I believe a horse that has had 2 runs or more in the season who then goes for to Champion Hurdle without another run in the calendar year isn't a negative to the horses chances of winning in recent times. Racing is needed to get horses fit and down to ideal racing weight, a trainer can keep them ticking over from then to March due to modern training being superior to how it used to be.

1 win and 3 seconds is a return within norm for the horses chances in past 10 years. As such I disregard the fact Faugheen may go straight there. What I factor is if a horse was intended to have a prep and misses it as that's an interrupted prep to me and a possible negative.

I am no stats man,as some will know on here,however those that use them-fair enough.
If I had backed Faugheen....which I ain't,but if I had I would have no problem trusting the trainer to have him right on the big day.
To me that's what it's about really.
I'm sure if he really thought he needed a run he would get him one.

If it's proved....somehow,that a prep run is vital and Faugheen failed to win cos of race fitness, then his trainer needs to be seriously looked at as re his ability to do his job.
Are people saying he's not got the knowledge to get a horse race fit on the big day??

I think also it comes down to individual horses.
Some will need a race to get them race fit others will be able to get fit at home.
This is what you pay trainers for. It is their job to recognise if the horse needs a prep or not.
This has always been the plan for Faugheen so I'd imagine the team are confident in getting him to the track fit.

Willie Mullins may be wrong re lack of a prep race for Faugheen, but that's his job.  I am sure that if he thought he needed one, then Faugheen would have a prep.  However, it would appear WPM is quite happy to go straight to the Festival and his judgement has to be trusted as he is the expert regarding his horses not us.

If he gets beat in a clean run race it won't be down to lack of a run IMO.

I'll make sense of all this prep or not nonsense.  The Champion Hurdle is Usually (not always) won by the best horse on the day. There can be mishaps/bad luck but invariably the best horse wins and the trainer has done his job with or without a prep as the case may be.

My advice is focus on the horses and not the trainers.  I know its a forum, but they do know their horses better than us.

The stats don't proove that a prep is needed, who's to say they wouldn't have won without a prep.  Each horse needs individual preparation and some may need a prep and some not.

some of said horses lost their prep

Look to keep it simple. If someone throws up  a stat and uses it as a reason a horse won't win a race at Cheltenham ignore it.

If you want to use stats to prove an argument and don't know the sample size or do a test of significance with a standard error then you don't have a leg to stand on. You are essentially trying to use something you don't fully understand.

If we could infer something significant from looking at horses from the past I'd be the first person to use it and Champion it. I have both a degree in Mathematics and a Masters Degree is Statistics. I worked in Quantitative Finance for 7 years where correlation is a big thing.

I have done the analysis on the RSA and Champion Hurdle horses who go to Cheltenham with no run on calendar year. There is no statistically significant evidence that horses fair worse with the lack of a run in the calendar year.

Further to this, as people assume all opinions are based on some kind of pocket talking. I have not backed Faugheen and have no interest in backing Faugheen.

I'd imagine if this statistic was a factor it would equally apply to the other big races but we find examples of horses winning races like the Gold Cup following a similar prep. If a horse hasn't been over raced in a season and it is a part of the plan to get it to a specific race in top shape then I don't see why they shouldn't take in a prep and pick up some money. The time I'd say definitely have a prep would be if a horse is either buzzy or they simply can't get the horse to the required level at home. Outside of that I'd say the person to best judge is the trainer who should know the specific requirements of the horse.

Enjoyable reading.

Ok for people with no mathematical expertise, this is very simple and you need to know how to calculate the probability from the odds. You divide 1 by the fractional odds plus 1, eg. 1/(5/2 +1) = 0.28, in percentage its 28% winning chance for a 5/2 horse, at least thats what the punters correctly or not backed them at. Odds offer a more accurate view on a horses chances than the winning percentage from total runners in a race. For example in a 10 runners race each one has 10% mathematical winning chance however due to many many other factors punters have 3 of them lower than 10/1 so when doing statistics its more reliable to take the SP chances (2/1 horse would have 33% winning chances) than the mathematical chances(an evens shot would have the same 10% winning chance as an 100/1 shot which is highly misrepresentative)

If you do this for all the horses in the list that I posted on last page with horses from 1990 without a run in current year, you'll need to make an excel file and 5 minutes of entering the data and you'll get all the winning chances in percentages of all horses. Then you'll take the mean of all 57 and you'll obtain exactly: 8.83% theoretical winning chances based on SP odds (or 7.3% with 120% overround)

What does the ~8% tell us? That from the 57 runners we should have had at least 5 winners. Instead there have been only 2 winners. In statistics the more data you rely on the more accurate you are, however a somewhat confident conclusion can be drawn: NOT running in the same year(not having a prep run) means the horses chances decrease by 2.1 times [ 7.3 / (2 / 57 * 100)]. In our case Faugheen currently given evens chance by punters equates with a winning chances of 50% [1/(1+1) * 100]. When we reduce it by 2 his winning chances are decreased to only 25%.

In horse racing however the above calculation is prone to error due to the fact that trainers bias comes into play which means that trainers will almost always prefer to give their horses a prep run because of past knowledge so we need to consider that from those 57 trainers that entered their horses without a prep run, they almost all thought they don't need one(just like Mullins doesn't think Faugheen needs one), however if more trainers would've entered their horses without prep runs then the above chance reduction factor of 2.1 would be even bigger because more horses would be entered without being fully fit which would result in even worse results eg 2 winners not from only 57 but from 100 runners or 3 winners from 150 etc.

Stats are made to be broken but they're not irelevant especially in this situation when there are 5 beaten fav. or joint favs, 0 winners from 10 horses at 5/1 or lower and only 2 winning horses from 57.

Or thinking more logically about the best way of approaching the question...

There have been quite a few placed horses in that list as well but there has been very little account of them. If the argument is that a horse needs a prep run to win a Champion Hurdle, it surely extends to horses filling the places? I think it's fair to say, given the variation in quality of renewals from one year to the next, that the form required to finish second in one year is as good as that required to win in another.

The more ridiculous part of this is the simplicity that some people are failing to take on board: Willie Mullins wins Cheltenham Festival races for fun and probably has the strongest team he has ever assembled this season. I'm sure he knows how to prepare his horses for the big races.

@CVByrne you're disproving statistical evidence by offering selected examples that have no relevance to the initial hypothesis.

@CVByrne I took the calendar year because the races near Chrismas time etc are more of a trial than prep runs.

@tomdeane so statistics don't apply to Mullins right? Care to look up chase performances outside Ireland? Everyone is bound to stats, doesn't matter if he's God, prep runs are statistical relevant to how a horse performs in the CH. You don't get race fitness no matter what modern training methods you use. Mullins wins races at Chelt for fun ? Then tell him to skip all his horses prep runs in Jan and Feb and we'll see how much happy he'll look after the festival...

I'm of the opinion that only so much can be done at home and there's no substitute for race fitness, and a Festival race is the most likely place to exploit a lack of race fitness.

totally agree mate

I'm not surprised Tom has a PhD in Biostatistics as it's that specific part of my Masters degree which tests significance of evidence available which I'm leaning on most when it comes to racing. The fact we are both on exactly the same page here is unsurprising.

I'll also end the debate here. We've articulated our views well as have others. Everyone has their own approach to betting

To be honest im glad I aint got a stastics degree, I might have been tempted to join in!!

Anyway, as I said earlier and others have alluded to,surely its safe to presume his trainer knows the horse and whether he needs a prep run to have him A1 on the day.
If he don't hes not up to the job.

I have a phd in winding folk up or playing devils advocate

I just have a PHD...the women never complain

@CVByrne I would've been much pleased if you both haven't made the basic mistake of treating less than 4% (Binocular, Go Native) a big enough statistical difference to disprove the results.

I also find it odd that you both link these findings with my betting approach as if I mentioned anything related to my bets. I actually think Faugheen is talented enough to break this stat however even if he wins the findings will still remain relevant unless of course over the course of next years more horses with no prep run start winning the CH. Trainers bias will come into play as well because if Faugheen loses you'll never see Mullins send a horse without race fitness into the CH in the future.

I thought I'd stumbled across a maths forum then.  Homer describes it best.

Kent Brockman: Mr. Simpson, how do you respond to the charges that petty vandalism such as graffiti is down eighty percent, while heavy sack beatings are up a shocking nine hundred percent?

Homer Simpson: Aw, you can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that.

Judge each race on it's merits I'd say, based on who will turn up, what the ground is, who is in form etc.  Stats get brought up so much at festival because of the high profile races - you manage to work without them for nearly all other races throughout the year.  ie Would you do all this for the Irish Hennessey?  If you would then fair do's, but I wouldn't.