A combination of work, holiday and the volume of racing needing analysis and archiving has prevented me updating the blog recently but the Stewards Cup is always interesting and with rain foiling my plans for the morning I have time to post an analysis.
Using the Post's forecast, there are four consistent horses in the race: Enact, Jonny Mudball, Palace Moon and Striking Spirit, all of whom are what VDW referred to in his Prominent King evaluation as "probables".
The class/form horse is the "probable" with the best balance of class and form:
Starting with class, the positions of the four in the ability rating ranking are:
Palace Moon 12
Jonny Mudball 18
Enact 24
Striking Spirit 28
Moving on to form, the four come into the race from the following runs:
Palace Moon, 2nd class 498
Jonny Mudball, won class 125 (following a 2nd in class 68)
Enact, 2nd class 312
Striking Spirit, 2nd class 623
On the face of it, Striking Spirit would seem to have the best form of the four, especially when the one with the second best form, Palace Moon, came 3rd, beaten 1.75l, by Striking Spirit in the class 623. However, there are grounds for viewing the class 498 in which Palace Moon last ran as a better race than the class 623 in which he and Striking Spirit both ran.
The decisive issue, as regards identifying the class/form horses, are the rules VDW adopted when balancing both class and form, and on that, in my view, there is no doubt that in the Stewards Cup Palace Moon is the class/form horse.
The final issue for consideration is whether, as class/form horse, Palace Moon has all the "winner in the race" characteristics, ie is at least 80% probable as the winner. And quite clearly he falls short on two of the "winner in the race" requirements: he lacks what Lee usefully termed "ultra consistency", which all the selections going up in class specifically named by VDW as bets had, and he is too far down the ability rating ranking for the race (12th, whereas all the selections named specifically as bets by VDW were in the top five of the ranking). So, like many another, Palace Moon is a class/form horse who falls short of the 80% probability threshold. He is nevertheless has very solid form (in both his recent races beaten by favourites with good prior form) and is the most likely winner in the race.
