Thursday's free feature, the Instant Expert racecard tab is one of Geegeez readers' most popular tools because it has the unique ability to condense the entire form profile of every runner in the race into a single, easily digestible, view covering the form in terms of wins (or places), runs, and win (or place) percentage for each of going, class, course, distance, and field size.
It also compares today’s official rating with the horse’s last winning official rating. The display is colour coded: green for a higher percentage rate, amber for a middling percentage, and red for a low percentage. Horses with no form under a certain condition have grey figures.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Where a horse has no UK/Irish form – i.e. it is having its first run in Britain or Ireland under Rules – it will not show up on Instant Expert at all.
We make this feature freely available to ALL readers EVERY Thursday for ALL races, including, naturally, our selection of 'free' races as follows...
- 3.23 Thurles
3.35 Huntingdon4.05 Huntingdon- 4.53 Thurles
As most of you already know, I'm not a big fan of Irish racing (each to their own and all that) and with the lack of 'free' UK card available to me at the time of posting (the free list will repopulate later, don't worry), I've got carte blanche to pick any race to cover and the day's highest rated race in the UK is the 6.00 Newcastle, where I suspect Cover Up might be a warm favourite to land this 8-runner (poss E/W bets?), Class 3, 4yo+ A/W handicap over a straight 5f on standard tapeta...
Cover Up won last time out and is three from his last five and comes here on a hat-trick, whilst Moon Flight also won last time out and has two wins and two runner-up finishes from his last four. Clearpoint made the frame on his last outing and is three from five and only top-weight Exalted Angel is without a win in seven or more, having lost 25 on the bounce in just over three years.
Exalted Angel is the only one of the eight not moving in class today as Intervention, Clearpoint (on yard debut for Simon Hodgson) and Lord Riddiford (licence rather than trainer change for this one) all drop down from Class 2, whilst hat-trick seeking Cover Up, Jump The Gun and fast-finishing pair Moon Flight & Pockley all step up from Class 4.
All eight have raced in the last 5 (Intervention) to 33 (Clearpoint/Lord Riddiford) days, so no layoffs to over come and Clearpoint, Cover Up (LTO), Moon Flight (also LTO) and Pockley have all won over this course and distance. Jump the Gun has won here over 6f (last November) and both Exalted Angel and Lord Riddiford have 5f Tapeta wins under their belts (Southwell and Wolverhampton respectively), but Intervention has won at neither track nor trip; he does however have 7 wins on tapeta over 6f/7f from 26 attempts at a very healthy 26.92% strike rate...
Clearpoint and Cover Up are the Instant Expert eyecatchers with lines of green, even if they are both 5lbs higher than their last A/W winning marks. Exalted Angel and Lord Riddiford have gone a long time since they last won an A/W contest, hence the latter's 10lb drop in ratings from his last win and whilst Pockley has won four times on this track, he prefers it slower than standard. If we then look at the place form from those races above...
...we could add the names of Intervention and Moon Flight to our list Instant Expert possibles alongside Cover Up and Clearpoint, giving us runners in stalls 1,2, 6 and 7 and somewhat surprisingly for a straight 5f sprint, there is a bit of a draw bias, favouring Intervention and Clearpoint here...
Now the draw stats from those 100+ races might have surprised a few of you, but I'm pretty sure the pace data from those races won't raise many eyebrows...
...which is pretty much as you'd expect, especially from a win perspective, which shows more bias than the place stats do, as leaders win 1.76 times more often than hold-up horses, but actually only place 1.3 times more. And if the isolated stats for the draw and the pace above are combined, the resulting heat map will probably not surprise you either...
...with the red box being the preferred combinations. We know how the field will line up ie
...so if we can place them onto the heat map, we can hopefully make a reasoned assumption to the outcome. Thankfully we also log how each horse has approached past races and their recent efforts look like this...
...with long-time loser Exalted Angel and three of my four from Instant Expert looking like the ones who'll be setting the pace and in terms of that pace/draw heat map...
Summary
Cover Up and Moon Flight both won last time out, but Clearpoint is also in good nick and he scored well on Instant Expert, as did hat-trick seeking Cover Up, of course, whilst Moon Flight and Intervention had good place stats. Of these four, Intervention and Clearpoint seemed to be more favoured by the draw, whilst the pace data was also against Moon Flight.
The pace/draw heat backed that up leaving me with three to choose from (in draw order) Cover Up, Intervention and Clearpoint. It would be easy/lazy to just suggest Cover Up wins again here, based on form, but let's not forget that he's up in class and also up 5lbs for just a half length win.
He probably should win here, but the 5.40pm odds ranging from Evens to 13/8 don't really excite me, but I am interested in the other pair. Clearpoint and Intervention can be backed at 7/1 and 9/1 respectively and whilst they might not beat the fav, I think they're both decent E/W alternatives and you never know... 😉
Other Recent Posts by This Author:
- Tix Picks, Saturday 04/01/25
- Tix Picks, Friday 03/01/25
- Tix Picks, Thursday 02/01/25
- Tix Picks, Tuesday 31/12/24
- Tix Picks, Monday 30/12/24
