As you all know the starting stalls are used in horse racing on the flat but not over obstacles or National Hunt flat races. The drawn position can give you a winning chance or if badly drawn it can prevent you from winning even though you maybe are the best horse in the race. Throughout the UK the courses are not the same design and therefore apart from horse, jockey, going and horses wearing blinkers, visors, cheekpieces, tongue ties we have to decide if the draw is in our favour too! Well who said this sport was easy? Definitely not me.
I am going to give you an example of some of the courses in the UK where the draw is so very important… what you must remember is I am not saying a horse cannot win from an unfavourable draw but in general it doesn’t happen too much.
Lingfield has a turf course where it is usually very favourable to be drawn high as the stats show this is very favourable with races over five furlongs, six furlongs and seven furlongs. The highest drawn horse has a terrific record here and if you don’t have the high draw your chance of winning is vastly reduced.
Thirsk racecourse has on good going or better a very strong bias in favour of a high numbered draw in sprint races. In fact in general it is thought you have little chance if not drawn high in these sprints. On soft ground the results show the bias doesn’t seem to exist.
Beverley seems to have the most famous bias in horse racing because unless you have a low draw you just do not appear to be able to win over five furlongs on any going. The higher your draw the less chance you have.
Bath is a left handed course with a left handed ‘dogleg’ turn which you would assume to be in favour of low drawn horses but nothing is so untrue as the high numbers have a massive advantage here over sprint trips. The going does not affect the bias.
Chester racecourse seems to have a general bias in favour of low numbers in sprint races. The higher your draw the less chance of winning.
Obviously some horses do win from a bad draw but the percentage call is let them do it because overall the draw does significantly affect your opportunity to win.
There is a website you can read about the bias on UK races and that is called drawbias.com. It’s free and is a very useful tool to have in your fight to find winners. Check it out.
My service High Roller Racing would welcome you to join us FREE of charge and only pay us £10 for every winner but we only tip a maximum of one horse per day. Follow the link below and join us now.
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