The Bookie Breakdown - Part 3

By Ben Grimstone, Harness Racing Trading Manager  

It’s a bit of a different Bookie Breakdown this week. 

Rather than one meeting, we are going around a couple of tracks, touching on a few feature races and one maiden race that was particularly interesting.

Working our way south, we start in Auckland for the features, drop into Addington for the maiden, then wrap things up in the deep south for their big day in the sun.

Alexandra Park

Anzac Cup

This was a really difficult market to frame up. Personally, I had question marks around all four favourites.

Hillbilly Blues had slight queries from his last couple of runs, Meant To Be was the form horse but was having his first stand start, Oscar Bonavena is Oscar with all his quirks and Mr Love was bringing in different form lines. Put simply, this race was over-traded, so we didn't really need to move our prices at all. 

We could have closed the market where we opened and our customer base was as confused as us, with a near perfect spread of money across the field. Higher Power was an OK result for us although there were some customers that found him, firming from $12 into $9.50. Meant To Be and Hillbilly Blues should have closed as equal favourites as they went dollar for dollar, but we are splitting hairs on that one.

Taylor Mile

If you had asked anyone in our team to price the Taylor Mile independently, you would come up with some very different markets.

How you price Swayzee from out wide over a mile was the first question. The second was the race map. Does Sooner The Bettor hand to The Lazarus Effect or stay in front?

Not many had Doo You Want Me holding the front for the first part of the race, which put Sooner The Bettor in a world of pain. Swayzee held over 50% of the money invested in the race, suggesting we should have closed closer to $2 if we were trading purely off the amount of money bet in the race.

The Lazarus Effect got out to $4.40 late which in hindsight was too generous, needing to close at $4 given the weight and quality of money invested. It was still a great result for us - Swayzee winning would have been disastrous.

Addington

Race 2

Maiden races are as hard as it gets when it comes to pricing and trading. It essentially boils down to having our best guess then trading aggressively if and when we see support for runners.

Tee Ball was the most over-backed runner across both Addington and Alexandra Park on Friday night, holding 61% of the money invested in the race. That is a staggering figure for a horse we opened at $6.50. Aside from Tee Ball and the Simon Adlam-trained Admor Ella, every other runner in the race was completely friendless, hence our fluctuations of opening the winner Admor Ella at $9 and closing at $9. The way the race was run, luck was on our side and the punters were very unlucky going down by half a head, deserving to make us pay for our error.

A good result for us but not the outstanding result plenty of people would assume given Tee Ball got beaten. Between you, me and the lamp post, you won't be seeing $6.50 for Tee Ball in a maiden ever again.

Ascot Park

Diamond Creek 2YO Classic

Here’s a good example of a well-priced and traded favourite being a strong result for us bookies. We opened Roger That as a clear favourite at $1.65 and closed $1.75, which is exactly where we wanted to be. With an obvious race map, we were confident in our price and held firm.

Roger That only held 28% of win singles investment. To put that into context, Chiggsy held 48% of turnover, making him our worst result by a mile. The only mistake we made in this race was the opening price around him. He needed to be clear second favourite, and we needed to open Travel Agent and Patriot longer from their wide draws.

3YO Southern Supremacy

A strong race with many chances. We opened this race very early and HRNZ had Tim Williams listed on Get Seaside Lucky. We factored that into our early market which explains why we opened that runner at $4.60, assuming Tim had the choice.
This is a good example of us being dynamic with our trading after opening. 

What may look like fluctuations driven by money could simply be us adjusting our markets due to driver changes and swaps, which is what happened here with Jonny Cox later being named as the driver of Get Seaside Lucky

Mystery Creek was well found in early trading but dried up as he hit the $4 mark. Marble Arch was the best backed runner in the race, holding 30% of total bets, suggesting the $4 on the jump was a touch too kind and he needed to be closing with a three in front of his price.

One to watch: Shiver In The Dark was very well found in the market even at a big price. Look out for him when he freefalls in grade next start.

Wrap

Alexandra Park was a strong meeting for us. The two open class races went our way with Kyvalley Ray our biggest losing result, but other than that we came out in front. Sunday was an even battle between bookie and punter and ended up close to square. A cracking week of harness racing all round.

Hope you enjoyed the racing like we did. Find a couple of winners but not too many.