Introduction Course

An excerpt from the Introduction Course

What is the obvious starting point for betting?

Clearly the simplest bet to take is a place bet, that is to say you select one horse to finish either first, second or third in one race.

At the other end of the scale one of the most difficult bet types would be the first four where you select the winner, second, third and fourth placegetter in the correct order in one race. A Quaddie is also pretty tough.

Let's start at the start and not the finish.

How do you go about selecting this place bet? How do you select the race? What criteria are you going to use to be able to successfully find a placegetter in a particular race?

This is the difficult part of horse racing.

There are probably a thousand races over a 30 day month for you to bet on. Assuming you want to find one place bet each day then that is 30 races from a thousand.

How do you differentiate those 30 races from the other 970?

Let's create a basic system.

The system will work through a process of elimination to begin with.

Clearly race tracks where the track rating is very wet, so for example heavy 8 or worse should probably be avoided and ideally you want to be betting on races where the track rating is a good 3 or 4, scratch that, good 3 these days is pretty hard so ideally good 4, or soft 5. This may eliminate 30% or more of those 1,000 races.

Next if you are simply looking for a place bet there is no point focusing on the difficult races for the day. For most racetracks the last half of the card, usually four races, comprising the 4 legs of the quaddie are the most difficult.

So let's eliminate those and focus on the first shall we say four races, plus minus.

Next there is no point betting on a race with no form since we are using form, that is previous race performances, as a guide to future performances.

In simple terms we don't want to bet on early two-year-old races where there is limited form or other races where there are first starters and unknown factors that we have no control over. So eliminate any two and three-year-old events especially races where they are more than two first starters.

Okay so we have probably reduced the number of races down to only a few for each day.

Next we need to look at the field size. Races of less than eight starters will pay only two place dividends on the TAB and most races on Betfair. We therefore want to bet in races with eight or more starters at a minimum.

So what now? We have maybe one or two races for the day? How can we decide on which horses to bet on?

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