Monday's FREE Tip Is Ready...

14th September 2015

Hi ,

Today I wanted to look at something a bit different. After all, looking at things differently is how we make profits as bettors. So…

Have you ever considered whether a horse is improving?

If you haven’t then you should.

In fact you shouldn’t only consider if it is improving, you should also consider if it is declining.

Do you want to bet on a horse that has shown a significant decline recently?

I’m sure you don’t.

What I’m about to show you is a quickfire method to find out whether a horse is improving or declining and analysing a race on this using nothing but the Sporting Life and Racing Post websites.

What we're looking for are horses that may be considered outsiders but have shown they are improving significantly and therefore could make good value bets.

First of all head over to www.sportinglife.com and then open a race you are interested in and click on the Ratings tab.

You will see something like...

Ideally we would want every horse in the race to have 6 rating, but this isn’t often possible. Focus your analysis on races where the majority of runners have at least 3 ratings.

Don’t forget that these ratings are read from left to right. The most recent race is on the far left and the race on the far right took place the longest ago.

What you want to look for is a steady improvement in these figures.

In the above race you can see straight away that Unidexter has been consistently improving over the last 6 races. Poetic Verse hasn’t been improving but has been putting in consistent performances over the last 5 races. Orlas Rainbow has seen a small improvement in the last 3 races and Crystak Peaks has also seen an improvement in the last two races.

With this knowledge you can now visit the Racing Post website and take a look at the horses previous form.

I like to use the Racing Post because it allows us to display the last 6 races for all horses at the same time.

You want to calculate the average distance to winner for each horse in races that are similar to todays race.

When a horse has won a race then we consider this to be 0 distance to winner.

This example race is a Class 6 All Weather race with £1,704 going to the winner.

Elusive Thought has two similar races at Lingfield and Kempton and distance behind winner for these races were 3.5 and 2.25 for an average of 2.88.

Crystal Peaks has three similar races with distances behind the winner being 0, 6.75 and 8.25. This gives us an average of 5.

Good Speech has no similar races.

Poetic Verse has two similar races at 10 lengths and 12 lengths for an average of 11 lengths.

Orla’s Rainbow has two similar races at 31 and 16.5 lengths for an average of 23.75.

Lady Of Yue has three similar races at 8.75, 12.5 and 8.75 for an average of 10.

Pacquiao has no similar races.

Great Ormand is in three similar races at 10, 15.5 and 27 for an average of 17.5.

Unidexter is in 5 similar races at 7.5, 6, 7.5, 9.75 and 37 for an average of 13.55

The averages for each horse are:

Elusive Thought: 2.88
Crystal Peaks: 5
Good Speech: N/A
Poetic Verse: 11
Orla’s Rainbow: 23.75
Lady Of Yue: 10
Pacquiao: N/A
Great Ormand: 17.5
Unidexter: 13.55

On these average distance to winners are displayed like this, you can easily see that Elusive Thought and Crystal Peaks have the best figures (lower numbers are better because it means they were closer to the winner on average).

We don’t know about Good Speech and Pacquiao as they didn’t have any similar races, so we can use the market to base our judgement on these horses.

This shows us that although Elusive Thought hasn’t been significantly improving, this runner could be a threat. From our improvers it’s Crystal Peaks who looks to be the strongest and this is the runner we may want to focus our attention on.

Using this approach can quickly highlight runners that have the ability to perform better than they may seem able at first glance. It will allow you to get on some high-priced winners and if you use it in combination with your current analysis methods it will be even more effective.

Back next Monday.

Michael Wilding