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Bold shout, spud. Recent Timeform comments of “looks poor at this stage” and “has shown zero ability to date” perhaps a little harsh.
I’m pumped for a potato v Sleepy Hollow showdown!
Yet another strange one from you, RubyLight.
I was trading Southwell today and could see the logic from connections. Lil Rockerfeller has always been a moody so-and-so but looks increasingly ungenuine now. One could see the “not today” signs with the blinkers left off and the dour stayer running at 2m 4f on a tight track but it was still a valid bit of education for the horse. There was a very nice prize on offer if his backclass saw him through, too.
Lil Rockerfeller is going to be difficult to place under both codes now, especially with his attitude degenerating. His only real avenue is to improve his fencing and exploit the lower chase mark. I fear he’ll never be fluent (or willing) enough to do it…but the test of a tight 2m 4f with stiffish fences in a small field is probably just what this slow learner needs if he is ever going to get the hang of it. Reportedly Bryony Frost is also set to become his regular rider over jumps so it was an important ‘getting to know you’ day for the pair. I’d rather see him have a few more of these than doing a somersault in a Ladbrokes Trophy or something like that.
Lovely result for a Sunday by the way – always a great situation on our side of the fence when you’ve got valid reason to oppose a ‘people’s horse’. You know you won’t struggle to lay it.
Nothing to do with us, potato, although a fully-funded team of SEO manipulators pushing Drawbias dot com, Tommo’s tipline and The Racing Blogger towards the top of the search results would be a cracking idea if times turn lean.
I’d guess the reality is that the rival sites are fairly low-tech (GG looks like something out of 1998 even now) and they’ve probably got a poor understanding of SEO. Even ATR’s course guide pages are quite badly out of date (some last updated pre-2010) and those rankings might have been static for a while.
Potentially a good opening for somebody to make a new draw-themed site for a bit of affiliate income though…
Either close it down, update it or do something with it – I agree! The site is five years out of date on its data even before you get to all those factual errors.
I wonder how they’re still the top result on Google for many draw bias-related queries. I’m no SEO maven but I do know that regular updates are quite important for your rankings. Again I’m no great fan of the individuals behind the rival sites for draw info (gg.co.uk & FlatStats) but at least they’re current! Get ’em up top.
It’s absolutely fascinating and I’m a little bit obsessed with them at the moment. There was a decent introductory piece by James Willoughby in the RP the other day about Machine Learning but he stopped short of saying whether or not they are in the market already. They are!
Quite who ‘they’ are, what data they are crunching, how they have such huge backing and how they carve out a really small ROI over such massive turnover are all hard to grasp. Whenever I feel I’ve got them sussed they do something unexpected. They’re also active at early prices and, from the patterns we see, they have huge influence on the eventual ISP and BSP.
What I would say is that their edge (so far) seems absolutely tiny and out of proportion with the major market shifts they’re creating on a day to day basis. Hence my opinion about SP beat % no longer being a valid way for ‘client profiling’ departments at bookmakers to judge customer accounts.
Machine learning operations are increasingly influential, especially in that key period when liquidity is at its highest.
Don’t get me wrong – if you have a bad bet at early prices (with an obvious reason WHY it’s bad e.g. ground, absence, poor sectionals/times) it’ll probably SP bigger. But there is some evidence that these machine learning boys are overplaying the market and overloading small or even non-existent edges.
Fairplay on the 2yo situation. Glad you’re in control, good to hear!
That’s a good point about Siskin as well – really would have looked toxic in the market if he had drifted as far as 2/1. I guess my situation was more hypothetical: as in what would you do if I’d been the first bookmaker to put the market up and you’d looked at the race fresh with prices along the lines of:
Monarch Of Egypt 8/11, Siskin 2/1, Royal Lytham 6/1, 33/1 bar
Spud, not sure if there are two people using your account but you’re at danger of being accused of hypocrisy here.
With your brave (and excellent I must say) shout to back Siskin on the ‘Big Races’ section the other day, you described EVS as a “gift of a price”. Surely that suggests you’d (at least mentally) come up with a tissue for the race and given yourself a value spectrum for Siskin. Would you have backed him at 4/7, for example? How about at 4/5? Would you have staked more at 6/4? Would you have backed Siskin at SP? What was the thought process there?
I have a huge amount of respect for you and think you have massive potential. Your formreading is exceptional and (I’m assuming you’re quite a young guy) you’ve got great energy for watching and studying and betting. However rash sentences like “if you made more money than you put on then you found value” are quite worrying. Likewise your behaviour in your recent 2yos tipping threat in the DLAP section where your P/L went into the negative (no shame there) then your stakes increased and increased (chasing losses) until you put up a ‘boom or bust, bet the farm’ pick (which lost) and you quit the thread (and the forum) for months afterwards. That’s a sign of problem gambling and you need to be very very careful if that is happening in your real life punting.
There is a fair amount of variance in horse racing. A good long-term winning punter could have 500 bets at early prices in a month and lose – luck in running, falls, jockey errors, reversed results and general swings are always a threat in the medium-term. However I would argue with those who use ‘Beat SP%’ as the ultimate gauge of the value you’re getting since on-the-off exchange markets have changed somewhat in the last year or so. That’s another debate!
I wondered this too. I was meant to be trading Ayr tomorrow and was confused to see the card showing broken on the RP website with no icon or explanation or story or anything showing the meeting had been abandoned. I eventually got the answer from Twitter! Not the industry’s supposedly leading news service.
I agree with yeats. They’re a total embarrassment and this is yet another sign of the Racing Post’s decline. There has been a torrent of self-destructive stuff from them recently. While I agree with getting rid of the deadwood on the staff as they have in the last few years, they’ve surely gone too far the other way now and so much inexperience makes them look lightweight. Barely a day goes by in the early days of Tom Kerr’s spell as editor without a PR disaster for the paper:
A glowing profile of Sheikh Mohammed just days after the news broke about Princess Haya and their daughter, a junior journalist tricking Ger Lyons and turning private comments into a front-page story (yesterday), THAT extremely worrying article by Steve Palmer, an utterly dismal 24 months of tipping (I have the LSP figures) from all regular racing tipsters bar Paul Kealy and Ron Wood…
Not to mention Kerr’s editorial bias w/r/t the whip, the diminished daily reporting section, the rookie race analysis prone to guesswork about pace/sectionals, the creaking website, the price of the print edition creeping ever upwards, Bruce Milington’s antagonistic Twitter persona…
I could go on!
To be honest, if the betting industry come up with their own news/cards service (which can’t be far away) to go in the shops and data feeds online, would the RP really be viable? I have Members Club Ultimate (on the firm) but, with Timeform and the ever-improving AtTheRaces website, I wouldn’t miss it one bit.
Well played the spud – bold call and well played.
I’ll stick my neck out and say that’s a good horse. Shrugged off those conditions (which couldn’t have been ideal) like an old pro.
5/4 for a decent chunk on the machine if you’re confident, spuddy! Good luck if you’re playing.
Agree with KevMc – would love to see Ger Lyons get his G1. He’s probably the #2 trainer in Ireland right now and deserves to start taking his share of these big ones. Rather unlucky if the ground scuppers him here.
I have the delights of the Curragh tonight. Personally saw it the other way.
There’s a serious weather warning around tonight and lots of rain expected. The US-bred Siskin has a scuttly action and looks an unlikely sort to handle any cut in the ground. Monarch Of Egypt (despite being by American Pharoah) is proven on good-to-soft and looks more likely to deal with it. I also like that MOE ran so well despite being so desperately weak on return from his setback last time, suggesting he needed it badly. He’s strong in the market tonight I think he’ll reverse the form.
