by SAM DARBY. Some horse racing punters swear by using stats to make selections in big races while others find them misleading. Many stats, especially Cheltenham Festival stats, can be very useful in narrowing the field and helping to pick those vital Cheltenham Festival 2013 tips.

One of the traps to avoid when making Cheltenham Festival tips 2013 is backing too many favourites. Favourites do win at the Cheltenham Festival but they are often poor value, especially the so-called “bankers” where the perceived chance of victory and the actual chance of victory can be very different.

There have been 142 horses at the Cheltenham Festival since 1980 with odds lower than 2/1 and only 57 of those 142 actually went on to win. Backing all 142 would have produced a level stakes loss to a £1 stake of £6.15. A slightly more successful but still unprofitable favourite backers’ strategy in the same period would be to have backed all the odds-on selections at Cheltenham. There have been 31 odds-on favourites since 1980 and a £1 stake on each of them would have resulted in a level stakes loss of £5.28.

So if backing short-priced favourites is a bad strategy, what is a good strategy for finding Cheltenham tips? Well, following horses that have finished 1^st or 2^nd on their previous runs can massively improve your chances of picking winners. 174 out of 243 Cheltenham Festival winners since 2003 (over 71%) had either finished 1^st or 2^nd in their previous race. You’d expect most winners to arrive at the Festival in good form but it’s still surprising to see such a huge majority having filled one of the top two finishing positions last time out. Most of those were pretty well fancied as 142 winners went off at 12/1 or lower and just 57 were 14/1 or bigger.