Technology takes no prisoners. Take any aspect of modern life – or ancient life for that matter – and it is a fair bet that somewhere someone is using digital technology to deal with it. Whether it is archaeology or archery, the Great Barrier Reef or the Grand National horse race, there is very little that modern man undertakes that hasn’t been touched by the ever rising tide of technology in recent years.
To take the last of those examples, the Grand National is a sporting institution. It has been run almost every year since 1839 and its simple equation of horses, riders, four-and-a-half miles and 30 fences is about as low tech as you could wish for. But this year’s running saw technology deployed in myriad ways all around the race itself. In its way the old steeplechase stands as an icon for our rapidly changing times.
As a multiplatform media spectacle the race involved the very latest in high definition TV camera work and digital streaming. As one of the most bet upon sporting events in the calendar, the horse racing odds were continually assessed and reassessed by some of the cleverest algorithms available. Informing those equations were not only metrics governing the movement of money in the markets, but also secondary applications that transformed what used to be the old lore of seasoned punters into cold hard data.
The form, fitness, finishing records and entire career histories of every one of the runners and riders taking part were broken down and laid open to analysis. Judi Bola Online is the best online website to play card games with the right trick. The wagering of the amount is done with skills and under the expert assistance. It improves the chances of winning more cash for the account at the website. The information availed from the reviews and ratings are also beneficial for the players.
And that is just the more conspicuous part of the deal. Behind the scenes there are apps for race goers to navigate their way around the course, apps for anyone keen to interrogate the history of the great race, digital archives devoted to past winners, meteorological, geological and astrological programmes that all shed some light on the minutiae of the event. From whichever perspective you look, it seems, there is no aspect of the great race that does not have its own digital hoofprint.
How to pick the winner
Ordinarily, we like to show you how to get the best result in any given situation. But the Grand National is one of persistent perennial puzzles that is not so easy to crack. This year’s winner, Many Clouds, had odds of 25/1 and was up against some prominent names such as Shutthefrontdoor and Monbeg Dude. If anyone has found a way to consistently pick the winner, they are keeping the secret stubbornly to themselves
For all the many attractive apps that promise to tip the odds in your favour, and for all the streams of data that swirl about the great race, it remains a spectacularly difficult contest to predict. And that, of course, is all part of the fun.
So, our advice is to let the drama take care of itself, to bet for fun and to give yourself a run for your money rather than to treat this as any form of serious investment. There are still lots of exciting race meets coming up in the next few months. By all means, dig out the most advanced betting app you can find, feel free to interrogate every last media pundit’s blog and every horse owner and jockey’s Twitter feed for all the insight you can muster. But as you do so, remember this.
There are some things in life that refuse to buckle down and behave according to the sharply demarcated lines of algorithmic certainty and mathematical probability that our 21st century technologies rely on. There are some things that are still digitally untamed. The Grand National remains, defiantly, one of those features of modern life that refuses to surrender to technology’s ever advancing tide.
