Why is a cached Regexp outperforming a compiled one?

This is just a question to satisfy my curiosity. But to me it is interesting.

I wrote this little simple benchmark. It calls 3 variants of Regexp execution in a random order a few thousand times:

Basically, I use the same pattern but in different ways.

1. Your ordinary way without any RegexOptions. Starting with .NET 2.0 these do not get cached. But should be "cached" because it is held in a pretty global scope and not reset.

2. With RegexOptions.Compiled

3. With a call to the static Regex.Match(pattern, input) which does get cached in .NET 2.0

Here is the code:

static List<string> Strings = new List<string>();        
static string pattern = ".*_([0-9]+)\\.([^\\.])$";

static Regex Rex = new Regex(pattern);
static Regex RexCompiled = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.Compiled);

static Random Rand = new Random(123);

static Stopwatch S1 = new Stopwatch();
static Stopwatch S2 = new Stopwatch();
static Stopwatch S3 = new Stopwatch();

static void Main()
{
  int k = 0;
  int c = 0;
  int c1 = 0;
  int c2 = 0;
  int c3 = 0;

  for (int i = 0; i < 50; i++)
  {
    Strings.Add("file_"  + Rand.Next().ToString() + ".ext");
  }
  int m = 10000;
  for (int j = 0; j < m; j++)
  {
    c = Rand.Next(1, 4);

    if (c == 1)
    {
      c1++;
      k = 0;
      S1.Start();
      foreach (var item in Strings)
      {
        var m1 = Rex.Match(item);
        if (m1.Success) { k++; };
      }
      S1.Stop();
    }
    else if (c == 2)
    {
      c2++;
      k = 0;
      S2.Start();
      foreach (var item in Strings)
      {
        var m2 = RexCompiled.Match(item);
        if (m2.Success) { k++; };
      }
      S2.Stop();
    }
    else if (c == 3)
    {
      c3++;
      k = 0;
      S3.Start();
      foreach (var item in Strings)
      {
        var m3 = Regex.Match(item, pattern);
        if (m3.Success) { k++; };
      }