The Cheltenham Festival / Jack Houghton / 14 March 2011 /

Even if you can't swan off to Prestbury Park for the week, or even watch the action on TV, you can still have a profitable Cheltenham. Here's Jack Houghton's tips for the work bound bettor.

It's all very well for the various loafers and do-nothings that make up the betting industry: they get to go to the Festival - or at least sit in an office somewhere and watch it - on the pretence they are "working".

I know, because for five Festivals I lived that dream; each year slightly bemused - or should that be amused - that I was getting paid to do something I would happily pay to do myself.

The 2007 Festival gave a stark jolt back into real life. A new office. No television. No stack of Racing Posts on the front desk. No internet access to any sites of interest. No-one stopping-by to ask if Amaretto Rose was underpriced. No excuse good enough to explain my half-hourly absences. No City bookmaker providing quite the same atmosphere as Prestbury Park herself.

For the majority of racing fans, though, this is the reality. Our employers not realising that this is as close as we get to religious observance, we are reduced to placing our bets in the morning, and setting our television recorders in the vain hope we can shield ourselves from the results until we get home to watch those bets unfold.

What's worse is that with so much good racing, and so little time, it's very hard to properly assess what those bets should be. Thankfully, over the last five years, I've adopted some approaches that allow good decision making, even with limited time.

Time Saving Tip One: Use speed ratings

Speed ratings are never as predictive as they are at the Festival. Here's why. Outside of a few big-field handicaps, the vast majority of jump races are run relatively slowly in the opening stages. That means horses can establish impressive form figures without ever demonstrating they can handle the frenetic and sustained pace of a Festival race.

Look at the Arkle Chase. Ghizao [5.1] is well fancied, and yet in a list of the best speed ratings achieved by horses in the race, he appears at 12, out of 13 entries. Whilst he may have looked talented in his small-field victories earlier in the year, punters are taking a lot on trust to think he can be similarly impressive in the likely much speedier affair he will face on Tuesday. That's not to say he can't, but at such a short price, I won't be paying to find out.

So how to use speed ratings to save time?

First, choose the ratings you will use. Assuming you don't keep your own, this will likely mean using a commercially available service like Timeform. For the sake of this example, I will use the Racing Post's. Sure, I have some problems with how they arrive at their figures, but for the purposes of this exercise, they will more than suffice.

Second, find the best speed figure achieved by any horse in the race.

Third, eliminate any horse yet to run within 90 per cent of that figure.

There you have your field of contenders: a list of horses with a proven ability to run an end-to-end gallop.

In this year's Supreme Novices' the process is quite dramatic. Cue Card [3.35] posted an RP-figure of 153 when winning at Cheltenham in November. Looking for horses to have run 137 or better then (153 x 0.90) brings in only Spirit Son [7.2], Zaidpour [11.0], Hidden Universe [29.0], Dunraven Storm [34.0] and Sam Winner [70.0]. A field of 23 reduced to six in a couple of minutes.

In the next instalment of this working person's guide, I'll look at what to do next.

Open a Betfair account today and we'll double your winnings if you back a winner at the Cheltenham Festival

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