Golf Betting: Five outsiders to persevere with

Golf Bets / Paul Krishnamurty / 14 February 2012 / Leave a Comment

Rising star - Thorbjorn Olesen

"Thorbjorn Olesen has already been runner-up three times, and registered impressive top-20s amongst elite company in a couple more Gulf events recently."

With so many golfers capable of winning tournaments each week Paul Krishnamurty believes the markets have definitely underestimated some possible future winners. Want to know who? Read on.

Results over the past fortnight have gone some way towards vindicating a couple of themes about the new golf order that I've been laying out on these pages for several months.

Firstly, that prolific winners amongst the game's elite are becoming few and far between, meaning the favourites rarely represent good value anymore. As Rory McIlroy, Lee Westwood and Tiger Woods showed over the weekend, class does not necessarily equate to finishing the job.

Secondly, as there has never been such strength in depth on both main tours, on any given week it is possible to identify several plausible outsiders at crazy prices.

Last week it was the turn of Rafael Cabrera-Bello, a [250.0] chance with a promising reputation. The Spaniard had been a Find Me a 100 Winner pick for two of the last three Gulf events and although last week's column covered the PGA Tour, regular readers may be pleased to know I kept the faith. Unlike the previous fortnight, when another recent selection Kyle Stanley, fulfilled his promise on the PGA Tour.

Both were players with plenty of form over recent months, albeit without winning, but when big odds are frequently on offer, it pays to persevere. After all, one win in triple figures could, theoretically, pay for over two years worth of losing level-stakes bets on that player. Here's another five such candidates who regularly catch the eye at silly prices.

Thorbjorn Olesen

When this 22-year old Dane joined the European Tour last season, following a short successful Challenge Tour campaign, many experts identified him as a star of the future. He's already been runner-up three times, and registered impressive top-20s amongst elite company in a couple more Gulf events recently. Yet because, typically for a young player, Olesen has also missed more than his share of cuts, he's often a rank outsider. Before making the top-ten in Abu Dhabi, he was around the [500.0] mark.

Bernd Wiesberger

A similar story can be told about this 26 year-old Austrian entering his second season on the main tour. Wiesberger has made the top-five on four of his last 16 starts, yet was available at a mammoth [700.0] before last week's encouraging top-25 in Dubai. Those odds are simply wrong and sooner or later, the market is going to wise up.

(Both Wiesberger and Olesen were highlighted before a ball had even been struck this season by Mike Norman in his five rising stars to follow column)

Tom Lewis

Despite courting much attention after an impressive Open performance as an amateur and an immediate breakthrough in the professional ranks, the fickleness that characterises betting markets these days means Lewis can suddenly be found among the rags. That early win in Portugal may have prompted an overreaction, yet because he failed to deliver at cramped odds on continents where he had no past experience, Lewis was available at over [200.0] during the Gulf Swing. Those conditions didn't prove to his liking, but expect the young Englishman to make a big impression once again when the tour returns to mainland Europe.

David Horsey

Horsey probably lacks the long-term potential of the above trio, but is another persistently under-rated character. Having won an event in each of the last two seasons at big odds and put up several more good challenging performances, he certainly owes any regular followers nothing and after a slow start to 2012, may again be wrongly dismissed by the market. As one of the world's best putters, Horsey is particularly worth keeping an eye on in low-scoring affairs.

Gareth Maybin

2011 saw Maybin's star wane after a series of near-misses during the previous two seasons, but the Northern Irishman showed enough during the Gulf Swing to think this might be the year he finally breaks through. If last week's [400.0] odds are any sort of guide, it could potentially come at odds that pay for a decade's worth of losers. However given his promising record in Asia, it may be worth considering a much shorter quote of [65.0] this week in India for the Avantha Masters.

Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods will have an army of followers this week, in the Betfair markets that is, but Paul Krishnamurty believes both are worth taking on at their current short odds....

Dan Geraghty is hoping for better luck with his three-ball tips, making four selections for the opening day action at the Commercialbank Qatar Masters...

Danny Lee is a massive [350.0] and Ryan Palmer a chunky [160.0] to win the Waste Management Phoenix Open at Scottsdale but this pair of birdie machines could kickstart their seasons on a course that looks to provide an ideal...

Amazon Sports Center

The five 100-1 outsiders who won the Grand National

Features / Dan Fitch / 02 March 2011 / Leave a Comment

Mon Mome was the last 100-1 Grand National winner.

Dan Fitch takes a look back at the five 100-1 outsiders, who defied the odds to win the Grand National.

The Grand National course at Aintree has a reputation of being the toughest event in racing. Run over a distance of four miles and 876 yards and punctuated by 30 challenging fences, it's little wonder that sometimes the form book can go out of the window and a rank outsider can win the race.

Since the race was first ran in 1839, there have been a handful of occasions when a real no-hoper shocked the nation by winning at Aintree. Here are the five 100-1 outsiders to have won the Grand National.

The first 100-1 horse to win the Grand National was Tipperary Tim. As the race was about to start, Tipperary Tim's jockey William Dutton heard a friend call out "Billy boy, you'll only win if all the others fall down."

As fate would have it, 41 of the 42 riders did fall down, leaving Tipperary Tim to win the race ahead of the re-mounted Billy Barton. The two horses were the only finishers, after a melee at the Canal Turn in treacherous weather conditions.

One year after Tipperary Tim made history, Gregalach became the second successive 100-1 shot to win the Grand National. The horse was given such lengthy odds having fallen at Sandown, just eight days prior to the race at Aintree.

Gregalach's jockey Robert Everett rode a clever race in which he gradually gained ground on the leaders and overtook the legendary Easter Hero on the second to last fence, before winning the race by six lengths.

As if the fact that the 100-1 outsider Caughoo won the 1947 Grand National isn't exciting enough, legend has it that his victory wasn't exactly legit. With the Aintree course covered in a thick fog, it has long been rumoured that Caughoo hid behind a fence in the early stages of the race, only to emerge towards the end of the race and win by 20 lengths.

Caughoo's jockey Eddie Dempsey was beaten up by another rider after the race, but it seems that this was unwarranted, as photographic evidence emerged years later, clearly showing Caughoo jumping Becher's Brook on two separate occasions.

The most famous 100-1 winner of them all was Foinavon, who entered into Grand National folklore by winning the race amidst a mass pile-up and ended up having a fence named after him.

Foinavon was lagging behind the other 27 remaining runners, as they approached the 23rd fence. Popham Down veered wildly to the right as it came to the fence, which resulted in a melee. The only horse to jump the fence first time was Foinavon, who was lagging so far behind that his jockey John Buckingham could steer away from trouble. Although 17 re-mounted horses gave chase, no one could catch Foinavon.

A total of 42 years passed after Foinavon's victory, before Mon Mome became the next 100-1 winner of the Grand National.

Venitia Williams became only the second woman to train a Grand National winner, while Mon Mome's jockey Liam Treadwell rode the horse to victory on his Grand National debut.

Dan Fitch takes a look back at the five 100-1 outsiders, who defied the odds to win the Grand National....

Dan Fitch takes a look at the men behind the horses that have won the Grand National, as he profiles the trainers who've had the most success in the race....

Champion trainer Paul Nicholls is yet to win the sport's biggest handicap prize, the Grand National, but this year he has made 10 entries in a bid to end that hoodoo. Here is Paul's assessment of all his current Grand National entries...

Betfair website

5 rank outsiders who won the Cheltenham Gold Cup

Features / Dan Fitch / 23 February 2011 / Leave a Comment

Dan Fitch looks at the horses that defied the odds to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

As the most prestigious event of the National Hunt calendar, the Cheltenham Gold Cup is the Grade 1 race that can make or break the reputation of a horse.

With the race contested by the very top horses around, it is no wonder that it is most often won by one of the favourites. Occasionally though, an unfancied entrant has upset the odds to win the race.

Here are five rank outsiders who won the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

Carvill's Hill was expected to win the 1992 Gold Cup at Cheltenham, but was overtaken in the final moments of the race, as Cool Ground won the race by a short-head, with The Fellow just beaten into second and Docklands Express a close third.

Trained by Tony Balding, Cool Ground had started the day as a 40/1 outsider, before being backed in to a 25/1 starting price. The Gold Cup win proved to be the pinnacle of Cool Ground's achievements, as the horse failed to win another race for another three years.

When the amateur rider Dido Harding bought Cool Dawn for £7000 in 1993, she had no greater ambition for the horse, than to ride it in ladies' point-to-point races.

Just five years later, Cool Dawn had progressed to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup.Trained by Robert Alner and ridden by Andrew Thornton, the 25/1 outsider led the race from start to finish and saw off a late challenge for Strong Promise, to surprise the Cheltenham crowd.

Tony Grantham was the first royal jump jockey, but he was riding for the owner Philip Burt rather than the Queen Mother, when Gay Donald won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1955.

The 33/1 long-shot won the race by some distance, beating the 1954 Gold Winner Four Ten into a distant second place.

L'Escargot may have come into the 1970 Cheltenham Gold Cup as a 33/1 outsider, but his name is now forever etched into the racing history books. Unlike some of the other long-priced winners of the Gold Cup, L'Escargot's victory in 1970 wasn't a one-off, freak result, swiftly followed by a descent back into obscurity.

Trained by Dan Moore and ridden by Tommy Carberry, L'Escargot would win the Gold Cup again in 1971 and beat Red Rum to win the Grand National in 1975. Along with Golden Miller, L'Escargot remains the only horse to have won both the Gold Cup and the National.

The biggest ever rank outsider to win the Gold Cup was Norton's Coin in 1990. If it wasn't enough that Norton's Coin started the race as a 100/1 afterthought, he did so by beating a field that included the legendary Desert Orchid, who was the odds-on favourite.

Norton's Coin was only entered in the Gold Cup because his owner had missed the deadline for a lesser value handicap race at the Cheltenham festival. Sirrell Griffiths, who also trained the horse, only set off for Cheltenham on the morning of the race, after milking the cows on his farm in West Wales. Little did he know that his horse would hold off a challenge from Dessie and Toby Tobias to clinch an unlikely victory.

Dan Fitch looks at the horses that defied the odds to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup....

With the Cheltenham Festival soon upon us, Dan Fitch looks at some of horse racing's funniest commentaries....

Our resident blogger Simon Rowlands points out the shortcomings of some types of conventional trends analysis......

Betfair website