Supercomputer predicts massive Cheltenham success for the Irish With the Cheltenham Festival kicking off next Tuesday irishracing.com has fed all of its Cheltenham related data into a Supercomputer to see how the Irish-trained horses will compare to their British-trained counterparts at the annual National Hunt showpiece. Ireland has been in the ascendancy in recent years in the Prestbury Cup standings, which collates the number of British and Irish-trained winners of the 28 races that take place over the 4 days of the Festival. Supercomputer 2024 prediction: 23-5 in favour of Ireland At each of the last two Cheltenham Festivals the score has ended up 18-10 in favour of Irish-trained horses, but the Supercomputer expects the British to be on the receiving end of an ever bigger drubbing next week with the predicted score to be 23-5 in favour of Ireland. This prediction equals the record haul for the Irish at the 2021 Festival. Methodology & data analysis The foundation for this project involved providing the Supercomputer with historical data for the last 30 Cheltenham Festivals along with detailed information about all the horses entered for each of this year’s races, including their lifetime race form and ante post betting odds from a wide range of bookmakers. To transform the raw data into a format conducive to analysis we took a number of preprocessing steps. These included: Scaling numerical features: we normalised the numerical date to ensure all features contributed equally to the analysis. Encoding categorical features: we converted categorical data into a machine-readable format, enabling our algorithms to process and learn from all aspects of the dataset effectively. Our approach centered around the “most typical winner profile.” This profile served a benchmark in assessing current year contenders. Recognising that certain features were more indicative of success than others, we developed a specialised weighting system. This system assigned greater importance to the more predictive attributes, fine tuning our model’s accuracy. We then calculated the cosine similarity between the “most typical winner profile” and each of the current year’s contenders. This metric provided a quantitative measure of how closely each contender matched the winning profile of the previous winners of each respective race they are entered for in 2024. The supercomputer also predicted the winner of each race at Cheltenham 2024 for bet365. Conclusion The Supercomputer concluded that Irish-trained horses will win 23 of the 28 races at Cheltenham 2024. The five races that the Supercomputer predicts will be won by British-trained horses are: Albert Bartlett Novices Hurdle Betway Queen Mother Champion Chase Coral Cup Handicap Hurdle Fulke Walwyn Kim Muir Challenge Cup St James’ Plate Festival Open Hunters’ Chase If this prediction proves correct, Irish-trained horses will win all seven races on the opening day of the Festival next Tuesday and it will be the third race on Wednesday before the British get a winner on the board.
