Most valuable Flat races today

As the Flat season is yet to get into full swing, the racing fare is still jumps dominated.  The Irish National followed by the Aintree meeting next week will keep it that way for a couple of Saturdays to come.   However, we’re mainly concerned with Flat racing analysis here at the blog (though there will be an exception for the National next Saturday), and we can use Smartform (which carries full data for both codes in UK and Ireland) to tell us what the breakdown is.

Prize money is usually a good indicator of where the quality racing lies, so let’s use the Smartform daily updates to rank all races by prize money under both codes today, with the following query:

>select penalty_value,  race_title, scheduled_time, course from daily_races where meeting_date=CURDATE() order by penalty_value DESC;

The ‘order by penalty_value DESC’ part of the query simply means ranking the query results from highest prize to lowest.  If you’re using MySQL via one of the many MySQL interfaces (such as Sequel Pro for the Mac), you can manipulate your query results by point and click to re-order and rank for small queries such as this.

Anyway, here’s the result of listing all races by prize money on offer for today using the query above:

43 rows in set (0.09 sec)

What does this tell us?  Well, 3 jumps races are still the most valuable as we thought.  Looking at the race titles, you also can’t help but notice that Betfair and BetFred are pumping a lot of cash into sponsorship at the moment (!) and Betfred have sponsored the two most valuable Flat races at different courses.

We can easily alter the original query to see Flat racing only (as opposed to all racing) as follows:

>select penalty_value,  race_title, scheduled_time, course from daily_races where meeting_date=CURDATE() and race_type = “Flat” order by penalty_value DESC;

And if we want to exclude Irish racing, add a further qualifier as follows:

>select penalty_value,  race_title, scheduled_time, course from daily_races where meeting_date=CURDATE() and race_type = “Flat” and country != “IRE” order by penalty_value DESC;

This will leave us with racing at Musselburgh and Kempton, only, and the most valuable race at each course at the top of the query.  So, if betting on quality Flat races is part of the betting plan, then the 3.50 Royal Mile Handicap at Musselburgh (worth over 30k in prize money) and the Listed race for fillies at Kempton (the 2.40, worth c. 20k) are the races to focus on.

Of those, the non-handicap looks of interest.  No detailed race analysis today, but Night Lily catches the eye at a double figure price, having finished a close second in this last year.

Tags: Smartform

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2012 at 8:25 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.