Cheltenham Festival

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The Festival is on 11-14th March, with the feature race of each day due off at 3:15pm. Co-incidentally these four races also feature the south node rising which provides a possibly interesting thread through the four days.

The chart for the Champion Hurdle on Tuesday has much going on; the Moon exalted in the 10th and Mercury applying to the north node in the 7th. The aspect between Mercury and the north node on Wednesday depends on which nodal position one uses.

On Thursday and Friday, Mercury is separating from the north node. The major aspect looming later on is a sextile from Mars to Saturn (L7), so in the Gold Cup on Friday (widely seen as a match between Kauto Star and Denman) my current preference is for whatever starts as the challenger.

Does anyone have experience of observing the nodes and their possible effects in such charts?

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I actually haven't had any time to look at the cheltenham races this year.
Other than the Gold Cup itself, where I just looked at how the race chart compared to the charts of Kauto star, Denman and Exotic Dancer.

KS and ED both have saturn cojoining the MC, whilst Denman has a progressed Jupiter there. However KS and Denman both have some other great aspects. It is amazing how great horses seem to have great aspects to the race charts and lower class horses don't. The wonder of the great universal plan.

Certainly this didn't give me a clear winner. I even tried rectification of the natal charts to get better data- but Denman proved impossible.

I thought, then, why not try some symbolism? So based on the chart showing these three and "all the rest". Basically we have a few main conjunctions.
Sun in pisces conjunct uranus
Venus in pisces ( just) conjucnt mercury in aquarius
Mars conjunct moon ( we've had weeks of the moon making hard aspects to mars on saturdays and it seems to be throwing a spanner in the works)

So I tried matching up the names
So the sun in pisces with uranus is the "star" with the name no-one gets right- KS
Venus with mercury and neptune in Pisces and Aquarius is Exotic Dancer
Making Den"man" the Moon and Mars (male) in Cancer.

Maybe jupiter then is all the rest?

Unfortunately I could also make a case for switching the Denman/KS symbolism. Which doesn't help.

Still,let's run with it.
The sun uranus conjunction is squared by Moon one, and really makes no significant other aspects.

Mars on the other hand has both good and bad ones. But is opposed by Pluto. And "ED's" venus conjunction is opposed by saturn. Ok that doesn't help much either.....though venus is applying to saturn and mars separating from Pluto.

On the other hand the MC is ruled by Venus which favours ED. Not that likely - though of course can't be ruled out.

On balance I'd go with Denman, I really like that applying sextile to saturn. But frankly I can't call this one any better than anyone else can.

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Amelia, thanks for the insight. I had forgotten about aspects other than conjunctions to the angles as I long ago abandoned using those and separating aspects; maybe I've been mistaken.
I looked at the Imperial cup chart & noted the Sun's close conjunction to Uranus. As the Sun was L1, I can see that this might signify an exceptional winner. The south node was 5degrees from the Asc, so maybe didin't really enter into it.
By the time of the Gold Cup, the south node will be much closer to the Asc, which is why I can't see KS winning. I had missed the ingress of Venus in Pisces. As L10 and in its exaltation, maybe ED has a really good chance, certainly worth an each-way bet.
I have also wondered on occasions whether a chart shows us a horse with odds that will yield a profit if backed each-way? Maybe what we see isn't always the winner. Some place bets pay more than a win-only on an odds-on chance.
Good luck to anyone betting on the races this week, P.