A good chunk of the field can be dismissed on the grounds of age: No horse under the age of 6 years has ever won this race and very few over the age of 8. The sweet spot age range is 6yo to 8yo.
Too much hurdling experience also goes against candidates and once again, several 'over-raced' individuals can be dismissed on these grounds including the red hot favourite, Big Bucks.
No Irish-trained horse has ever won this race and in spite of the general great record of the Irish in the Festival, I'm sorry to say this statistic goes against Mr. Mullins and co.
Finally, the market is a good indicator for the race in that the winner is usually in the top three in the betting. This leaves only two horses in the field, Karabak and Sentry Duty. But the latter falls foul of one more notable fact about past winners of this race namely that all have won a graded hurdle in the run-up to the race.
Big Buck's should not have been dismissed so early since he smashed the trend here of past winners never having run more than twenty hurdle races in their career before coming here. Had the second horse, Time for Rupert, won, he too would have broken the trend of the market leaders always winning this.
Keys: Unpenalized 9PFF, jockeyship
The general profile suggests looking for the best form horse using 9PFF. If the horse is weight penalized
and unless he has a claiming jockey (claiming 5lb or more and preferably a JFN/sr leader) to off-set most/all of the penalty,
consider him for a place. Otherwise go with unpenalized 9PFF leader pref. strong JFN/sr jockey.
Spoilers:Race experience leader/TFC/vol #2
The spoiler was an indicator to the 16/1 winner here, Quatro Pierji since he was the leader in the
field on race experience (had the most jumps races behind him) and though his trainer was not a course leader, in a field where
only one trainer had won two in previous weeks, of those five who had won one, Moffatt has a respectable joint 3rd strike rate of 10%
but most notably his win was just two days ago in the Cheltenham Festival- the 33/1 shot Chief Dan George indicating that the stable
is rather hot right now.
For the NH profile analysis record: Sagas (213) and Vannin (222) were joint leaders on 9PFF but Sagas was penalized with no offset
though he did carry the JFC narrow leader on vol but by no means a dominator. No other 9PFF horse in the field so in fact
the winner's 9PFF (458) could be considered next best. Winner was leader on race experience with 11 starts compared to
Cocoa Key who had 8 (and a trainer 4th on vol/c with 13) and Sagas who had 7 (and also a trainer 2nd on vol/c with 16). If the
profile could be tweaked here, I'd change just the spoiler note to reflect a 'notable' trainer rather than just TFC/vol. Also
I'd indicate spoiler conditions may be activated by 9PFF leader/previous winner present carrying penalty.
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