Build Your Handicapping Tool Box One Horse Racing Factor at a Time

Handicappers build a toolbox that they can dig into to pick apart a race and then put together a strategy or campaign for profitable horse racing handicapping. Can you correctly identify the tools in your tool box? Do you use some kind of system to pick a race apart and then look at each part of it?

For instance, when you look at the speed figures of the horses, how do you compare them and quantify them? Some people merely look at the time in the last race, or average time at the distance. That may work for them, based on how they find good bets and other factors, but by itself will not show a profit. Putting several factors together, like speed, conditioning, connections is a good way to assign a morning line to horses, but assigning a morning line on just three factors isn't enough.

To make a profit betting on horse races you must have a whole bag of tricks, or box of tools and be familiar with them so that when you see a situation that requires a certain tool, you will reach into that box and pull out the tool. A good workman realizes that one tool doesn't do every job.

You don't use a screwdriver to drive a nail or a file to saw through wood. In a claiming race with horses dropping in class and running for new barns, speed figures and form will not be enough. You'll also have to use a tool that assesses how much effect each of the other factors will have on those speed figures.

You must learn how to compare speed figures but you must also learn what effect running for a new barn will have on a horse's average speed. That means you have to pull out your trainer tool and adjust the horse's average speed by whatever the average improvement or decline is that you know that trainer will be good for. So you adjust speed figures with trainer tools.

Next you adjust speed figures with form cycle for horses coming back from a layoff on their first second or third race back. But that also has to be adjusted by knowing how much the trainer pushes a horse and what he or she will expect from the runner. There are so many variables that affect each factor in horse racing, you must have a tool for comparing and adjusting them.

You must adjust each factor according to class, breeding, age, gender, conditions, connections. Only when you have done all this can you begin to know what a horse's real chances of winning may be and then, based on that, know what fair value is in the pools. Your method becomes your tool for each one.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bill_Peterson