Special post: Day 1 Cheltenham

Some ratings that you can use / ignore as you like

Mar 10, 2025

For those who have known me a bit longer, you’ll know that I used to produce daily ratings. The aim of them is to provide a nice summary of race. They’re not intended to be a guaranteed predictor of success or profit/loss. I doubt that backing the top rated, or indeed blindly backing any combination would result in a profit. I also scrape various data sources from various places, so there might be one or two omissions or errors. Apologies.

But… I think they provide a helpful and occasionally provocative summary of a race in a shorter time than it would take to read the Racing Post. If you’re looking for a quick summary to aid your ITV7 selections or your placepots, or a nice outsider or a vulnerable favourite, you might find them useful.

None of the ratings tables necessarily contain my personal views and they’ve no connection with the system bets. Just use them as you like.

I’ll share these for the next 4 days, and maybe for Aintree. Feel free to comment with any questions or let me know your bets and placepots.

Hope you have a great week.

Guide to the ratings

The table provides a foundation Rating. This is a simple numerical score that represents the horse’s best recent. It’s not their best ever run (e.g. you’ll see Constitution Hill is not top of the table) but their best run in the last few months. This is my starting point to think what is a reasonable expectation of the best performance of the horse if conditions are in their favour. The ratings are adjusted for weight carried.
The next columns try to give a sense of whether conditions are indeed in their favour.
- Going: how has the horse performed previously on the forecast ground
- Course: how has the horse performed at Cheltenham
- Distance: how has the horse performed over the trip
There are four categories here:
- Strong+: Horse has performed at or very near its foundation rating on today’s conditions
- Positive: Horse has shown good form on today’s conditions
- Negative: Horse has underperformed on today’s conditions
- Unknown: No or insufficient data on today’s conditions for this horse
- Horses can always prove past performance wrong, but it gives a guide.
The final column shows the pace angels.
- 1-3 suggests the horse will be held up
- 4-6 suggests a middle of the pack runner
- 7-10 suggests a front runner or pace setter