If you’ve got any spare time over the weekend, dear reader, you may very well be spending it poring over the form for next week’s monster monster Cheltenham Festival 2011.
I’ve already started a couple of days ago, and I’m starting to formulate my ideas on the likely winners and best value outsiders. I actually have high hopes of winning next week at Cheltenham.
If you can’t readily say the same, then I’d strongly recommend you taking a look at Gavin Priestley’s excellent, fantastic, and otherwise different class Cheltenham Festival Trends manual (if you haven’t already).
Now in the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you that Gavin is my best friend, and that I am godfather (not in the Don Corleone way!) to his son, Dylan. That’s not the reason I’m telling you about Festival Trends (or FT for short).
FT is, quite simply, the best researched, best laid out, most comprehensive race by race analysis available. And I use that phrase advisedly as I’ve seen all of them. I’ve got all of them.
For each race at Cheltenham, the layout is as follows:
- Race History
- Recent Trends
- Interesting trends facts
- How the top fancies fit the profile (easy to view grid)
- Breakdown of recent winners (last decade)
- Age, favourites, and pace analysis
- Breeding analysis
- Trainer analysis
- Key trials and a review of who did what in each
- The final ‘eliminator’ to leave a best trends selection and a ‘Nag Ratings’ top three or so
In total it amounts to around 130 pages when the elimination element is added in. And that’s another point about FT. It’s not a static document. Once you download all of the above info, there are updates each night before the next day’s racing, where Gavin adds his final thoughts, as well as his placepot perms for each day of the Festival.
And in the members’ area right now there’s also his ante-post four to follow. Bizarrely, and this is almost unheard of, I actually agree with him on three of them! Normally, when we agree on the same horses we’re not far wide of the mark. Like I say, it doesn’t happen very often…
The cost of Festival Trends is
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