As the flat season gets into its swing we will start to see more and more two year old racing.  At this time of year in particular there is very little form to go on.  In order to predict outcomes, punters have to rely instead on stable whispers, the bloodlines and expense of the horses in question, and the records of their handlers in these type of races as well as their current overall form.  We can add to this some signals from the market once the horses emerge into the paddock at the course for the first time.

However, there is an often ignored and occasionally hard-to-find form element that has great significance in the early part of the season – that is the actual foaling date (ie. birthday) of the horse in question, rather than their “official” birthday – ie. 1st Jan.  As a proportion of age, the month or two differences you find in foaling dates are of course significantly greater early in the career of a two year old, though these will diminish in significance over time.   Identifying foaling dates and ranking them can be a laborious process.   Fortunately, 2 year old foaling dates are simple to identify and rank in Smartform from the earliest to the latest date.  Moreover, we can automate the search of 2 year old races and subsequent ranking of each race by age of contender.

Below are the queries you need – applied to today’s racing.

First, let’s identify all the two year old races in the database for today’s racing:

mysql> select race_id, scheduled_time, course, age_range from daily_races where age_range LIKE “%2%” and meeting_date= CURDATE();

1 row in set (0.10 sec)

Next, let’s use this race_id to retrieve basic details of all horses competing in it and at the same time rank them by age:

mysql> select trainer_name, jockey_name, name, foaling_date, forecast_price from daily_races join daily_runners using (race_id) where race_id=”397147″ order by foaling_date;

5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Easy.  We can also automate this with a simple script for all races on any given day – basically saving the race_ids from the first query, and looping over them with the second query.  A script is available for Smartform members that does just this.

By the way, on the above evidence alone, the late foaling date of the favourite,  Bapak Bangsawan, makes him look quite vulnerable, doesn’t it?