Sat in hotel room half way between Cheltenham and Newcastle- breakfast doesn't open for half an hour so thought I'd give you a brief trot through yesterday's punter friendly day.
1) We started with our, also patented, bookie bingo book and the liabilities were spread across the field (Pied Piper, Knight Salute, Teddy Blue and Lunar Power) Vauban was a taker and won easily. Places were kind and a small win ensued- we felt bullet dodged and I reminded Kev that we got some of the "lost" profit on the 40/1 the previous night back there and then.
2) No such luck in the second as you can't avoid laying the top of the market in the big handicaps- State Man and West Cork maximum losers at head of betting along with Cormier half way down the market. Commentary rather sagely winner was "ahead of the handicapper" and another competitive looking handicap became another procession. Places were equally rotten which equated to our worst result of the week. For the 3rd day out of 4 we were miles behind after 2.
3) Best followed worst as we got stuck into Hillcrest and also had a couple of small losers in Minella Cocooner and Shantreusse. Jackpot v bogey and, as we had in many races, we came out the right side to register our best win of the week with The Nice Guy who we had barely laid.
4) Ach, Rachael. You had to spoil our fun didn't you? The best betting heat of the week (of course) was a choose your loser job a long way out as 2 of our 3 bogeys finished 1st and 2nd (the other being Galvin) We were never in it and our chance of the bumper, bumper jackpot passed us by for another year and a significant loss chalked up.
5) So this was a weird one in every way. We had a lovely guy who'd won a lump on A Plus Tard and reinvested a couple of very chunky bets on Winged Leader and Bob and Co. We proceeded to chase the fav in to get the liabilities down to a reasonable level and, despite taking plenty for Billaway it was still a small winner on the off with the aforementioned horses still our 2 bogeys. Winged Leader looked a certain winner over the last but was nabbed on the line by the jolly and with the places dodged it was a surprisingly nice win for us. Memories of the previous night now completely banished with our good fortune here.
6) Another big lump on Mount Ida framed our book and was our only loser for our maximum. This looked like the result of the week for us as the 2 rags battled it out with Scarlet and Dove being our preferred winner until Elimay passed them both and broke our hearts. We generally want a big priced runner to win but not to place and the each way payouts negated most of the small profit we had on Elimay
7) Eyes down, look in for another game of CairnBet bingo where we laid 4 of the top 6 in the market (Langer Dan, Adamantly Chosen, Chemical Energy and Cobblers Dream) with the other 2 big winners. As they turned in there were 5 with a realistic price in running and 3 of the bogeys were there so we were grateful to dodge a bullet with Banbridge getting up despite it being our worst winner and a savaging in the place market.
Right, that's it, apologies for the brevity but I can smell the bacon and Newcastle awaits. We felt we had as good a day as we could overall on what could've easily been a 5-2 losing day but, of course, it's difficult to really cash in with so many short priced ones going in. We didn't really get any of the hotpots chinned all week with the exception of Shishkin for a half result and that was reflected in our reasonable but not spectacular performance over the week. We felt we probably got about as much out of it as we could have in fairness and left feeling bullets dodged in the main.
On a final note more races is not the answer. The racing was pretty uncompetitive for large parts and the short priced ones pretty much all won incredibly easily and a further dilution runs the risk of the ring being dominated by "betting without" and "forecast" markets becoming more prevalent in order to offer something competitive looking market wise which surely cannot be the way forward.
Newcastle today and blog, probably, tomorrow. Until then...
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