Making Profits From Forecasts

A forecast bet is one where you have to predict the horse that are going to come first and second in the race in the correct order. In other words, you need to select the horse that wins as the winner and the horse that comes second as the placer. There is also a bet known as the reverse forecast which allows you to select two horses and as long as one of them comes first and the other second then it wins.

As you know I’m an advocate of thinking outside the box. We should always be pushing ourselves to create and develop new ideas. Often this can be done by taking someone else’s idea and adapting it to our situation. There is nothing wrong in doing this and I have made a number of very successful strategies with this approach.

Ultimate anything to do with betting is going to rely on it “suiting you”. It needs to be something that fits your personality, time constraints, concentration, bankroll and risk level. That is why you should always take an idea and then try different variations of it to see what the most effective approach is for you.

When we’re looking for the two horses that are most likely to come first and second we need to start by asking ourselves the same question we always do when we’re analysing a race:

Who are the most likely contenders in this race?

Answering this question through one of the techniques I have written about before will provide you with a key piece of race information.

• How competitive is this race

This piece of information can help to determine whether you want to continue to look for a forecast bet or whether it is best to move on to the next race.

As I mentioned earlier, we want to think out of the box when we’re looking into new methods of analysing a race and this is no different. I’m going to assume that you’ve found a race which has no more than five contenders. This means that there are only five horses which you consider having a strong chance of winning the race.

Now we’re going to use a method of comparing each of these horses with each other to determine which the strongest are. I’m going to call this method the Overlay Race Analysis technique.

You can do this on paper or a spreadsheet program, but it is going to need to be somewhere that you can make a graph.

For each of the five contenders you want to give them a rating out of ten for each of the following four areas:

1. Class
2. Speed
3. Current Form
4. Connections

This should be a very quick process as you’ve already analysed the race to find your five contenders. This is a reducing down of all your analysis into the four main categories.

Next we create a simple graph with each of our horses marked on it for the rating we have given them in each of the above factors. For example…

This allows us to compare each of the horses with each other for all the criteria. In the above example the x-axis (the horizontal line) stands for:

1 = Class

2 = Speed

3 = Current Form

4 = Connections

Let’s start with Elna Bright and Generalyse. We can see that Elna Bright is slightly higher rated for Class but is significantly lower rated for all the others. If we were going to pitch these two against each other we would expect Generalyse to come out on top more often.

The key to this strategy is going to be to give a number to how often we think one horse would beat another. Personally I like to do this out of ten, but experiment as you may find a more preferable way.

I would expect Generalyse to win 7.5 times out of 10 against Elna Bright. This can also be written as I expect Generalyse to win 75% of the time against Elna Bright.

Then we move on to the next pair which is Elna Bright and Belle Bayardo. Belle Bayardo is better than Elna Bright for everything but only just. I would expect Belle Bayardo to win 60% of the time against Elna Bright.

Don’t spend too long determining the percentages here. Go with your gut feeling. You’ve analysed the race to find contenders and you’ve then gone on to rate the contenders in each of the four main categories based on your analysis. You’ve already done the work, now we’re just working out how to bet so your gut feeling is going to be a very good indicator.

With the two pairs that we’ve done we can already see that we think Generalyse and Belle Bayardo would beat Elna Bright more often than Elna Bright would beat them.

If you continue to do this for all the pairs you are going to have a list of horses with the strongest two clearly indicated when compared with each of the other contenders. These are the two that you use in your forecast or reverse forecast.