Stat of the Day, 18th November 2012
Stat of the Day
Stat of the Day, 18th November 2012
Firstly, a warm welcome to all new Stat of the Day followers, especially those who our friends at More Money Review invited. I hope you enjoy this daily feature, and please remember that it’s not magic, and we have more losers than winners. The trick, of course, is to ensure that the winners more than pay for the losers, something we’ve managed quite successfully since starting exactly a year again.
Indeed, it was SotD’s first birthday yesterday and, unfortunately, William Buick hadn’t bought us a card. The normally excellent jockey was asleep in the stalls and forgot to remove the hood from Resplendent Alpha. Here’s the Sporting Life result comment:
Rider removed blind late, slowly away in rear, some late headway on outer final furlong
Hmm. In fact, having lost eight lengths at the start, he was beaten less than five at the finish. We don’t generally make excuses here at SotD, but that has to be marked down as unlucky.
Onwards, and today we’re looking at the Southern National, a three and a half mile handicap chase around the only remaining figure of eight jumps course in Britain. It’s the…
As some of you will know, I recently gave away a free system which focused on a handful of trainers who excel with handicap runners. One of the five in that manual was David Bridgwater. ‘Bridgy’ is having an excellent year, and his fancied handicappers (priced 12/1 or shorter) have won 13 of 47 starts for a profit of 28.84 points at Betfair SP in 2012.
Bridgwater’s record at Fontwell is pretty good too: he’s won seven of the fifteen handicaps in which he’s had a runner priced 12/1 or shorter… and four of the six he’s entered this year! That’s worth a profit of twenty points, and one of the key elements of that healthy balance sheet is today’s selection, Double Chocolate.
Double Chocolate is a bit of a Fontwell specialisit. Indeed, of the four races he’s won, three have been on this quirky ‘horses for courses’ track. And all four of his wins have been within a furlong of the extreme three and a half mile trip. In other words, he likes it here. He’s won three times on good ground and once on soft, so today’s good to soft should be fine too.
His recent form of 1P7R1312218 becomes 1R11 when distilled to Fontwell only. The ‘R’ was a ‘ran out’, when Double Choc bucked and kicked his way to the first and swerved the fence. Obviously not an attractive trait, but that seemed to be a one off, and he’s won his other three starts here.
This represents a small step up in class, from Class 4 to Class 3, but he’s earned that by consistently winning in that lower grade (all four wins in Class 4).
Double Chocolate sneaks in here off almost bottom weight, and looks to have everything in his favour for a big run. It’s a competitive race, as befits prize money of £11,000, and at the 9/1 available an each way bet is the suggestion.
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