The Chester Vase

It’s the start of the Chester Boodles festival today, and the feature race is the 15:35 Chester Vase run over one mile and four furlongs. There are eight declared runners, and I’m going to take a look at the race and break it down into the selections that I’m going to personally be betting on.

The first thing to note, is that the weather is, quite honestly, crap. It’s pouring with rain and the race course going has already gone from good to good-soft and I would expect it to end up soft by the end of the day.

So make sure that you bear that in mind when you make your selections!

There are eight declared runners, and one of them, Gentile Bellini, is already a non-runner.

The current market favourite is King Ottokar at odds of 3.80, and our PR Odds agree that this horse should be favourite, Technician should be second favourite and Norway should be third favourite.

It’s worth mentioning that Norway is trained by A O’Brien who has a very good track record in this race!

I’m going to start by eliminating Arthur Kitt and Kaloor. Arthur Kitt because he hasn’t had a good race (DSLGR) for 319 days, and Kaloor because our PR Odds reckons he should have odds of 96.64.

Our Reynolds Ranking (RR) and the 5278 factor agree with each other that Norway is the best horse in the race. We can also see the AEEProCLL rating, which is a money class factor, shows Norway as being the strongest horse with the highest rating. All of this information gives this runner a boost in our analysis. It’s also worth noting that the horse is ranked second after Technician for the adjusted speed figure.

Looking at the speed charts for races on flat turf which are run on good-soft or soft ground shows us that there are fours horses which have previous history, and interestingly Norway is not listed.

We can see very quickly that King Ottokar and Dashing Willoughby are the two that look to be the most likely to perform the best.

Interestingly, if we hover over King Ottokar and Dashing Willoughby we can see the details of each of those races, as shown below:

This shows us that both these horses have run in almost identical races to achieve their best ratings, which would mean we can expect King Ottokar to beat Dashing Willoughby in this race as well.

If we remove the filter on these charts to show all races, we can see that Norway’s best race has been on good-firm, which means that it may not perform well now the ground is heading towards soft.

So far King Ottokar is looking like our strongest contenders.

I’ve made a quick race card just showing the best ever speed figures each horse has achieved over soft and soft-good ground conditions.

This shows us that on good-soft going (SHORBEGT6) Dashing Willoughby has a slightly higher best ever speed figure, but it’s only marginal, and on the soft going (SHORBEGT12) King Ottokar has the better one.

So where does this leave us?

Due to the weather conditions, and expecting the ground to stay on the softer side, King Ottokar looks to be the strongest contender in this race, and is going to be the selection I bet on. As he’s currently the favourite, I will be going for a win bet on him.