The jumps favourite, put through 10,216 real races

Every betting habit has a story attached, and the jumps favourite has one of the better ones. Over hurdles and fences, the thinking goes, class tells. Stamina and jumping sort the field out, the form is more honest than on the Flat, and the market's first choice is the market's first choice for a reason. Back the jolly over the sticks and let the race do the arguing.

It is a habit with real money behind it. Winter Saturdays are built on it, from the 1.15 at Wetherby to the feature at Ascot, and plenty of punters who would never touch a system will still tell you the jumps favourite is "the sensible bet".

So it earned a proper test. We took every jumps race in our record, 10,216 of them, and backed the favourite in each one at starting price. Fallers settled as losers, because that is what they are when your money is down. No cherry-picked seasons, no leaving out the bad festivals. One rule, applied to the lot.

The habit's fans are half right, as it turns out. The half they are right about is the winning. The half they are wrong about is what the winning is worth.

The jumps favourite wins 37% of its races in our record. That is a genuinely high number, comfortably clear of most habits on the board, and it is why the strategy feels so dependable from the sofa. You collect often enough that the losing days read as bad luck.

The return tells the other half. Across all 10,216 races, backing the jumps favourite at starting price gives up 7.8p of every pound staked. For comparison, the same habit on the Flat costs 9.4p in the pound. The two codes land in the same neighbourhood, because the thing deciding the outcome is not the fences. It is the margin inside the price, and the price already knows the favourite is good.

That is the pattern worth carrying into the weekend: how often a bet wins tells you how it will feel, and the price tells you what it will cost. The jumps favourite feels great and costs steadily.

The full working, with the confidence interval, the sample and the Professor's verdict, lives on the experiment page: Do jumps favourites make money? And if you want to see this habit lined up against every other one we have tested, the whole board is at Systems & Strategies. The figures in this post are live, so they move as new races settle.