The Affect of Headgear in Horse Racing

Horses wear headgear in races to improve their racing. It may be to block vision, or to hold the tongue in position to prevent it blocking an airway, or any number of other reasons.

There are seven types of headgear in use in horse racing, and these are:

• Hood
• Visor
• Blinkers
• Cheekpieces
• Tongue strap
• Eye shields

It may improve the racing for the horse, but does it have any impact on the results for your betting? Or have the odds on these horses already reduced because everybody thinks they know it improves the horses chance of winning?

The Affect of Headgear in Horse Racing Contents

Where to find the headgear a horse is wearing on the Race Advisor

We’ve made it as simple as opening a racecard to find if any horse is wearing headgear in a race. Head to our homepage and choose a racecard.

Once you’ve opened the racecard, if any horse is wearing headgear, you will find it underneath their weight.

If you’ve not yet made your free account on the Race Advisor, you can create one (or login) using the buttons below.

Horse Racing Headgear Statistics in the UK and IRE

Let’s find out using 38,410 races, containing 372,669 horses!

We need to establish a baseline to begin with. If we take all the horses in the sample with Betfair SP odd of 30.00 or less, we get these stats.

These figures show us the baseline for all horses in the sample. We would not be expecting a huge amount of winners or any profitable return. Having only a -1.33% return on investment is better than we may have expected.

You will also see that there are more winners than races, this is because some races have joint-winners.

With a baseline we can begin to look for improvements in performance with the use of headgear.

Horse Racing Headgear: Hood

There are 11,330 horses who wore headgear from our data. This represents 4.33% of all the data. I’ve highlighted in green the factors which are better with this headgear than our baseline.

Instantly we can see that Chase is the strongest race type for horses with hoods. They win slightly more races than our baseline but made an excellent 6.85% return on investment (ROI) and showed a 9% advantage (A/E).

Be aware that there are only 228 winners here in our sample. Whilst the minimum number I like to work with is 100 winners, this is still a little on the small side and there could be some fluctuation as we get more results and data.

Flat races also produced better results than the baseline, and the sample had 515 winners which gives more confidence in continued performance than the Chase races. There is a small 3% advantage and pushing into profitable with a 0.55% ROI.

Focusing on both these race types for horses wearing hoods would be beneficial.

Horse Racing Headgear: Visor

We get a very different picture when we look at visors. Horses wearing a visor actually perform worse, under every race type, except for hurdles. The winning rate is actually lower than our baseline, but the ROI is a strong 2.68% with a 5% advantage.

However, there are only 118 winning bets here, so there may be some fluctuation on this data.

Looking at this from another angle, the performance of horses wearing a visor is so poor on Chase races that laying these horses in the win market (betting them to lose) actually makes a small positive return on investment of 0.59%!

Horse Racing Headgear: Blinkers

Blinkers gives a surprising result… there is only one improvement in the statistics by putting blinkers on a horse, and that’s the ROI on flat racing. However, in return for this improvement there is a significant decline in the winning rate of the horses.

There may be some small angles to be found within these race types, but it wouldn’t be an area to focus your attention on unless you are a layer, in which case blinkers may be the headgear for you to watch out for in Chase and Hurdle races.

Horse Racing Headgear: Cheekpieces

Cheekpieces are worn by 10.79% of all the horses in our data, which is significantly more than any other the other pieces of headgear we’ve looked at so far. This means we have more data and the statistics are going to be less likely to fluctuate.

The immediate advantage for horses of wearing cheekpieces is in Hurdle races where these horses have made a 0.16% return on investment immediately. The advantage is only 1%, which isn’t enough to use it on it’s own, but it’s a good starting point for further investigation.

Horse Racing Headgear: Tongue Strap

Looking at tongue straps, we can immediately see that this has the most widespread benefits on returns from all the headgear we’ve considered so far.

It makes sense!

Tongue straps are used to prevent the tongue obstructing the airway, and allowing the horse to get the maximum amount of air into its lungs.

What is interesting is that the betting markets haven’t picked up on the impact that this is going to have on the horses. The market is undervaluing the benefits, which means we are seeing an increase in the ROI for every race type and an improvement in the advantage for all race types except Flat.

Horse Racing Headgear: Eye Shields

At first glance the stats here look strong, but yet I’ve not highlighted any of them!

Why?

Because there is not enough data to have any confidence in these figures. Only the All Weather has more than 10 wins, and it is still far below the recommend minimum of 100 to get any kind of statistical confidence.

This tells us that eye shields are not worn often enough for us to consider them in our analysis as either a positive or a negative.

What to do next

Will headgear mean a horse is more likely to win? No.

With the exception of hoods in chase races, headgear showed a reduced chance of winning from the baseline data.

But profitable is not only about picking a winner.

In fact it’s not primarily about picking a winner!

Profitable betting is about consistently betting on horses at odds higher than they should be. This means finding an advantage in the betting market is the key to success, balanced against making sure your win rate is high enough to cope with the losing streaks.

There is no doubt that headgear can make a difference to the horse running. More importantly, from a betting perspective, the market hasn’t accurately taken into account the impact of some of the headgear.

Most notably tongue straps provide an immediate advantage in all areas of racing except flat. This would be the area I would recommend you starting with.

Keep an eye out for any horse that is wearing a tongue strap and put them on your contender list. If a horse is already on your contender list and is wearing a tongue strap then they will have an additional advantage.

That being said, don’t ignore the other advantages shown above, they can all be used either as the starting point for a profitable angle or where you will know that the horse has an advantage in the market that the majority of bettors are unaware of.