi as an example as its had over 100 runners in our target range

The following is the comparison by distance ( Long is defined as 12f+ in this)

As we can see, we should take note of any Kalanisi runner upped in distance

Other indicators that this sire is suited to stayers is its strike rate by age

As mentioned before, late maturing types often excel at further

This sire analysis can work the other way as well.

Below is the list of the worst  20 sires for 14f+ over the last 10 years

Red Ransom has had 57 runners running over 14f or more & none have won – if your horse is stepping up in distance & it’s by Red Ransom – you have been warned. Amazingly they weren’t all longshots, 25 of them started at 9/1 or lower!

It’s not a bad sire as its sprint strike rate is 9.8% it’s just one of those that you need to be wary of when going further than 12f

It won’t surprise you that over 2 of the stiffest courses – Carlisle & Pontefract, its won 1 race from 65! – This sire doesn’t breed many tough types.

You can obviously incorporate these tables into fairly robust systems but I mainly use them to gauge whether a horse will be suited to the step up in distance. Once they’ve had a few runs at a variety of distances then the form book will usually tell you whether they are going to stay or whether they’re just slow.