Sean Boyce is again our chairman for the night having done such a superb job the last four years. He's been a presenter for At The Races since the start and he'll definitely be giving us some nuggets of information as well as making sure we don't fight too much. In his college days Sean was encouraged to have ante post bets for the Gold Cup on Garrison Savannah whilst he was out injured. The impeccable source of this info was the stage manager for a theatre production he was in. He couldn't watch the race as their was a matinee performance that afternoon. He says he can still remember his stable mole sticking his head through the lighting box window in the middle of an emotional scene on stage grinning from ear to ear and giving him the thumbs up. "Garry had won and the audience was wondering why I was grinning inanely during one of the tensest moments of the play".

Rory Delargy is a UK Racing analyst who writes a tipping column for The Irish Field and the Irish Daily Star. He proved such a success at our inaugural Preview Night that several attendees wanted to pay for the following year on that night if we could confirm that Rory was going to be on the panel again. The great news is that he has become a regular panel member ever since.

His best bet was also his worst bad beat - he was convinced that Asian Maze was a superstar when seeing her win at Punchestown as a novice, and he spent the six months leading up to the 2006 Champion Hurdle backing her to win at huge odds. It was assumed she’d go for the Stayers, but Rory was convinced otherwise, and odds of 100/1 all in were frighteningly tempting. When one unnamed firm went 66/1 NRNB, Rory took to the streets to shovel what he could on at the price, and by the day of the race he’d staked more on her than he’d ever done before. Come the day, she was as short as 12/1, and the selection of Tom Segal in the Racing Post, but was brought down by a swinging hurdle before halfway. To add insult to injury, she went on to beat the Champion Hurdle third by seventeen lengths at Aintree, and poor old Rory was left to ponder what might have been.

Neil Channing attended his first Cheltenham Festival in the early 80s. The 1st Cheltenham races he watched were in the Sea Pigeon/Monksfield/Night Nurse era but the really early memories were the days of Desert Orchid when, as the college bookie, he cheered home Norton's Coin and moaned as Yahoo was collared close home.

An early bookmaking hero bet £10,000 in cash on Beech Road while Neil was standing and chatting to him in the Cheltenham ring. Although that was the year Kribensis won, the memory of the relaxed way the transaction occurred so impressed him that he just knew this was the game for him. The next eight years were spent as a Silver Ring bookmaker and his final five years on the course were as a front row Tattersalls bookie with too many wild swings to recall.

These days he never even thinks of going to the course, choosing instead to wake up at 4am and to sit on the internet reading everything possible rather than wasting time travelling.

Russ Wiseman is looking forward to his 29th Festival and he was delighted to be with us to celebrate his 100th Cheltenham Festival Preview. Russ hopes that some of you will try and inflict some pain on SportingBet during the week, he's their PR man and his worse fear is writing the press release of the Willie Mullins day one disaster.

Lydia Hislop

Lydia Hislop has worked as a journalist and broadcaster in horseracing since 1996. She joined Racing UK (now Racing TV) at its outset, alongside stints at Channel 4 and the BBC, and is now one of its leading presenters. She currently works as contributing editor for Tortoise Media and writes the popular weekly Road To Cheltenham column for sportinglife.com, having previously been a columnist for the Times and Guardian, racing correspondent for London’s Evening Standard and contributor to the Racing Post.