Author Alan Potts shares his thoughts on Cheltenham Author Alan Potts shares his thoughts on Cheltenham Daily Telegraph columnist Ben Grundy takes a look at the next big event of the EPT...

Author of Against The Crowd, The Inside Track, plus other numerous articles, Alan is a full time professional punter and racehorse owner, he is regarded as something of a thinking man's expert. Here he shares his thoughts with INPLAY ahead of Cheltenham.

On Monday February 27th, the Racing Post front page read: “The big countdown starts today” to which my response was ‘if only!’ For many years now, we’ve been bombarded with prices, information and debate all winter long. What’s changed recently is that the rise of the internet forum has confirmed that the media and bookmakers were simply giving us what we wanted.

The Cheltenham Festival clearly dominates the thinking of many punters and everyone has that most dangerous thing – an opinion.

I reckon there’s a trap for punters in all this. It’s the risk of taking a fixed position long before all the relevant information is available. Do you know anybody that hasn’t already made up their mind about Beef Or Salmon and Iris’s Gift? But what if it rains for twenty four hours before the Gold Cup? Do you have the flexibility to recognise which prospects would be greatly improved by that admittedly unlikely event? Even if you do, it won’t help you much if you’ve laid them for your maximum and backed a couple of good ground horses as well.

That’s just an extreme example, but as we’ve seen in the last two years, horses can get injured, jockeys banned, connections can change their mind about which race to go for - and the clerk of the course can ‘improve on nature’ by watering the course. I’ve got great admiration for those who make a success of ante-post betting, but I much prefer to wait for the day and treat the Festival races just like any other meeting.

That leads me to what I see as the second potential problem for punters in this never ending flood of words: the feeling that Cheltenham races should be treated differently and analysed in more detail.

The pro punter is often seen as someone that spends hours every day poring over the form, but that’s never been my way. I prefer to keep things simple and use my time to watch the racing. I research ideas rather than specific races and I stick to that for the Festival. Given the sheer volume of analysis on offer for this meeting, how many hours would you have to spend with the form book to find something original anyway? It’s all factored into the prices already.

My main tool for any big race and certainly for the festival is past trends. This is an approach that has grown more popular in recent years, but it still provides a quick and easy way of establishing a short list for each race - without being a method that guides every user to the same horse. The basic rule for the Festival is to concentrate on young horses with good recent form, preferably with past form round Cheltenham and with a light weight if you’re looking at a handicap.

Ever since Cheltenham improved their drainage system in the 90’s, speed has been the dominant factor at the Festival. In NH races, speed almost always equates to youth – but everyone knows that already. I laid or opposed favourites like Baracouda, Brewster and Beechcourt on that basis. Moscow Flyer proved the exception, but that’s just the sort of result that encourages punters to dismiss the trend for youth and provide the backers to match my bets!

Last season, all the trends came together to produce a bet on Kelami in the 3M handicap chase - a 7-year-old, carrying 10st 2lbs, who’d run well in the same race 12 months earlier and had finished third at Haydock on his latest start. Unless you’re betting on all 24 races, you don’t need too many 8/1 winners to ensure a profitable week.

Apart from that, stable form is another key factor and one that can only really be assessed once the meeting has started. Last year, half the winners (6/12) on the final two days represented stables that had already had a winner on the first two days. That‘s something you simply can’t allow for in the ante-post market.

One last suggestion to help with the selection process is to look back for the best performance you’ve seen during the season at that distance. For example, regardless of anything else that happened in the run up to the Gold Cup last year, Kicking King had shown far more ability in the King George than any of his rivals had all season. That was the one race in the form lines that had the ‘wow’ factor. The one performance that sticks in my mind so far this season is Afsoun at Huntingdon. His combination of speed and fluent jumping produced a sparkling performance that really surprised me – I’d laid him that day!

A final thought. Have a plan that ensures you’re still staking the same way on Friday as you were on Tuesday - and if you get behind on the week, don’t chase your losses. Easy to say, harder to do, especially in the frantic atmosphere of Festival week. If you stop for ten seconds before making a bet and ask yourself ‘would I be having this bet if I was in profit’, that hole you’re digging might not become a tomb!

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