Ok, so I figured what I'd do with my search for an odds on system is to document facts here as I discover them along with my thoughts and why I looked at what I did.

So maybe today's article won't get us to a profitable system and maybe it will…

First off I decided to look at just flat, turf racing because we are now at the start of the flat turf season.

So the first thing I discovered is that 56% of horses that are priced at evens or shorter win in flat turf races.

If you back them all at level stakes you will lose 6.71% of the money you turn over.

On average there are 677 bets per year that start odds on, on the flat turf.

My first thought for further drilling down was to look at different courses, I guess there are a lot of reasons that some tracks might be more profitable for odds on bets and I'll let you speculate about what they may be.

But the facts from the last 11 years results show that there are tracks where betting the odds on favourites was profitable.

Here are the top of the list sorted by ROI…

Down Royal = 18.97%
Ballinrobe = 11.80%
Kempton = 11.08%
Tipperary = 6.95%
Goodwood = 4.91%
Haydock = 3.25%
Chester = 2.55%
Fairyhouse = 1.68%
Sligo = 1.36%
Folkestone = 0.18%
Lingfield = 0.15%

A lot of Irish courses!

Next I looked at Class of race, I thought, wrongly, that higher class races would be more profitable, because the form would be straighter!

The numbers show that class 1 – 4 races are all close to an 8% or 9% loss.

Class 5 lose 4.44% of monies bet, Class 6 races lose just 1.71%.

Next I looked at race distance and frankly the returns are all over the place and I can see no pattern to draw from that.

As far as sex goes, I was surprised to see that females, have a higher strike rate and the losses are slightly less than for the males.

As you would expect there are far fewer odds on shots in Handicaps, but when they do occur they are more profitable than non handicaps.

I'm going to leave jockeys and trainers for tomorrow, so for today I'm going to finish off with days since last run which is a favourite for systems creators.

What the stats show is that if a horse is returning to the track after just 3 days or less and is odds on then its probably worth a bet.

But also that if its been off course for 300 days or more then it's also worth a bet, but neither of these scenarios offer enough bets to make it a worthwhile strategy!

More on this tomorrow.

Today's Selection

Wolverhampton 9.05 Arabian Comet – win bet – 11/8 Sky Bet, Paddy Power