Three Horse Race

Weather looks a bit ropey today…

I had a great chat with a friend of mine regarding horses and betting yesterday. It started as a general how are you, long time no see and all that, how’s the wife the dog your athletes foot. We got onto talking about people’s expectations regarding systems racing and betting.

His argument or point of view was that looking at horses history beyond a year is pointless.

Why… well because he says it’s been and gone.

I said ok well I agree with you to some point and for that reason within my software and personally for years I’ve looked at historic form and previous recent form. Some people obviously say the last three runs don’t mean anything, for many others they only look at these. Either way both are correct to a certain extent but at the same time they are both wrong.

As long as a horse is running ok and it has shown recent fitness improvement or at or least something then whether it won the last three or not is irrelevant. As you see with racing we need to gauge what will happen next, which horse today for this race has a chance, and to be fair in most races there is usually more than one.

You see historic form shows you if a horse has performed at the distance, the course, the ground whatever factor it maybe and it has achieved something over one two or all these factors then it’s quite capable on achieving the very same thing again. In fact it’s capable of doing one of two things either going on to better things or falling short and never really moving on from what early potential it had shown.

For me that’s the whole reason why I love racing it’s down to us and our judgement to notice these trends and to go with them. It would not be any fun what so ever if we were right and won every race. Ok we would all never have to work again but racing would become boring.

” History does repeat itself, as humans we are geared to look for and notice patterns, and don’t even get me started on back fitted systems I’ll save that for another post “

Where most people go wrong is this they look at far to many races and they expect to pick the winner in every race… Well good luck with that, if your looking at ten races per day and you can predict the winners in each then please call me I’ll give you a job.

Here’s the deal. You are so much better off getting the most from one maybe two races. If your backing there will be in 99% of races, two horses who have a real chance.

Chances are there will be three horses. In many races there are just to many horses to choose from, i don’t mean a large field i mean to much competition. Horse three in our example race might be at a very decent price, good value if you like but it’s real chance is probably one in ten races. These are the types of horses I like for EW or place bets you can predict a decent run from them and just hope for a good finish.

” Even though I’ve stated I don’t really back EW or place bets and it’s true unless i spot something tempting “

So for backers if that’s your thing then great I’m with you. I started out laying and made that a big thing for a while (actually thats not strictly true i had placed bookie bets before laying came along) but then I needed something new, I always wanted to pick the winner who doesn’t.

We now have so many choices, we can Lay in the same race we Back in and we can have a Place or EW bet in a race we also back a winner in.

My advice and pearls of wisdom for today well i think I’ve already set the scene and by now the penny must have dropped. It’s the same as racing really it’s no fun for any of us if I just come out and say do this and that and maybe some more of this and then its job done.

It’s always better if you take onboard my ramblings and make your own path, a path which suits you best and your betting style as apart from knowing most of you prefer Back bets, lots of people I’ve talked to have all kinds of methods and ways they work through races but still most of them struggle with that as well. So take the most of what you can from a single race is far better than trying to get very little from a number of races.

That’s my two pence on the subject.

For the hell of it, his wife left him, the dog ran away, but on the bright side his athletes foot has cleared right up.

Talk Soon