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Back to the weather . . . it rained heavily here on Friday afternoon/evening and constantly tipping it down all day today. I’m a stone’s throw from the track.
Think it would be soft by the end of today – the Mildmay course drains pretty quickly. The National course is another matter though.
Hope that helps.Don’t forget that RTE Radio broadcast commentaries of all the Cheltenham races – very handy for the last two races once C4 has gone off air.
In the west of the UK you get a really good signal on 252 long wave – I think Tony O’Hehir does the calling.As for Des Scahill, he wasn’t always jaded, as this link shows:
http://www.rte.ie/laweb/ll/ll_t07j.htmlI know it’s not quite the same but you’ll be able to listen to the races through the BBC website.
Their i-player lets you listen again to shows that have already been broadcast so you’ll be able to listen to 5live’s coverage delayed from the afternoon.
The races are also likely to be on You Tube within hours of the race being run but it will be hard to avoid the results.
The Channel 4 racing programme may also be on 4OD which replays Channel 4 shows but you may have to be in UK to watch that.It’s raining heavily here (about 5 miles from Haydock) at the moment to add to the general gloom for the weekend.
I agree with the comments above although I have a slight vested interest with my involvement with Racing Ahead Weekend.
Incidentally, I am going to print a round-up of how each of our tipping columns is doing in this Saturday’s paper.
Have a look at the "today’s multiple bet" part of RP Tipping. This is dozens of points down already.I know Raceform used to do all the extra stuff (notebook-style comments, synopsis etc) from the office. They had to watch the races on a little PC screen and churn them out.
As for the comments in running, I think these are done at the track but only after several rewinds of the video in the press room. It’s the most difficult job in the press side of the sport if you ask me.If you asked the majority of racing "journalists" to put their qualifications on the table, most would be reaching for their coat.
The best racing journalists are the ones who earned their stripes on news before specialising – if I was employing a racing journalist, I wouldn’t look at anyone without that experience.
There are obviously exceptions to the rule but most people put up in this thread as good writers are competent at very best.
Tipsters are different, they don’t need the same skills – but just because you write in a newspaper, it doesn’t make you a journalist.
A lazy hack might now say that if you sleep in a stable it doesn’t make you a horse (I’m sure the subs will edit that bit out).
Most midweek sponsorships are linked to corporate hospitality. You hire one of the hospitality suites at a racecourse to entertain a load of clients and the track will usually throw in a race title.
Also, it can cost as little as £200 to have a race title – not bad value really.Just thought people might be interested to know that our first month’s verified sale for Racing Ahead Weekend was an average of 22,000 copies per week.
I am encouraged by the way the sales have been fairly constant through the month and there wasn’t a huge drop from week one to week two.
We have made a lot of improvements to the paper since week one – there needed to be! – and if anyone is interested, I will be happy to send them the PDF of the last edition if they PM me.Thanks for the reminder about the omission of handicap ceilings graysonscolumn, it is high on the list of things to sort out.
This week, we will have an indication of whether each race is on RUK/ATR in the raceheader, we are sharpening up the stats on the racecards and making the Scoop6 page and verdicts a lot neater.
As for leaving out Sunday form, we are in a bit of a dilemma. Basically, we are limited to 48 pages for the foreseeable future and it was a simple choice between Sunday form and the sports section. For the moment, we have decided to go with the sports section but that could change if there’s enough demand.Some interesting comments – pretty much what I expected.
I have to say that I am disappointed myself with the editorial pages at the front of the new issue.
We had some production problems (that, thanks to sod’s law didn’t surface in the umpteen practice runs) that meant we just didn’t have time to sub-edit the pages properly.
When you are a small title like ours, if you don’t hit the (very early – any ex-Sportsmen around, our final off-stone is 6pm!) press deadline the paper doesn’t get printed. So we had no option but to go with what we had at that time.
Those hitches will be ironed out by next week and the front-end will be much more like it, including the couple of columns we had to drop due to the technical problems. The Scoop6 page etc and other little ricks will also be sorted out – hopefully it’s not too late. I think the fantastic results will help in the short-term but we have got to get things right.
Thanks again for the feedback.It’s interesting about the small crowds at Haydock for the jumps meetings.
I stopped going to the summer Saturday meetings a couple of years ago – I couldn’t stand the communal sing-songs in the Tatts Stand while the races were on. There’s nothing like a load of drunken woolybacks to put you off.
Anyway, I hope Aintree pick up some of the slack from Haydock. The course is still a much under-used facility and the crowds are very healthy for the newer meetings they have put on in recent years.
I know the track is a very different test to Haydock but maybe there could be more events on the Grand National course to provide the jumping test that Haydock used to provide.I used Compunter a lot in the nineties with solid success. It has various modules which go into varying levels of detail – some require just a few pieces of information, while the most detailed asked for about 25 inputs per horse.
Sadly, the programmer passed away a few years ago so the the program has not been updated for several years. It required updates because the trainer and jockey were taken into consideration for most modules.
One of the modules – the Class module – was, according to the author, inspired by the writings of VDW. This is a module that can still be used because it doesn’t involve trainers or jockeys so the lack of an update isn’t a problem.
The Class module is intended to be used on the better grade races, with the best results from Conditions Stakes, Listed and Group races on the Flat. I can’t say I used it on the jumps that much.
You enter each horse’s recent form figures, age, number of wins and total prizemoney. The software then calculates a rating and value price. It sounds very simple but the fact that it takes less than 5 minutes to evaluate a race is a real plus.
From such simple information, the program does very well and I made consistent profits until I moved away from daily betting. At that time (8-10 years ago), I did well using the Class module and the speed figures calculated by a colleague.Just for fun (!), here’s the Compunter VDW-based module’s verdict on what is just about today’s best race, the 4.40 at Hamilton.
This is probably just below the standard of race that should be operated but nonetheless:
Dustoori: Rating 130, value price 13-8, indicated as a BET by the program
Sphinx: Rating 125, value price 3-1
Bajan Parkes: Rating 123, value price 9-2
Tilt: Rating 122, value price 5-1
Looking at the ratings, a five-point gap is pretty conclusive from this software.
But from a value point of view, Bajam Parkes is available to back at 14-1 but is quoted at a value price of 9-2. So this is a clear case of a horse that the program doesn’t think will win but seems to be overpriced.
What do you do? Take the 14s on Bajan Parkes or go for Dustoori who, at the time of writing is a 9-4 shot.Just a quick reminder – the horse tipped by Compunter’s VDW-based module to win the 4.40 Ayr on Saturday was Anna Pavlova with a value price of 10-3.
Here’s the Compunter verdict on the Listed 4.40 at Ayr on Saturday:
Anna Pavlova Rating 138 Value price 10-3
Confidential Lady Rating 138 Value price 10-3
Ivy Creek Rating 134 Value price 9-2
Blythe Knight Rating 134 Value price 9-2
Championship Point Rating 128 Value price 13-2
Happy to put up others if there’s any call.
