The Paddy Power Cheltenham Gold Cup A Horse Form Approach

 

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I love this graded handicap race at my favourite national hunt racing track.
I am getting  a bit long in the tooth now and will not be attending.
Its a funny race and some years it can be quite an easy race to assess and others very difficult. 

Why is it a difficult race?

In my opinion the following horse form variables are key to this race,

Weight the horse carries in the race based on its current horse form.

Distance in past races the horse has competed in.

Penalty values in past races the horse has competed in.

Now the above are basic horse form variables and any seasoned punter should know this for any race type they are assessing.

The fly in the ointment!

I will simply make the statement "Handicap Blot"!

In other words the horse is well weighted and has bags of future potential.

Now lets us look at the above statements, what do they mean?

In simplistic terms the horse is better than its true mark and this is difficult to see as the current horse form does not highlight this.

Now we can branch into two directions here with horse form for this race and these are as follows,

1. Use existing horse form and work around this great Paddy Power past race statistics.

2. Make a judgment and a very good judgment at that at watching past races for "Handicap Blots" in other words look for horses not struggling
at the business end of a race.

Number 2 above requires quite a bit of skill and comes with practice but 1 above should be familiar with everyone and I will show you a few things here in reading horse form for this great race on Saturday.

An Approach for Statistics and horse form for the Cheltenham Paddy Power.

1. Check the weight of past 20 or 30 years winning weights for this race. Now this is simple but do punters follow it?

No, if not you are mostly likely guessing. Do you think a horse carrying 11st 10llbs over 2m 4f in this race against horses and good horses on the rise carrying 10st 11llbs is a good thing. Now there is a reason for the former carrying  11st 10llbs! But horses become exposed and as the old saying goes weight slows horses down.

Now we cannot just make this statement above and assume every thing is rosy in the garden with weight its not that simple. We need to factor in other horse form variables like distance and class off opposition in past races. Then wee need to understand if the horse has potential for improvement by reading the race commentary's of past races or the horse is it hitting  a class ceiling at the weight comparing todays race weight. I will make this bold and important statement you must read between the lines of past race horse commentaries and their you will find the golden nuggets and also the slack.

Now this has served me well over the past years and it is a art form and once you crack this you will love handicap races whether graded or Class 6 in all racing codes.

Some pointers here for this great race.

SP Stats
Weights Stats
Age stats

Now look for frequencies of the above values over set number of years and work the horse form around this and factor past race comments.

Now a word of caution two anomalies for this race

weight <= 10st 5llb or >+ (11st 7llb)--------Occurs less frequent in terms of winners.

SP <= 14/1 High frequency of winners and look for clusters.

Encapsulate the above stats with honest horse form work and analysis and you cannot go wrong here.

Two selections for the Paddy Power  race 13th November 20206

Available in the morning on race day.