#Strategic7© #NH14
A project based on combining patience, flexibility and analysis. Ultimately a test of winner-finding skill, the project centres on the Cheltenham Festival but can incorporate any key Graded race along the way in a bid to accumulate all winners in one bet. The approach is underpinned by a very simple philosophy: the winners of top-end high class National Hunt Graded races are rarely ever a surprise and the physical and mental characteristics that are revealed by the winner through and after the race are accessible and identifiable just as much prior to the race. For a select number of races those characteristics can be evaluated a long way in advance owing to the specific high-class demands placed upon horses in order to win those events.
Six of the seven strategic races are therefore at the Cheltenham Festival with the seventh being the King George VI Chase. The latter is an obvious race to target: almost always the race is won by the horse with the highest level of residual class suited to the race distance regardless of ground and opponents. Horses are in effect targeted at the race anything up to eight months in advance allowing substantial assessment time.
The six Cheltenham Festival races are the Arkle Chase, the Champion Hurdle, the Ryanair Chase, the Queen Mother Champion Chase, the World Hurdle and the Gold Cup Chase. With the exception of the Arkle Chase the novice events are avoided for this project for obvious reasons: they have their own structure which is no less accessible but requires a much deeper level of information that only reveals itself closer to the event. The Arkle Chase is, however, an excellent long-range analytical race.
Identifying the King George winner acts as a significant price accelerator for the Festival events. In theory any race winner(s) can act as an accelerator: other projects could see the King George as the culminating race following a Betfair Chase, Charlie Hall Chase or the popular Paddy Power Handicap Chase and so on but the #Strategic7 races are the most solid and consistent in terms of expected performance and repeatable factors.
The project has two core elements. The first is the skill of winner-finding. There is no place in the project for the flawed concept of 'value'. The task is to identify the winner of each race regardless of man-made abstractions because those winners will be permed together to generate large odds. Prices are therefore irrelevant also. What matters is the accumulation of big-race winners not a result from any one race in isolation (although that is obviously possible). Idealistically most of the races would require only one selection to keep accumulation perms to a minimum but whilst that is highly unlikely so also is the idea that including four or five selections for every race is acceptable: if it were that simple there would be no need for the skill of winner-finding. Nonetheless that skill is insufficient on its own in a sport that features elements of chance and misfortune giving rise to the second core element: perming.
At the 2013 Cheltenham Festival the idea behind #Strategic7 was trialled in a loose way: analytically strong but lacking serious structure. The World Hurdle was omitted until the day owing to the absence of the superstar, Big Buck's. Starting with the King George VI Chase the 'Super Six' yielded results of 11F11F. The winners came from strong analysis but the lack of structural rigour was laid bare in the races where the selections fell: they were the sole representatives and as such there was no back-up plan for misfortune or, more simply, an undesirable scenario despite plausible alternatives being available (at an added cost). Given how straightforward those two races were (both favourites won) there is no difficult or random reason why the Super Six did not yield a winning accumulation - it was simply a case of an approach not yet tested or polished. Nor does that infer that for #NH14 the #Strategic7 will simply be a case of tweaking a given set of criteria: the work remains hard, long and enjoyable but 2013 - including similar work in the Graded novice events - showed how with that work exceptional rewards become available. More to follow..
A project based on combining patience, flexibility and analysis. Ultimately a test of winner-finding skill, the project centres on the Cheltenham Festival but can incorporate any key Graded race along the way in a bid to accumulate all winners in one bet. The approach is underpinned by a very simple philosophy: the winners of top-end high class National Hunt Graded races are rarely ever a surprise and the physical and mental characteristics that are revealed by the winner through and after the race are accessible and identifiable just as much prior to the race. For a select number of races those characteristics can be evaluated a long way in advance owing to the specific high-class demands placed upon horses in order to win those events.
Six of the seven strategic races are therefore at the Cheltenham Festival with the seventh being the King George VI Chase. The latter is an obvious race to target: almost always the race is won by the horse with the highest level of residual class suited to the race distance regardless of ground and opponents. Horses are in effect targeted at the race anything up to eight months in advance allowing substantial assessment time.
The six Cheltenham Festival races are the Arkle Chase, the Champion Hurdle, the Ryanair Chase, the Queen Mother Champion Chase, the World Hurdle and the Gold Cup Chase. With the exception of the Arkle Chase the novice events are avoided for this project for obvious reasons: they have their own structure which is no less accessible but requires a much deeper level of information that only reveals itself closer to the event. The Arkle Chase is, however, an excellent long-range analytical race.
Identifying the King George winner acts as a significant price accelerator for the Festival events. In theory any race winner(s) can act as an accelerator: other projects could see the King George as the culminating race following a Betfair Chase, Charlie Hall Chase or the popular Paddy Power Handicap Chase and so on but the #Strategic7 races are the most solid and consistent in terms of expected performance and repeatable factors.
The project has two core elements. The first is the skill of winner-finding. There is no place in the project for the flawed concept of 'value'. The task is to identify the winner of each race regardless of man-made abstractions because those winners will be permed together to generate large odds. Prices are therefore irrelevant also. What matters is the accumulation of big-race winners not a result from any one race in isolation (although that is obviously possible). Idealistically most of the races would require only one selection to keep accumulation perms to a minimum but whilst that is highly unlikely so also is the idea that including four or five selections for every race is acceptable: if it were that simple there would be no need for the skill of winner-finding. Nonetheless that skill is insufficient on its own in a sport that features elements of chance and misfortune giving rise to the second core element: perming.
At the 2013 Cheltenham Festival the idea behind #Strategic7 was trialled in a loose way: analytically strong but lacking serious structure. The World Hurdle was omitted until the day owing to the absence of the superstar, Big Buck's. Starting with the King George VI Chase the 'Super Six' yielded results of 11F11F. The winners came from strong analysis but the lack of structural rigour was laid bare in the races where the selections fell: they were the sole representatives and as such there was no back-up plan for misfortune or, more simply, an undesirable scenario despite plausible alternatives being available (at an added cost). Given how straightforward those two races were (both favourites won) there is no difficult or random reason why the Super Six did not yield a winning accumulation - it was simply a case of an approach not yet tested or polished. Nor does that infer that for #NH14 the #Strategic7 will simply be a case of tweaking a given set of criteria: the work remains hard, long and enjoyable but 2013 - including similar work in the Graded novice events - showed how with that work exceptional rewards become available. More to follow..
No comments:
Post a Comment