After looking at the likelihood of big odds winners at the Festival in his last blog, Spread Betting tips for the Cheltenham Festival, Billy Blakeman looks at how we can profit from Cheltenham festival favourites.
There is no better way to ensure an interest in all 27 of this year’s festival races than to buy or sell the performance of the favourites across the meeting. Every race will have one of course, no matter which horses don’t make the final line-up and this is an interesting and fun market to get involved with. The scoring is simple – 25 points are awarded for a winning favourite, 10 for a second place and 5 for a third. Note that if there are joint favourites, the horse with the lowest racecard number will be deemed the favourite for this market. If you don’t have a spread betting account, now is the time to open one with some very generous free bet offers from both Sporting Index and Extrabet.
One of the things that makes this market intriguing, is the fact that we do not yet know which horse will be sent of as favourite in many of the races; in fact that goes for all the races really! So where do we start? Well lets find both ends of the rope. At one end, we have some of the big handicaps where the favourite might currently be 8/1+ and there are maybe a dozen possible favourites at this stage. This kind of race is difficult to assess therefore as we would be guessing the favourite’s name, never mind assessing how we think it will perform.
On the other end of the scale, we have Quevega in the DN Mares hurdle who is likely to be around even money or even odds-on. It is reasonable to assume Willie Mullins mare will be the designated favourite and we can form an opinion on how she will perform. There are other warm favourites of course, Cue Card and Time For Rupert spring immediately to mind. It is these races that we need to assess in detail to determine a view on the favourite rather than the races where there is great uncertainty. If I think Quevega will run poorly and don’t particularly subscribe to Cue Card, on those two opinions alone it is very unlikely I should be buying the favourites but I would probably be looking to sell. Basically, you need to concentrate on the races where you have more visibility and accept that something like the County Hurdle is not easily read.
The Coral Cup, the Pertemps Final, County Hurdle etc. warrant an additional mention. By normal probability, we would expect to see only one winning favourite in 10 years so when the stats fans trot out that the Coral Cup is a bad race for favourites etc, that is misleading. These difficult handicaps are the friend of the Festival Favourites buyers. This is because only a small return in terms of points would be expected from these races. I won’t go through the maths here but a winning County Hurdle favourite will effectively earn you far more points than the spread firm judged would be the case. Remember, the spreads are a mathematical calculation so a 9/1 favourite can equally be called a 9/1 outsider given the relatively small expectation of success. If three or four of this type of race go to the day of race favourite, backers will probably have a superb meeting.
By contrast, horses like Quevega, Cue Card and Time for Rupert are the friends of sellers. Because there is a high expectation, then say if Qevega finished second, that would still be bad for buyers as she will earn less points than the spread firms allocated. If she fails to finish, that will be a very bad result for buyers.
So, to summarise, we can only take a ‘vanilla’ view of some of the races where the favourite could be one of many but we do need to look closely at the races with shorter priced known favourites and take a view on these races as these will effectively determine which way we should play.
A quick look down the AP markets shows that there are quite a few races where the favourite is reasonably strong and of course a few with 10/1 favs currently. I don’t have scope in this article to go through each race in detail but the current spread is 205-214 and my summary thoughts are;
I do not think Binocular will be strong in the Champion Hurdle market and I expect Menorah, or possibly Hurricane Fly to be favourite on the day. Quevega looks pretty bomb-proof, Cue Card I don’t have a strong opinion either way but if he doesn’t win, I think he will be placed and I like Imperial Commander. Overall, I tend to just favour buying and that does give you a positive interest throughout the Festival. Often the negative bet is better value for that reason but this is once a year and I think the favourites have a generally strong look this year so that’s the bet, even though I am mindful that in both 2008 and 2010, there were only 2 and 4 winning favourites respectively but this year could see revenge for favourite backers.