Happy New Year

January 1^st

A Happy New Year to you all.

I usually attend Cheltenham today but, alas, falling on a Friday this year means that I need to watch it from home to write the weekend preview which will be uploaded by early evening. A real shame as the Dipper Chase and Relkeel Hurdle in particular look belting affairs. Two of my four Cheltenham Festival Ante-Post selections run this afternoon but as long as they run well, that’s all I care about today.

I can let you know now it has been announced that Matt Tombs will taking over writing the Cheltenham Festival Betting Guide after I decided 16 years was enough for me last summer. If you are unfamiliar with Matt, he used to write the Road to Cheltenham series on the Oddschecker website and wrote a book this year called How To Bet And Win At The Festival. He’ll do a good job on it and doubtless bring in some much-needed fresh thinking as, after 16 years, I was running round the same old circles.

It seems a while back now but I thought the Sports Personality of the Year brought up a potential betting edge for 2016. It was held in Belfast a couple of weeks back and three of the awards where there was no public voting were given to people from Northern Ireland. Now don’t tell me that’s a coincidence! One of which was of course Sir Anthony McCoy, who was recognised in today’s honours list. Now, if only I can find out which city will host the 2016 SPOTY!

I hope you have been enjoying the darts as we head into today’s four quarter finals. As for All-Inclusive members, I also hope that you have been following Mike Henderson’s advice over the first three rounds as he has been doing sterling work and is in profit and also has a couple of nice bets still running like Adrian Lewis to win the Second Quarter at 5/2 and Jelle Klaasen to win the Fourth Quarter at 10/1. Both are now odds-on. The next two events to be covered in Sport will be the BDO Darts Championships and the Australian Open Tennis.

Andy Richmond’s latest Trading Talk was uploaded to Guest Contributions this morning and Paul Ferguson’s Novice Note Book will be uploaded over the weekend looking back at the last month. The next monthly instalment by Football Elite will also soon be uploaded.