Do Trainer and Jockey Tips Help You Find Winners?

Kingsley on SEN radio with racing.com. Segment courtesy of SEN x racing.com.

People ask me how much weight I put on trainer information, and whether jockey comments rate highly in my process. The honest answer is none. I do not take any trainer or jockey information into my betting at all. It is not that I think they are being dishonest. It is that the position they are in makes their comments close to useless for the job I am trying to do, which is to work out where the value sits across a whole field.

They are always talking up their own runner

When I listen to trainers or jockeys, they tend to be tipping their own horse. I understand why. They are the connections. They have owners listening. They have people who have put money and time into that horse. You rarely hear a trainer come on and say the horse has not worked well and they do not like its chances. That kind of honesty almost never gets said out loud, and I would not expect it to be.

So the information flow is one sided by design. If nearly every comment is positive, the positive comments carry no signal. You cannot separate the horse that is genuinely well from the horse whose connections are simply doing what connections do. Once I know that, there is nothing left for me to use.

They know their own horse, not the opposition

The second problem is scope. Most trainers and jockeys know their own horse very well. They see it every day. They know how it has worked and how it pulled up last start. What they generally do not have is a full view of the field and what that horse is up against.

That is the part that decides races. A horse can be in career best order and still be the fourth best runner in the race. A trainer telling me their horse is going well does not tell me how it stacks up against the other runners, because most of them have not gone through the opposition the way I have. My job is the comparison. Their job is the horse. Those are different pieces of work, and only one of them settles a bet.

What would change my mind

I am not closed off to the idea in principle. If trainer and jockey comments existed as data rather than as talk, I would be interested. Give me the tips and the information they have put out over the last two, three or four years, in a form I can sort and test, and I would happily go and have a look at it.

That is a real question worth answering. Which trainers are worth listening to, and on what kind of runner, and how often does the confidence hold up. But that is a study, not a soundbite. Until someone puts the record together over years, a comment made before a race is just a comment. I have no way of knowing whether it has any strike rate behind it.

So my advice is simple. Listen to the trainer and jockey comments if you enjoy them, but do not let them move your assessment of a race. Do your own work on the field, and hold your opinion unless something you can actually measure tells you to change it.

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