Chester lowly drawn today

We’ve discussed the low draw advantage at Chester a number of times in this blog. Comprehensive analysis of the advantage afforded by a low draw at Chester is also one of the examples covered in the Smartform User Manual.

Despite the number of times the low draw advantage is mentioned, it continues to produce a blind level stakes profit in certain circumstances (in particular sprints over the minimum distance with a decent field size on decent going). Now that the worst of the bad weather is over (and the Chester May meeting is behind us) we can hopefully look forward to decent ground and a return to the rich seam of potential winners that can be discovered by concentrating on those drawn low around the tight Chester circuit.

A useful Smartform query in order to whittle down fields on this basis can be produced as follows:

select course, scheduled_time, distance_yards AS ‘distance’, name, stall_number AS ‘draw’, forecast_price from daily_races join daily_runners using (race_id) where course=”Chester” and meeting_date=CURDATE() and stall_number < 3 order by scheduled_time, stall_number;

16 rows in set (0.10 sec)

Of course, we may take the view that those we wish to look more closely at a wider range of criteria (say the lowest half of the field), or an even narrower set of criteria.  In this regard, one of the keys to using draw advantage effectively is filtering by the number of runners in any race, so let’s discover that data as follows:

select count(name) AS ‘runners’, course, scheduled_time, distance_yards from daily_races join daily_runners using (race_id) where course=”Chester” and meeting_date=CURDATE() group by scheduled_time;

8 rows in set (0.10 sec)

Generally speaking, races with fewer than 10 runners declared are less compelling from a draw advantage perspective.  Notice we’ve also included the distance of each race – again, races over distances beyond a mile are also less interesting (with some exceptions) from a draw perspective.

Thus, the 2.55, 4.0, 4.35, 5.45 and 6 pm races are the most interesting from a draw perspective today, so that may be the richest seam to concentrate on using the first query above.  Let’s hope the bias shows through again, since there are some juicy prices on offer about low drawn runners, as you can see from the forecast prices displayed above.

Tags: Chester, draw advantage

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