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1 day ago | 
racingpost.com | Keith Melrose |Jack Haynes
The major differences between the Highland National and Saturday's bet365 Gold Cup are the quality of runners and the ground conditions. The going at Sandown on the last day of the season is usually good nowadays. Meanwhile, 70 per cent of meetings at Perth, which races only between April and September, have the word 'soft' in the going description. On the quality point, the topweight at Perth would have been out of the handicap at Sandown seven times out of nine in the last decade.
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6 days ago | 
racingpost.com | Keith Melrose |Lewis Porteous
While his domination of the Grand National and its Scottish cousin might suggest otherwise, Willie Mullins greatest strength in depth is still with hurdlers and all six of his runners on Plumpton's valuable Easter Sunday card are over hurdles. They include four in the feature Sussex Champion Hurdle. Among them are a dual Cheltenham Festival winner (Sir Gerhard), a County Hurdle and Ebor winner (Absurde) and the Irish Champion Hurdle second (Daddy Long Legs).
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6 days ago | 
racingpost.com | Keith Melrose |Lewis Porteous
There are five yards represented by the six runners in this race and we can quickly run through the reasons all are here. For Gary and Josh Moore, responsible for Havaila, Plumpton is a favoured local track. Chris Gordon, who runs Unanswered Prayers, has this £35,000 race named in his honour by the sponsors. Taken just on those terms, their cases are less persuasive than the reasons for the other four turning up.
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1 week ago | 
racingpost.com | Keith Melrose |Lewis Porteous
Musselburgh has been busy since the start of the turf season. That is unlikely to be an accident. In March and April, the ground can be testing enough for Flat horses and the Scottish track's links setting makes it more resistant than most to the mud. This year, which has been unusually dry, has done away with any concerns about testing ground, and after another dry, breezy week, Musselburgh is bound to be quick underfoot. The other major factor on the five-furlong course is the draw.
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2 weeks ago | 
racingpost.com | Keith Melrose
The newest addition to the Racing Post's award-winning app is the Smart View card. This turns the traditional racecard into a product fit for the 21st century. All the do-it-yourself elements, which have necessarily been condensed into an arcane shorthand over the years, are now contained in six colour-coded bars, following a traffic light-like system, to represent scores out of 100. These six scores are then combined into a weighted average, which is presented as the Smart View score.
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2 weeks ago | 
racingpost.com | Keith Melrose
You can tell Willie Mullins was not planning his raid on the British trainers' title before he took £860,000 out of the Grand National. Entries for Ayr's valuable Friday card were made four hours before Nick Rockett won at Aintree and Mullins' name was completely absent. Conversely, when 60 entries landed for the Scottish Grand National on March 25, Mullins trained 13 of them. He had thought far enough ahead to not get caught short in one of the most valuable races left in the British season.
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3 weeks ago | 
racingpost.com | Keith Melrose
Racing Post Smart View is now available to users of the Racing Post's app, for all races in Britain and Ireland. It is the definitive modern racecard, condensing the old, jargon-heavy cards familiar from betting shop walls into a couple of square inches on a smartphone screen. The intention with Smart View has always been to fit as much of that old information, which is known from our research to be valuable to bettors, into the scores for each horse in the six categories.
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3 weeks ago | 
racingpost.com | Keith Melrose
The second running of a race after significant changes is always a challenge to analyse. Will this year's Grand National revert to type? Or are the differences we saw last year set to become a fixture of the race's character? Analysts will often roll their eyes at 'recency bias', the idea of the latest bit of evidence being given too much weight. Yet something that looks very much like recency bias exists in most predictive models.
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3 weeks ago | 
racingpost.com | Keith Melrose |Graeme Rodway |Robbie Wilders
In the latest in our new series, Graeme Rodway, Keith Melrose and Robbie Wilders collaborate to find the best bet of the day at Aintree. Here they outline their collective thinking. Graeme Rodway: I think we have to go after the Topham today, lads. It’s basically six places across the board and I’ve got my eye on a proper course specialist. Can you guess who it is? Keith Melrose: It’s not Latenightpass is it, Rodders? Because if it is, you could be on to something.
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3 weeks ago | 
racingpost.com | Keith Melrose
The Topham is famous for what it shares with the Grand National, but as a race it is most interesting where it differs. Being 40 per cent shorter is an obvious variance, and that difference manifests in more than just stamina demands. Two of the three races over the National fences at this meeting, the other being the Foxhunters', are run over this 2m5f trip. Comparing how different run styles fare across the three races very quickly reveals a strong secondary effect in the 2m5f races.
