UK Horse Racing's Ratings

Stall Bias

It is no surprise that some stall positions are more important than the others. For example, a horse in the low numbered stall at Beverley in a five furlong sprint will have a massive advantage because the five furlong start is before the bend leading to the straight. Until 2011 this bias used to be for the high numbers but make British racing more accessible to the punter in Prague the low numbered stalls are the favoured ones.

Some courses' biases are more prominent than others and some are very subtle. The afore mentioned five furlong sprint at Beverley is the most well known one. Another strong bias is at Chester where the course is only a mile round and it has been said that anything not drawn in the first four stalls may as well go home.

This is stretching the point a little too far but the fact remains that Chester does have a strong bias and getting in front at the last bend is very, very useful.

The Stall Bias is one of our calculated fields. We have determined the stall bias for each distance on each course and on various ground conditions with various sized fields. With all of these parameters and by having to use data from many years were are able to get a picture of what the stall probabilities look like.

We would like to say that when a course changes its surface, for example when Southwell and Lingfield replaced their all-weather surfaces we restarted our stall analysis for this course so we now are running on new figures for the new surface and we expect that we will have to do the same again for when Ascot comes back after the reconstruction.

+10% means that the horses from that stall have a probability of winning of 1.1 times that suggested by the value price
-10% means that the horses from that stall have a probability of winning of 0.9 times that suggested by the value price

In other words if the stall position alone were the decisive factor then the multipliers (above) would be the sole factor of the race's forecast.

As far as the ratings are concerned; it seems that Lingfield and Wolverhampton are good with the draws and there are often comments on the forum raised by people having good days here based upon the draw. No doubt these fortunate people factor in the draw in the ratings even more than usual.

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