What do you have and/or would like in your tool box to help pick winners? Examining a race on the race card is one approach to picking winners but some like to spot horses to back next time out or when conditions are right (tracking). For the latter approach there is nothing better than watching horses; in the parade ring, going down to the start, throughout the race, what sort of passage did they have, how they finished, how were they ridden, did they act on the going/course etc. Such information can help to spot what appears to be a significant under or over rating of a horse's performance and can make pure form facts not much better than throwing a dart at the race card. One thing that can drastically turn form upside down is that dreaded sudden change of going. Or is it dreaded? With the right tools one could take full advantage of such situations. For example, the going has suddenly changed to soft/heavy. Most horses have been showing form on a sound surface. Some horses have been kept off the track because of the sound surfaces, or had easy races, knowing that they need the soft. Instead of having to plough through realms of form for each horse to spot these it would be nice to have some computer analysis do it for us. Queries such as a chart of a horse's form (measured by OR and time) for each type of going, distance and course, quality of race. Better still, have horses for the day highlighted based on parameters you choose. Another useful tool would be to list all horses whose sires and/or dam sires have excellent/very poor records of their progeny running in the conditions, that are running today (or another day). Starting from the horse(s) as opposed to races on the race card can provide us with significantly fewer races to study in depth. For example if we have a horse that looks as though conditions are right today, we can look at that race. What we ideally want to see is that the stats for this horse show its below form figures have been under unsuitable conditions and that it was not given a hard race. The form could show " slowly away, chased leaders, no extra final 2f, never on terms", beaten 21l. However if we know/believe (through watching the race) that this horse was never intended to run to form because it is being prepared for a race when conditions suit, we can put a line through that form. We can now spend time assessing the chances of all the other runners using similar analysis tools. Just a few examples but what I'd like to know is what tools do you have available to you and what additional tools would you like to have to significantly increase the efficiency of your analysis time which, in turn, will enable you to spend more in depth analysis time on a particular race.?
We are very fortunate as racing fans in the age of the internet, we have much more scope to research form and our favoured rationales. We have videos on demand, we have multiple websites with form and collateral form tools. We also have sites like flatstats which can give sire statistics and/or going statistics.... then we have sites like this which you can discuss/learn from other racing fans. Then we throw in twitter and the information you can gleam from that. What else do we need? Perhaps weights of horses and many would like sectional timing. Perhaps also geldings being shown on the racecard (first time out) and event wind ops. Every little helps.
You can have all the tools and information at your disposal as you wish but the reality is there's an unquantifiable, but significant, proportion of luck required in horse racing or any sport. Slipped saddles, lost shoes, bad rides, hampered runners, bad draws, sick horses and too often horses simply not running within pounds of their best. I do wonder when I hear punters putting thousands onto a horse what the f** goes through their head at times. In my opinion flat racing is the biggest lottery of the lot, form seems to go out the window in races with more than 10 runners in them, i.e. the majority of them. I'd love to be a bookmaker taking bets on flat handicaps over a straight course. Half the poor beasts are snookered before they've even left the stalls because their on the wrong side of the field with the slower ground or the least pace! An absolute joke to be risking your money on that, unless you've far too much to begin with
Surely if you think half the field has no chance then its exactly the sort of race you should be targetting?
I've no interest whatsoever in those type of races, but even if I had I'd probably pick the wrong half Nass, and on a more serious note you never know what side will have the 'pace'. I used to think it was mainly sprints where they take turns in winning but looking on in results over the flat season it seems to be the majority of them. I await the SPs now coming into September, October as the ground changes. The Arc will probably be won by some 40/1 nag
Maybe if there is any possibility that the draw will have an affect the first couple of races should only be used to gather more relevant information to take into account.
