Last updated: 20 June 2026
Twice a year, racing quietly pulls the rug out from under you. The flat horses are running down their last starts of the season, tired and exposed. The jumpers are coming out for the first time in six months, fresh and completely unknown. For a few weeks the whole sport sits in between, and almost everyone in the business will tell you it is the hardest time of the year to make a profit.
The reason is information, or the lack of it. In the UK we get no official word on how horses have been working at home, just speculation and the odd hint you can never quite trust. So when the jumps season opens, you are reading form that is months stale on one side and barely exists on the other. The sensible thing is probably to stop for a couple of months and wait for the picture to clear, and a lot of good professionals do exactly that. But if you are anything like me, sitting on your hands for half the autumn is not going to happen. So here is what I do instead.
What should you bet on between the flat and National Hunt seasons? All-weather racing. The surface runs all year and changes very little in speed, so while the turf codes are at their least readable, short all-weather sprints stay predictable. Focus on five and six furlongs, shrink the field down to the genuine contenders, and back the fastest, most prominent runner when the price is right.
Why the flat to National Hunt switch is so hard to bet
The trap is real, and it is not your imagination. On turf, everything that makes form readable is in flux at once. The ground changes week to week as the weather turns, the flat horses still out are often being squeezed for a last run at the end of a long campaign, and the jumpers have a blank page where their recent form should be. When form is that unreliable the market gets unreliable too, drifting on rumour and reputation rather than evidence, and that is hard to beat consistently. What you want in a difficult spell is the opposite of all that noise: racing where the key factors are stable and you can trust what you are reading.
The racing that does not care what season it is
That racing is on the all-weather. I follow it all year round, but there is never a better time to lean on it than during the changeover, precisely because it is untouched by everything that makes the turf so awkward in those weeks. The surfaces are built to be run on whatever the weather is doing, so the going barely moves and the speed a horse is likely to run is far easier to predict. On turf, a drop of rain can turn a horse’s form upside down. On the all-weather you are working with a known quantity, which is exactly what you are missing everywhere else at this time of year. Be clear about what that does and does not buy you. Across more than 1.5 million British runners from 2013 to 2026, every code from flat turf to chases prices to a dead-level A/E of 1.00 on Betfair SP. That ratio compares the winners a factor actually returns against the number its prices implied, so 1.00 means bang in line with the market. The all-weather favourite holds that same 1.00 right through the autumn and spring changeovers, so the market here is no softer than any other. What it gives you is a readable one, where the going and the likely pace barely move and your own read still means something when turf form has turned to guesswork. If you have never paid it much attention, this guide to all-weather racing is a good place to start.
Start with the five-furlong sprints
Begin your all-weather betting with the sprints, and I mean genuine sprints. Five furlongs to start with, six at the very most. When you are finding your feet, I would stick to five furlongs only.
Why so short? Because in a five-furlong race one factor dominates everything else: speed. The trip is over almost before it begins, so there is little time for tactics or troubled runs to reshape the result. The fastest horse that breaks well usually wins. That makes these races the easiest place on the card to start generating a profit, and because it is the all-weather, you can do it every week of the year whatever the turf is doing.
There will not be a flood of these races, so you will have to be patient. That is a feature, not a bug: a few races you understand well beats a full card you are guessing at. Pace still matters, and reading how the race is run can lift your returns further, but you do not need it to make these sprints pay. Speed alone will get you started.
A quick way to shrink the field
Once you have a five-furlong all-weather race in front of you, the next job is to stop wasting time on runners that are not going to win. There is a simple piece of arithmetic I use to cut the field down fast before I do any real work.
- Count the actual runners, after non-runners are taken out.
- Divide that number by two.
- Add one.
- Sort the field by market price, then remove that many horses starting from the longest odds.
Take a race left with twelve runners once the non-runners are out. Twelve divided by two is six, plus one makes seven. Strike out the seven longest-priced horses and you are left with the five shortest in the market to analyse. One quick step has turned a twelve-horse puzzle into a five-horse one.
Be clear about what this is: a time-saver, not a selection method. You will occasionally cut the winner, but you would do that with any shortlist, and you will still find plenty of profitable races for a fraction of the work. Now check the survivors for one thing: have they ever raced competitively, within about two lengths of the winner, over an all-weather race at this distance? If a horse has not, take it out. Sometimes that empties the shortlist completely, and when it does, leave the race alone, because the quality is too poor to trust. Most of the time it trims another horse or two and sharpens the picture.
That competitiveness check is not just housekeeping. It is where the edge actually lives. In all-weather sprints, a horse already proven over the exact course and distance returns an A/E of 1.14 on Betfair SP across more than 700 such runners, rising to 1.18 for previous course winners. A horse that has only won over the trip somewhere else is fairly priced at 1.02, and one with no course or distance form sits at 0.99. The all-weather surfaces are uniform and quirky in their own way, so a course-and-distance winner is worth more than the market gives it.
Find the fastest, most prominent runner
Now you have a short list of horses that can handle the distance and have shown ability on the surface. The last job is to work out which one is likely to be fastest and up with the pace from the gate.
If you have access to speed figures, use them here, because this is exactly what they are for. One word of caution: never read a single rating as gospel. Any one figure carries variance, so look at the pattern across a few runs rather than the single best number. Alongside the ratings, open each contender’s recent races over a similar trip and read the in-running comments, which tell you where the horse was positioned. In a five-furlong sprint you want the runner that has consistently been near the front early, because horses that break slowly over this trip rarely have time to recover. The numbers say the speed read works: the fastest horse on our Dynamic Speed Rating in an all-weather sprint wins 19.5% of the time against 11.0% for the average runner, across more than 10,000 races, and better than 30% in the small fields of six or fewer. But that strike rate comes at an A/E of 1.00, so the market has already paid for the speed. The fast horse finds the winner, not the bet.
Do that and your selection usually picks itself. Sometimes one horse is left standing, sometimes two or three have a genuine claim. If you finish with more than three live contenders, the race is too competitive for this approach, so move on. You are not trying to bet every race. You are trying to bet the ones where the answer is clear.
A clean read is not the same as a bet
Here is the part the old version of this method glossed over, and it is the difference between a clever read and an actual profit. Finding the most likely winner is not the same as finding a bet. If a horse is obviously the fastest, most prominent runner, the market can see that too, and the price will often be too short to take. Backing a clear standout at a cramped price is a slow way to lose money even when you are right more often than not.
So the speed read gets you to the right horse quickly; genuine value is the thing you are buying. The cleanest way to check whether an angle truly beats the market over time is the A/E ratio, which compares the winners you actually get against the number the market expected based on Betfair SP. If your selections keep landing more often than their prices implied, you have a real edge. If they do not, you have a nice-looking method that quietly costs you money. Judge the bet on price, not just on profile.
So when the flat starts winding down and the jumpers come out cold, you do not have to switch the betting off and wait. Point your attention at the all-weather, start with the short sprints where speed rules, shrink the field with the simple count, and back the fastest prominent runner only when the price is generous enough to be worth it. The best place to put this into practice is on today’s racecards: find an all-weather five-furlong sprint and walk it through the steps above.
