Aintree week was a good one. Six bets, five winners, four and a half points on the book. And the best bet of the week was nowhere near Liverpool. It was Miss Fedora at Plumpton on the Thursday, at 5.7, while everyone else was watching the first day of the big meeting.
She's a good example of the sort of horse I keep going on about, so I'll walk through her. Second favourite, not the favourite, in a small field on a Thursday afternoon. The form line had a poor run at the end of it, which was the reason she was 5.7 and not 3.5. The run before that she'd won, over the same trip, on the same sort of ground. The poor run was on ground she'd never handled, at a track that doesn't suit her, and the handicapper had still given her a couple of pounds back for it.
So the question was whether the last run told me anything about this one. It didn't. Which meant the price was paying me nearly five to one for a horse that had every right to be favourite, and she won by a good bit. She was on the members' card by nine with the reason underneath.
That's one bet in a week of six, and it made more than the other five put together. I don't say that to make it sound clever. I say it because it's the pattern. Most of the list is short ones that win a bit, and a few times a month there's a horse at 4 or 5 where the market has been put off by one bad figure and the rest of the line is screaming. Those are the bets that make the year. Though you only find them by reading every line, every day, including the ones that go nowhere.
Aintree itself I left mostly alone again, as I said I would. The prices at the big meetings are honest and short, and honest and short is the hardest combination to make money on. One place bet at Chelmsford the same day as Miss Fedora, which landed at 1.17 and paid for the coffee.
The National went to a horse I'd never have found and most people hadn't either. Good. That's what the race is for.
Lee
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More from the notebook: Four bets in Festival week, and none of them at Cheltenham · Royal Ascot, the week I watch