Irish Derby Meeting Research

Great to be posting again after a summer break.

Ballydoyle dominate non-handicaps at the Irish Derby meeting and it stands to reason the most promising runners will tend to be those arriving via the best meetings. So, in terms of finding selections, the key criteria for each runner is the venue of their last run.

Overwhelmingly, the runners to be interested in last ran in a non-handicap at: Ascot, the Curragh, Epsom or Leopardstown.

The only other filters are to put a line through anything going off 25/1+, or exposed runners with 10+ career starts.

Backing every qualifier blind in non-handicaps since 2003:

127 Bets, 48 wins +95.87 pts level stakes profit (ROI 75.49%)

Since 2005 there have only been 2 losing years, -1.52 pts 2009 and -4.8 pts 2012. Last year produced +10.61 pts, 6 wins from 14. This year is already 1 win from 1 qualifier.

In the real world you probably wouldn’t back blind, as some races with multiple O’Brien qualifiers wouldn’t make sense at the prices. But it does give you top class short list.

Qualifiers ridden by Ryan Moore make a blind profit: 8 wins from 16, +10.99 pts to date.

But by far the most profitable jockey to follow is J A Heffernan. Since 2003, 16 wins from 32, +100.91 pts.

In normal years you could probably just forget the rest and back his mounts, but with Donnacha on the scene, as we saw at Ascot, Aiden’s son is (probably) sitting on those horses right now.

The ones to look at most closely this weekend are qualifiers ridden by those two.

Today’s qualifiers are:

2.50 Fleet Review (Moore) 11/8

4.35 Van Beethoven (Moore) 10/11

5.15 Saxon Warrior (Moore) Evens

You could probably do a lot worse than put those in a Trixie. 2 out of 3 will do slightly more than return stakes in most cases, while landing all three bags a profit of around 18.00 points.

Herbie authors the Key Racing Gold thread on the ENIGMA Forum - check the performance at:
WWW.KEYRACINGNEWS.COM/FORUM-RESULTS

** Feedback: Two wins returned stakes plus a small profit, Saxon Warrior sadly just outstayed to deny the full house - he'll be down in trip after that **

Saxon Warrior - out for redemption in the Irish Derby