Brain Re-Arrange

It’s only two days until 2014, I can’t believe how quickly 2013 has gone!

I’m one of those people who love new year, and the reason is that I always feel like it’s a time to reflect on the year that’s just finish and create new goals for the coming year. These can be both personal and work goals. I always try to make the next year better than the last 🙂

With the new year looming ahead of us I thought it was appropriate to talk about brain re-arranging. Okay, I admit I’ve just made that phrase up but I think it accurately describes what I’m about to say.

It’s very easy to get stuck into a single way of thinking. And I believe that this is the worst thing that is possible for bettors. As bettors we’ve got to be skilled in thinking differently.

The first thing we must do is understand how other bettors are thinking. This is the easiest part because most bettors are predictable. They’re going to be looking at the finish positions of a horse in the last few races. They’re going to be looking at the weight, Official Ratings and Racing Post Ratings, and…

…they’ll be looking at what the race analysis is on the Racing Post and Sporting Life.

That’s about it!

Most punters can’t be bothered to go into anything deeper.

Which is excellent news… for us!

Let me show you what I mean by using an example.

A lot of punters consider the days since a horse last ran as an important factor and the general thinking is that you want a horse to be running soon after a previous race because that means it’s fit but not to quickly as it needs time to get over the race it’s been in.  More than 7 days and less than 30 days is the most commonly used timing.

On face value that all looks to make sense.

But, there’s a couple of issues with this.

The first is that what’s to say a horse isn’t being run down for a rest rather than being run up?

Secondly why should all horses be the same? Some may prefer running with short breaks and some may prefer longer breaks. We can take this even further by looking at what a horse prefers after a good run where it will have put in a strong effort and a poor run where it most likely hasn’t.

So now we have looked at a particular factor and determined how the general public are betting, we can re-arrange our brain to think differently.

What we could do here is to look at horses individually.

We break them down and look at races where they put in a good run and see if there is a pattern in how many days it has been since their last race.

Starting just by doing that limits are research, and you’ll find that every horse has a slightly different preference for the lay off time before it puts in a good race.

Then we can look at whether the race before it’s good race was a good race. If it was then we may want to consider waiting for the horse to have a good race and then a layoff within the required timeframe before we bet it again.

And we can still take this further…

Most horses have a preference for race conditions, so now we can break these down again and combine this with the layoff. Which means that:

“If a horse has had a layoff after a good race which indicates another good race is coming and is racing over conditions that it has a preference for then it makes it a very strong contender.”

In fact what you have here is a method of finding contenders that are going to be putting in strong races most of the time. Take it and implement it. You could use it as a new starting point in your analysis for 2014 🙂