Sunday closes Cheltenham's November Meeting with six races on Good ground: nineteen runners in the Greatwood Hurdle, nine in the Tom Olliver Handicap Chase over almost three and a half miles, a maiden hurdle, two more handicap chases and a Listed bumper to finish.
This guide reads all six through our model. It is written for anyone who has never seen our numbers before: every figure is explained the first time it appears, and each race shows a different way of working with the data, from a maiden hurdle where we look past the model's top-rated horse, to a staying chase the model cannot separate, to a bumper where one runner's best form sits where the headline numbers do not reach. The framing of every race is open to everyone, a free account unlocks the complete analysis, and members get the live racecard underneath.
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TPR (Total Performance Rating) is EquiAnalytix's machine-learning rating. It turns everything we hold on a horse into its percentage chance of winning. It was tested on 836,398 runners rated before their races across GB and Irish racing from 2019 to 2026: the top-rated horse won 28.8% of the time and the top four included 72.7% of winners.
Our rating engine re-reads every horse's career after every run. Ability is the level a horse has proved it can run to. Oper, short for Operating, is the level it is ready to run to today. Both sit on the same scale as the official handicap mark, in pounds.
The gap between Oper and Ability, in pounds. A plus figure means a horse is running above its own proven level; a minus figure means it is running below it.
Ability sits on the same scale as the official handicap mark, so the two can be set side by side. When our Ability is higher than the mark, our numbers rate the horse more highly than the handicapper does. When it is lower, the handicapper thinks more of the horse than our engine does.
The engine reads jumps races in Britain and Ireland. A horse that has never run in one shows a blank beside Ability and Oper, and its percentage is then built from breeding, stable form and jockey. That covers a horse whose only run was in France, and Irish bumpers, which are called Flat Races in Ireland and are filed with Flat form. Those runs still appear, with their figures, in the horse's full form.
Every run earns a figure built from the time of the race and adjusted for its class, so runs at different tracks and in different grades can be compared. An easy win in a small field can earn a low figure, because the horse was never asked to run fast.
Yes. French races sit in our database alongside British and Irish ones, with performance figures on the same scale, so a horse's French runs can be read next to its British ones.
The level a horse has run to on ground like today's, at today's track and at around today's trip. A blank means it has never raced under those conditions.
On a handicap card we show each runner's current official mark beside the mark it last won from, and how far it is moving up or down in class.
The average performance figure of a sire's runners in today's kind of race, such as chases or bumpers, shown with the share of his runners that have won. A young sire's figure can rest on very few runners, and we say so when it does.
We read each runner's usual early position from its recent races and score the likely gallop from 0 (no pace at all) to 9 (very fast).
A yard's strike rate, winners divided by runners, over the last month, shown beside its figure for the year, along with the average performance figure of its runners.
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Fourteen horses who have never won over hurdles, and a good place to start if you are new to our numbers, because it shows both what they can do and where they run out. TPR, our Total Performance Rating, turns everything we hold on a horse into its percentage chance of winning. Here it makes OLD HABITS the top-rated on 21, with LION ROSE SIVOLA 15, MOURNE CRYSTAL 11, EN OR 9 and four more on 7 or 8. That is a clear enough order. But eleven of the fourteen have run three times or fewer in the races our rating engine reads, and two have not run in one at all, so the percentages are built on very little. In a race like this we would rather follow the best individual pieces of form in the field, and the two horses who own them are sixth and seventh on the model. We will show you why, and we will be straight about the risk: the model's own choice is neither of them.
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How do you rate a horse over fences when it has never jumped one in public? That is the question here, because the two horses at the top of TPR, CRYSTAL ISLAND on 20 and BLUE CARPET on 15, are making their chasing debuts. Behind them come BILL JOYCE on 11, with TURNDLIGHTSDOWNLOW, POURQUOI PAS PAPA and DIG DEEP on 9. Twelve run, nobody has more than a 20 per cent chance, and three of the first six on the model have never run in a chase.
Ten two-mile chasers, and the model has an order without having a standout: HIGHLANDS LEGACY 18, SHAKEYATAILFEATHER 14, LARZAC 13, JONY R and AUTHOCELTIC 12 each. In a handicap every horse carries weight according to its official mark, so the useful question is not who is best but who is best treated. Three things on our racecard help to answer it: a horse's mark against the mark it last won from, the class it is moving into or out of, and where our own Ability figure sits against the official one.
This is the hardest race on the card and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Nine run over almost three and a half miles, and seven of them sit between 10 and 15 per cent on TPR: U CANT BE SERIOUS 15, GUARD THE MOON and HOLOKEA 14, RESPLENDENT GREY, KING OF ANSWERS and DOUBLE POWERFUL 11, MONBEG GENIUS 10. When the model spreads its percentages this evenly it is telling you something useful, which is that it cannot separate them. The top-rated horse here has about one chance in seven.
Nineteen runners, and the top-rated horse has a 13 per cent chance. Read that the other way round: the model thinks there is an 87 per cent chance that something else wins. PIONEER PETE and TENNESSEE TANGO are both on 13, LET IT RAIN 11, HARRY LOWES and MISTER URSUS 8, THE MIGHTY CELT and THE KEMBLE BREWERY 7. This is the feature of the day, and a race where one number on our racecard does more work than any other.
The last race is a bumper, a Flat race for young jumps horses at the start of their careers, and nobody in it has run more than three times. TPR makes DUNDEE LAW the top-rated on 28, with CAMERON DE FIACRE 20, and LORD CHURCHILL and PAR AVION 14. With so little form, two things matter more than usual: the single best figure a horse has recorded, and how its sire's runners do in bumpers. On both, the model's second horse comes out ahead of its first.
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18+ | Please gamble responsibly | GamCare 0808 8020 133. All figures are EquiAnalytix proprietary ratings derived from our database of every UK and Irish race since 2009; they are analysis, not betting advice.