Tuesday's free offering from the GOLD service is the The Shortlist feature, a simple – and usually brief – report highlighting those horses with a largely ‘green’ profile in the Instant Expert Report each day. It covers win or place stats, and can be viewed for both today’s and tomorrow’s racing.
GREENis good (33% or better win rate) – worth 3 points
AMBERis quite good (16-32% win rate) – worth 1 point
REDis not so good (0-15% win rate) – worth -1 points
GREY means there is no available data for that factor - worth 0 points
The final column, ‘Score’, is the sum of the previous five ‘colour’ columns, with 15 being an all green profile, and 9 being the lowest score appearing on this report.
HINT: The best bets are not necessarily the highest scores. Rather, they are often the biggest difference between a Shortlist horse and the ‘best of the rest’ in that race.
N.B. Shortlist selections are unlikely to make a profit, at SP at least, to blind backing. Our recommendation is – and has always been – that The Shortlist should be a starting point rather than an end in itself. That said, it continues to highlight horses whose chance is better than recent form - and its odds - imply. As ever, please refer to our User Guide for further information!
And this how The Shortlist looks for this Tuesday...
As usual we still also have our daily list of 'free' racecards, which are as follows...
- 6.00 Roscommon
- 7.00 Roscommon
- 7.17 Chelmsford
- 8.47 Chelmsford
...but Salamanca Lad from the The Shortlist feature interests me more than the two UK A/W races above, so let's head towards Trimsaran for the 4.50 Ffos Las, a 6-runner, Class 5, 3yo flat handicap over a left-handed mile on good to firm ground...
SALAMANCA LAD comes here in great form, completing a hat-trick of one mile wins when scoring at Sandown six days ago. A 6lb penalty for a half length win makes life tougher here, as he's now 14lbs higher than five weeks here.
ARKHALIA FLYNN has raced just five time and has made the frame in each of his last three, winning once, He's down in class here after a decent third of eight at Yarmouth almost three weeks ago where the pace of the contest didn't seem to suit him.
DASHINWHITESARGENT got home by a neck in a novice race at Wolverhampton last time out to open his account at the sixth attempt. He's now back in a handicap off the same mark as when second at Epsom in April, so could go well here too.
FASTER BEE has yet to make the frame in six Flat outings and is an 11-race maiden overall. His two handicap runs this season have seen him come home 9th of 11 and last of ten, beaten by around seven lengths each time. He's down in class and weight here, but I don't like him for this one.
RUN FOR THE SUN has yet to win a race after five starts and hasn't made the frame since finishing second of nine at Yarmouth on debut a year ago. Was only third of five at Doncaster last time out, beaten by three lengths and others make more appeal to me here.
QUESTIONABLE has only made the frame once in six starts when she was a runner-up beaten by a short head at Haydock in late-May. She hasn't kicked on since, finishing 4th of 10 and 7th of 9 in two subsequent runs and was a good 8 lengths off the pace last time out.
So far, this looks like a race of two halves with the top half of the card vying for the two places, whilst the bottom half of the card will be trying not to get beat by too much!
Salamanca Lad has won four of twelve starts, but his five rivals are a combined 2 from 33, having made the frame in just 10 of those 33 so I'm guessing that we'll get more info from the stat side of Instant Expert than we will from the win data...
Once again, it looks like we should be focusing on the top half of the card and the class 5 results fort he bottom half tell their own story here. Salamanca Lad's 6lb rise could be an issue, too as could his draw out on stall five. There's not a huge draw bias here, but those drawn lower have tended to get the better of an admittedly small sample size of races...
...but I suspect the tempo of the race aka pace will be more of a determining feature here and that's true to an extent, as leaders have had the best of it here...
and these stats then, in turn, help to form part of this pace/draw heat map...
...which suggests that many pace/draw combos have a chance here, but if we look at how our field have approached their most recent races, we see that the pace is going to come from the two drawn highest, placing them firmly in the green here...
...but it's Arkhalia Flynn who looks most ideally positioned of the six.
Summary
From the write-ups and Instant Expert, the top half of the field ie Salamanca Lad (from the The Shortlist feature), Arkhalia Flynn and Dashinwhitesargent were the ones to focus on. Arkhalia Flynn has the slightly better draw and subsequent pace/draw combo and this allied to Salamanca Lad's 6lb penalty makes Arkhalia Flynn my tentative pick here in what will be a close affair.
Salamanca Lad should, in turn, have too much for Dashinwhitesargent, so it's an Arkhalia Flynn/Salamanca Lad 1-2 for me today.
Only bet365 had opened the book by 4.15pm Monday and here's how they saw it...
