Nick Hardman of Betting Insiders (http://dailypunt.com/nickhardman) keeps sending winners our way and this week he looks at today's Doncaster card and tomorrows Aintree feature…
Weekend Racing Tips
Our mud-larks ran well at Ascot last weekend with Madame Chiang being the highlight winning at 12/1. Betfair backers would have been nicely rewarded with an SP of 18.
Not a lot of action this Friday, but I want to highlight the performance of Luca Cumani at Doncaster this season and he has a number of runners this afternoon.
We will also be taking a look at the Old Roan Chase from Aintree that takes centre stage on Saturday.
Luca Cumani is having a solid season and one track where he has done particularly well is Doncaster. Here are his statistics at the Yorkshire course this season to date:
Runs: 21
Wins: 8
Strike rate (% win): 38%
Strike rate (% place): 62%
Profit to level £1 stakes: £13.51
On Friday he runs:
1.50pm Dreamlike
3.30pm Sleeper King @25/1 (e/w ¼ odds, 5 places)
4.05pm Norway Cross @6/1
4.40pm Kleo @5/1
Dreamlike is a 2yo and Cumani has not had a 2yo winner at the course in the last 5 seasons (0-11).
I would not be overly concerned by that statistic as he has only had the two 2yo runners up at Doncaster this season.
Overall his juveniles are 7-34 this year at a highly respectable strike rate of 21%.
Dreamlike made an encouraging debut and there is likely more to come. The market could be quite informative of her chances and she could go well at a price.
Sleeper King has failed to progress from a promising 2yo campaign and he has shown nothing in 4 starts this year (form figures 0000). However, this is his first run for Cumani having previously been with Kevin Ryan. Caution is advised if you decide to back him.
Norway Cross is interesting up in trip having won at Windsor last time out and Kleo is still unexposed after two wins this season and a LTO fourth in a Listed race at Yarmouth in September. These two appear to have the best chances of the quartet.
The jumps season is starting to gather momentum and this Saturday sees the Old Roan Chase at Aintree.
This year’s renewal looks wide open and a case can be made for many including current favourite Uxizandre, Module, Rajdhani Express and last year’s winner Conquisto.
At the prices I think there is a bit of value in Conquisto to retain his crown if the ground stays good.
A lot of the higher rated horses in this race will have other targets such as the Paddy Power Gold Cup and the Cheltenham festival whereas this looks like Conquisto’s main target.
He is 4lbs lower than when winning this last year and I think he could well have been laid out for this.
As an each-way alternative then Astracad could outrun his price, especially as he seems to save some of his better performances for Aintree (including a decent 2nd in this last year).
In 2013 he ran in a 2 ½ mile handicap chase at the Cheltenham October meeting a week before lining up for this. He has followed exactly the same path this year and with the Twiston-Davies horses running well he can give each-way backers a decent run for their money.
If the rain arrives and there is a change in the going to soft then Wishfull Thinking would have to enter calculations. His last 3 wins have come on heavy, soft and soft going. He is rated 162 but he won twice off this mark last season.
Saturday Aintree 3.00pm
Conquisto @7/1 (if the ground remains good)
Each-way alternatives: Astracad @14/1 & Wishfull Thinking @14/1 (soft or worse)
Newspaper Tipsters
Do you follow a newspaper tipster?
I'm guessing a large part of the betting public do, whether that be a regular tabloid tipster or a specialist newspaper tipster, which these days means one of the Racing Post columns.
I've just been looking at the Racing Post Naps Tables and Tipster Challenge Tables.
In the Press Challenge which pays a first prize of £2,000 to the top tipster at the end of the year there are only twelve entries.
Two of those are The Favourite and Top Course Trainer, which I guess are included to give some context to the tipster performance but probably also to make yp the numbers!
The Press Challenge table is also interesting for the data that it doesnt include as much as it is for what is presented.
It is a year long competition and each tipster starts with a £1,000 starting bank and one pound is staked on each tip. The tipster with the biggest bank at the end of the year wins the prize, but the table doesnt show the size of those yearly banks in the table.
IE we don't know what loss has been made so far this year by each tipster.
What is does show is the monthly profit or loss to £1 stakes, they obviously have the annual figures to date, but I guess it would be demoralising to punters to show them 🙁
If anybody has these tables from the printed Racing Post from the last day of each month so we could build up an annual figure that would be useful?
So what do we get? For the annual stats all we get is the number of tips and the number of winners and a strike rate.
Favourites have won 36% of races this year. I don't quite understand the turnover column but I'm guessing it means how many races the tipster bets on and that the favourites are less than 100% because of joint favourites etc. If anybody knows different then please let me know in the comments.
The Suns Templegate has a 27% strike rate but only selects 48% favourites.
We get profit and loss facts about Naps, which I assume is for the month and that shows Templegate Naps at + 9 points, the negative figures from other tipsters are not big enough for this to be the year to date figures.
Where we get the most info is in the month to date.
This month favourites are winning with + 28.81 from 403 bets, not great but this is at industry SP and as it's favourites we would expect them to return a loss in line with the average over-round. So favourites are over performing this month, so far!
The only other tipster in profit this month is Patrick Weaver from The Star who is +6.44 from 382 bets.
Interestingly Top Course Trainer shows a big loss for the month and a terrible strike rate for the year.
You can check out this data for yourself here http://www.racingpost.com/news/tips_home.sd#topHorseTabs=press_challenge_form
I'm going to make a note to collect the tables at the end of each month to see if we can glean anything worthwhile from them in the future.
Today's Selection
3:30 Plumpton Fred Le Macon – eachway bet – 8/1 Paddy Power, Bet 365
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