Tuesday is the day many of you have been waiting almost a year for, as it heralds the opening of this year's Cheltenham Festival, which my colleagues have covered at length elsewhere on the site.
For the purpose of my humble daily column, The Shortlist is Tuesday's free Geegeez GOLD feature and it's a simple (usually brief) report highlighting those horses with a largely ‘green’ profile in the Instant Expert Report each day and it covers win or place stats for both the current and the next day's racing.
GREEN is good (33% or better win rate) – worth 3 points
AMBER is quite good (16-32% win rate) – worth 1 point
RED is 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 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 might imply.
[Please refer to our User Guide for further information] and here is Tuesday's heavily Cheltenham-weighted Shortlist...
...although Tom Creen and Trac look worth a second glance at Sedgefield, as does Devil's Angel at Newcastle.
As ever, the daily feature is complemented by a selection of fully functional racecards opened up to all readers and for Tuesday they cover...
- 2.10 Cheltenham
- 3.50 Sedgefield
- 6.45 Newcastle
- 7.15 Newcastle
...and although I don't generally cover Festival races with them already being 'done' by my colleagues, it would seem remiss of me not to consider the chances of four runners from TS in the first of our free races, the 2.10 Cheltenham, which is a 9-runner, Grade 1, 5yo+ novice chase (13 fences) over a left handed two miles on soft ground...
The general feeling here is that this will be a 2-horse contest between El Fabiolo and Jonbon and I'd be surprised if that wasn't the case. I expect the bookies to have them both around the 6/4 mark, which means that we're not getting rich from singles or forecasts, but it does open up the possibility of an E/W bet.
I'm going to set the two prinicpals to one side for now and focus upon the other seven to see who might be worth looking at to make up the places for that E/W bet or for your tricast/trifecta selections, starting with their last runs which saw Ballybreeze and Effernock Fizz come home as winners, whilst Ha D'Or was a 2-length runner-up at Grade 3. And although Ballybreeze did win on chase debut last time out, it was 20 weeks ago and in a Class 4 handicap off a mark of 100, so not only might he need the run, he's up three classes and Straw Fan Jack / Effernock Fizz are both up two.
Most of these have raced in the last five weeks or so, but Hollow Games has been off for 11 weeks and Straw Fan Jack for over 15 weeks, so like Ballybreeze, they might not be quite 'race-fit'. Every single runner in this field ahs won over a similar trip tot his one, yet only two of the seven past Cheltenham runners have actually won here; Saint Roi won a Grade 3 2m1f hurdle here at 2020's Festival, Straw Fan Jack won a Class 2 Novice chase over course and distance as recently as October and neither El Fabiolo nor Ha D'Or have visited HQ before.
We've also got the 'complication' of softer than usual ground for the start of the Festival and Instant Expert shows us who has done well/badly on soft ground as well as other useful stats...
Red marks against Ballybreeze, Ha D'Or and Effernock Fizz on soft ground and that latter pair have hardly excelled in Class 1 company, whilst Ha D'Or's record at the trip is also poor.
Pace always plays a big part here at Cheltenham and many runners either go off too quickly and get swallowed up later on or they hang too far off the pace and struggle to make up ground on that long energy-sapping incline before the finish. This is shown to some degree in the follow short distance chase stats from previous meetings...
...where hold-up horses have really taken the brunt of it. Ideally for an E/W runners we want an average pace score of around 2.00 to 3.00 and here's our field's last four runs...
And at this point, I'd have concerns about Dysart Dynamo and Ha D'Or on pace. Pace is also against Ballybreeze, as is the rise in class and his layoff since his last run, whilst Effernock Fizz also faces a rise in class and a poor pace profile. Straw Fan Jack also comes off a lay-off and is up in class, whilst Hollow Games may also need a run, meaning that only Saint Roi has avoided any negatives in the process so far.
He did unseat his rider last time out, but in his penultimate start he did land a Grade 1 contest. That was Hollow Games' last appearance and he was 22 lengths further back. All things considered, I'm having Saint Roi as 'best of the rest'
Summary
We fairly quickly got to Saint Roi being our outlier and at 9/1 with bet365, looks a useful third choice in the race. As for our two at the top of the market, there won't be much in it, but El Fabiolo is rated 3lbs better than Jonbon who in turn scored better on Instant Expert. As for pace, El Fabiolo edges here, as Jonbon might get sucked into an early battle and when the two met at Aintree last year Jonbon only prevailed by a neck, despite El Fabiolo being hampered and then making a mistake.
There won't be much in it, wouldn't a dead heat be exciting? But if push comes to shove, I'm going El Fabiolo / Jonbon / Saint Roi.