Festival week is done and I had four bets in it. All four were place bets. None of them were at Cheltenham. Three won, one didn't, and the book is level to the penny. I know how that sounds on a racing blog in March, so let me explain.
Last year the Festival was kind. Fact To File, Galopin Des Champs, a few places at tiny prices, and I wrote afterwards that Cheltenham is where favourites are honest. That's still true. What was different this year is that the honest prices were too short to be bets. The best horses in the championship races went off at 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 on the exchange, and a 1.4 shot that wins seven times in ten is a losing bet, however good it looks going down to the start.
So I kept looking, every morning, and every morning the answer was the same. Either the favourite was the best horse at a price that didn't pay, or the race was a twenty runner handicap I can't read. Four days of that, and the only bets that passed were place bets on the all weather. Sibyl Charm at Newcastle on the Wednesday, which got beaten. Time Tested at Chelmsford on the Thursday, which didn't. Two at Southwell on Gold Cup day, both landed, for pennies.
I won't pretend that was fun. The whole country is talking about Cheltenham and I'm checking a 1.11 place at Southwell. But fun isn't the job. The job is to only have a bet when the price is paying me for the risk, and in Festival week this year it wasn't.
There's a punter's rule I think about a lot, which is that the best bet at a big meeting is often the one you don't have. The market at Cheltenham is the sharpest of the year. Every price has been fought over for months by people with more information than me. The chance of finding a favourite the crowd has got wrong is smaller there than at Plumpton on a Monday, which is a strange thing to accept and an easy one to prove with a book. That discipline is most of what you pay for when you join the list.
Aintree in three weeks, where the prices are looser and I've done better. Then the flat, and the sand, and the months where the list earns its money quietly.
Lee
PS: I did have a tenner on the Gold Cup, for the day out. It isn't in the book. It didn't win.
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More from the notebook: Miss Fedora, and the Aintree week · Lingfield, the course that keeps me honest