The 250 Challenge
The Betfred St Leger Festival is one of the highlights of the flat racing season. The festival culminates with the Group 1 Betfred St Leger Stakes, the world’s oldest Classic horse race, with the 2026 event celebrating the 250th anniversary running of the historic contest.
The St Leger Festival took place from Thursday 10th to Sunday 13th September inclusive and TPD ran a special event to mark the occasion.
TPD Zone subscribers were invited to send us details of their best trade / back or lay bet of the day, on each of the four days of the Doncaster St Leger festival.
The Entries
The following entries were submitted during the course of the Festival and each of the entries clearly demonstrate the power of the TPD live GPS data and particularly when combined with the innovative features within the Bet Angel Trading platform.
Doncaster 10th September 2026 16:10 1m Nursery
“I use TPD every race via Bet Angel, both for fully automated trading and to augment my manual in-play bets.
On the one-click screen I have a colour-coded column ‘Par var’ showing how fast the race is running compared to par. I also have a column ‘tpd rat’ that scores my own personal mix of TPD metrics VE, VF, and CE. I use these columns to identify how fast a race is being run, and how well each individual horse is running.
About 5 furlongs out in the Doncaster 16:10 the red coloured ‘Par var’ column showed me the leaders were probably travelling too fast. I also spotted that Zarakova, who was 2nd at the time, had a particularly poor ‘tpd rat’ score. With this info I laid £10 on Zarakova which profited when she finished the race 5th of 6.”
Doncaster 10th September 2026 – 17:20 1m 4f Handicap
“I used Bet Angel automated rules to lay Itica in the 17:20 @ Doncaster. The rule fires when the values in the relevant row are all red. These are a combination of the metrics obtained from TPD. You can also see the associated PARS chart which shows a crazy early pace. The horse was seemingly going well and contesting for the lead before completely running out of gas and finishing a well beaten 7th of 9 runners.”
Doncaster 10th September 2026 – 14:52
“I use the BA one click screen the strategy I’m currently using is a lay to back, 12 ticks using the distance behind the leader column. If the horse (not the fav) is 10m+ behind the leader early in the race and odds are under 15.0 I will lay. In this race it was Flann Sunna, layed at 6.14 out for 8.6.
This is a new strategy so low stakes at the mo. I have a high success rate so fingers crossed it continues.
Thanks”
Doncaster 12th September 2026 – 16:15
“In the Doncaster 16:15 I saw that a horse was slow leaving the stalls. Although I couldn’t immediately identify the horse on TV pictures, the TPD map data on Bet Angel showed it clearly as horse 5 Checkandchallenge.”
“As the horse was also an outsider I laid it immediately and with advantage of speed I was able to lay at 54, which was very close to the Betfair SP despite the poor start.“
Doncaster 12th September 2026 – 14:20
“TPD comes into its own in large field races where in-running players struggle to keep up with all horses manually.
With some simple TPD positional data combined with speed and distance to finish, a Bet Angel automation can pick out horses that are extremely unlikely to win and lay them automatically.
There were 21 runners in the Doncaster 14:20 and my automation automatically laid 18 of them, of which 12 were matched.”
Doncaster 12th September 2026 – 17:05
“Here’s one from yesterday where my automation managed to lay 4 horses in a field of 11 and they finished 5th, 6th 10th and 11th “
“.. and a late one from USA Laurel Park where the automation laid 3 horses in a field of 9 finishing 2nd, 8th and 9th. All fully automated using Bet Angel and the data from TPD.”
Doncaster 13th September 2026 – 14:30
“In the 14:30, halfway through the 7f race the leader Ironwill was travelling well. But using the TPD pars graph on Bet Angel it was clear he had gone off much too fast and I was able to get a lay bet matched at 8.8 which was below Betfair SP. As expected, Ironwill faded late into the race beaten a length into 3rd.“