The Horse Racing System Tracker

Introduction

Many punters have the belief that they can come up with a system that will produce a healthy and steady profit forever. Unfortunately, while the hopeful Punter is poring over results looking for trends and an edge, so too are thousands of others. Anything obvious may only be profitable for a couple of weeks before the market corrects itself and swings a couple of percentage points in the direction of the price anomaly he may have discovered. Many other times the punter will have uncovered a pattern in the results with no more significance than the pattern of tea leaves in a cup. Many reasonable racing systems work intermittently at different times of the year, under different codes and conditions, while even the best systems will have varying levels of profitability.

The details of any system will vary hugely from punter to punter, but what we can all benefit from is a means to develop, trial and track such systems. What I have included below is a simple example of a low-maintenance system for tracking horse racing system performance - a whole days racing can be checked in less than five minutes.

I wanted something that wouldn’t grow into a full time job, but would still let me check all of my methods and systems. I bet for fun, expect to turn a small profit, and don’t want to be spending all day sweating about my income. Many of you will be the same, and hopefully this article will help you in the goal of having some recreational punting that provides you with some beer money for the weekend.

Stage 1 – Race Selection

As I said above, most systems will work within a particular niche. I want to identify suitable races for whatever niche I’m trialling. Here is an example methodology.

Take the Racing Post and:

• Delete all races with five runners or fewer.
• Delete all races that have joint first, second or third favourites.
• Delete any race where the third favourite is forecast at 9/1 or bigger.
• Delete any race where the gap in the forecast between the third and fourth favourite is less than 1.5 points.

What you are left with is races you will be handicapping for your system

Stage 2 – Handicapping

The process of handicapping is where you try to identify likely winners that are mispriced. To do this you will take into account a range of factors. The example I use here will a simple one, where we will just try to identify the likely winner and then track the performance to see if it is profitable.

• Look at the horses last two runs and add both numbers together. For L or R use the number ten. For P, F or B use five. So, a horse that finished first on it’s last run and seventh on it’s penultimate start, 1 + 7 = 8. Deduct this number from 21. The horse in the example would then have a rating of 12. A horse that had two last finishing positions FF would have a rating of; 21 - (5 + 5) = 10
• For horses that are running for their first time award 10 points and if a horse has only run once just use the single figure plus five.
• Once you have rated the three horses in the forecast give +2 points top rated, +1 point to the second and no points to the bottom rated.
• Award +2 points to the horse top rated and +1 for the second top rated on form.
• The horse with the highest score is the selection

Stage 3 – Results Tracking

I've included a chart which you can use to record the results of your selections from stage 2.

Systems

1

2

3

4

5

Date

R

W

P

R

W

P

R

W

P

R

W

P

R

W

P

10/1

11/1

12/1

13/1

14/1

15/1

16/1

17/1

18/1

19/1

20/1

21/1

22/1

23/1

24/1

25/1

26/1

27/1

28/1

29/1

30/1

31/1

Record Sheet Key
R = Run (Number of Selections)
W = Win (Number of winners on day)
P = Level Stakes Profit (running total)

Stage 4 – Use of Results

I assess the past six days results on an on-going basis. If I have four winners or more within a six day period, I immediately start betting. I extend my betting out across all races because from experience I know that the methods I use work, intermittently. I keep stakes small and never use more than three methods at a time, that way if things go wrong I live to fight another day.

Keeping stakes small is essential whether we are recreational gamblers, or more particularly if we are serious/professional gamblers. For a more ‘serious’ system I would obviously want to develop a more sophisticated system and trial it more carefully, but our goal here is to have some fun, and that means we need to get some action too!