Great finish to Cheltenham
“Phew, that’s it then”. That was my feeling at the end of play today. An exhausting but rewarding Cheltenham. The gold cup was an excellent race and one that lived up to expectations, it’s really nice to enjoy the racing. We will be brought back done to earth for sure today! I have never had a good Saturday on Cheltenham week. If I do manage to pull a good day out of the hat, I’ll be in touching distance of a record week. Realistically though, I am expecting a bit of a slog today; the racing doesn’t look great.
In total, matched bet turnover on Cheltenham at Befair was £83.1m at this year (at post time), last year it was £84.2m. In only 12 out of 28 races did the turnover exceed last year. On a like for like basis turnover should have been in the region of £89.4m. Most amount of matched bets on one horse was £4.7m on Big Bucks.
For the final day I think I have to give myself nearly 10/10 but not quite. A really good day but not perfect as it didn’t contain a record race, but the overall total was highly satisfactory. I managed to bag £555 on the Gold cup which was satisfactory, but it wasn’t the best result of the day. Overall I was very consistent from start to finish and had a clean sweep with good results across the card. I continued my strategy of trading on both Betfair and Betdaq, but it was so intense that I came unstuck at one point. I was so busy that I failed to exit correctly on Betdaq and ended up with some money in-running, not a great idea on Betdaq. As a result, unable to exit, it ended up as a gamble and, as expected, it went against me and I lost £262 on that race. However all was forgotten on the next race when I trounced that loss with a profit of greater magnitude on the upside.
I’ve been really busy trying a couple of different things this Cheltenham and collecting more high quality data and it’s been a very satisfactory week on both counts. If I made one mistake this week it was being too timid on Betfair. But that’s not a great surprise given the lack of confidence in the stability of the site recently. The big upside this year came from Betdaq, I’ve always hinted that Betdaq works well at big meetings but it was on fire this week. Because the fill rate was higher on the Purple, that made it very favourable. Is this a tipping point?
I think this year was harder than ever, but I still managed to do OK and that gives me confidence for the rest of the year. I do plan to have a different 2011 though, I’ll update you at some point. I hope you had a good week!
Category: Horse Racing
