A horse won last time out. Everyone can see it on the racecard, and plenty of people back it for that reason alone. So we ran the numbers on our own database to find out where that actually means something, and where it means almost nothing.
This is every British and Irish run we hold, 2014 to today: 1,320,851 runs, of which 147,237 were horses who won their previous start. Here is the headline.
| Runners | Runs | Won | Level stakes at SP | On the exchange |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Won last time out | 147,237 | 19.1% | -16.8% | -3.4% |
| Everyone else | 1,173,614 | 9.9% | -26.7% | -3.6% |
So a last-time-out winner wins again nearly twice as often as the rest of the field. And backing them blind still loses you money, because the market has already read the same racecard. At the exchange price the 2 groups finish within a fifth of a point of each other, which is nothing like the gap in the win column.
That is the trap. The fact is real and the edge is not, unless you know which last-time-out winners to be interested in. That is what the rest of this is about: the codes, the tracks, the course moves and what our own ratings say about them. At the bottom, one click builds the best of them as a system in ProStats, so it works for you every day rather than sitting in a blog post.
The full breakdown, the angle that wins more than a third of the time, the tracks where these horses repeat, what happens when the winner is also our Top Rated, and the one-click systems, are below for members.