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On a general point I think ante post betting for Cheltenham is largely a mugs game nowadays:
Only for those who lack foresight Carv! My last 5yrs have been my best in 25!
Get onBurton Port
for Gold Cup glory,he ticks all the boxes except one and that one was
Weapons Amnesty
winning the RSA,a racing certainty he was!
I did say largely, not completely.
I did also put up Burton Port as a maximum bet on the Betfair thread at 20/1 the day after the Hennessy. Also tipped up Weapons Amnesty on here- nice to know you read my stuff.What happened to 2. and 3. Fister?
On the injury point. This is just my theory, but it has served me well. I would never back a horse ante post which had had a significant time off the track in the previous 12 months. I don’t really care what the injury was, these are finely-tuned athletes and significant down-time exposes them to increased risk when they do come back to race: any little niggle from the old problem can cause them to compensate and injure something else, even if the original problem holds up. It’s a belief that has saved me a lot of cash over the years.
On a general point I think ante post betting for Cheltenham is largely a mugs game nowadays: there are so many alternative targets that guessing the right race is often as hard as picking the winner. If you follow the mantra of backing sound horses with only one possible target you should be ok but the rest carries a major wealth warning. I also found that when I had a big ante post book I wasn’t approaching the races impartially- having no view until near the time is a good thing, I feel.
The only way it is worth playing now is with concessions like Ladbokes NRNB, but even then the percentages are huge.I think you are mistaken Miss Woodford. There are four Walsh siblings: Ruby, Katie, Ted jr and Jennifer. Only two (Katie and Ruby) are jockeys. If there is a Robbie Walsh riding jumps he’s not a brother of Ruby’s.
It will be interesting to see what the second finds off the bridle next time. In her defence it was her first run in about 7 weeks and it’s not inconcievable she could have been a gallop short given recent conditions. The TS figure of 42 makes that Listed race form a bit suspect IMO.
Reasons
not
to back Mikael d’Haganuet ante post.
1. How do you know he’ll run in the RSA? With the new intermediate distance novice chase he now has three options, and I doubt even WP Mullins knows which race he’ll run in yet. The sad thing about the expanded Festival is that horses can duck each other too easily- it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he and TFR avoided each other, perhaps with Mikael going for the in-between race.
2. This is a horse who’s been off a long time- backing horses like him and Hurricane Fly ante post is a dangerous game- they are less likely than most to make it to Prestbury Park fit and well.
3.He’s just had a bad fall, and I wasn’t 100% convinced by his fencing technique- he didn’t give them much air and soemtimes a horse that jumps like that can become a bit careful after a fall- I’d want to see a nice safe clear round next time out.
In short, if I were a bookie I’d be very happy to lay your 8/1, win or lose.I didn’t see a lot wrong to be honest. I watched the race before reading David’s comments and thought she’d win everwhere bar the line. Might have been a little overconfident but the horse surely found less than expected as well. Were I a steward on the day I wouldn’t have had a burning urge to call an enquiry. I can tell you what he’d have said: "I was getting there easy sorr, but when I went for her there wasn’t much there".
To answer the point about going wide- if you look again Ahern is dead in the middle of a track made by the tractor going around- he might have felt the ground in this was a bit more compacted and hence possibly faster- the winner is in another similar track on his inner.Punchestown has also suffered from "greed extension". Five days now and a lot of dross- 6 bumpers ffs! The only good thing about a good depresssion is that hopefully a lot of this extra Festival padding will be reversed.
Even as a patriotic Irishman if I could only go to one it would be Cheltenham and if only one day it would be Champion Hurdle Tuesday.It’s a bit sad to see someone like Richard stooping to the depths of "odds-to" tipping services. IMHO it doesn’t add much to TRF to allow him a bit of banal drivel every month as a thinly-veiled promo for same. Sack’m Corm.
Merely moved to a more ego free area
http://community.betfair.com/horse_ante … read?pg=62Your point was understood Reet- of course a good trainer must allow for maturity and refrain from pushing young horses to their limits. He or she will know what a horse is comfortably capable of at each stage in their development and avoid exceeding this too often too soon. Racing is littered with horses who never reach their potential due to going beyond their comfort zone before they were ready for it. I love trainers who have a long term plan and work backwards from there.
Eoin Doyles’ diary in today’s Post shows how this will affect the small guys more. He had no gallops for several days and was even without a horse walker for a period. He couldn’t even get out of the yard to get groceries and his feed delivery didn’t come when it should. Sounds like a nightmare. Well worth keeping a race to race eye on stable form after a period like this.
The most interesting post on this thread for me was the one "googling obscure theorems".
It makes perfect sense to me that a horse’s physiological makeup (notably the proportion of different slow and fast twitch muscle fibres in the major skeletal muscles), determined by genetics, results in it having both an optimum speed and a limit in time or distance over which this speed can be maintained. Of course this can be influenced by maturity, training, feeding and so on but it stands to reason that some horses can run faster comfortably than others while others can maintain their (perhaps slightly slower) speed over longer distances. The art of training is to allow the horse to express this ability to its maximum and run it under conditions which suit. This is easier than it sounds. As punters we really have to be better than the trainers (or at least better than the majority) at knowing a horse’s optimum conditions and realising the true story behind the form figures.
Get on
