Horse Racing Backing Systems : Using The Racing Post Website Part One
If you ever want to get involved with horse racing and in particular betting then, the Racing Post is a must and is the bible for horse racing fans and punters. There are other sites out there which are decent, but for reading and understanding form this should be your number one choice and can be the difference between making the right selection and gaining a profit!
Any horse racing backing system should have a few decent rules and filters in place or it just won't work in the long term. Things like weight, distance, ground, class, trainer course from, age of horse, recent horse form, course characteristics and fitness of horse should be considered.
The first thing I want to look at and is one of the most important factors in my opinion is distance. There's no point in betting on a horse who is a 2m specialist in a 3m race? I'm not saying it can't win, but if it's not proven over that distance then, you'd be taking a punt and that's something I try and avoid and never recommend.
The three main filters for UK handicap turf meetings in my opinion are distance, ground conditions, weight and trainer course form and for the purpose of this exercise, we'll stick with that.
From the above screenshot we can see that it's the 5.30 at Ludlow. The race has nine runners over 2m 5f and is a class 4 handicap over hurdles and the current ground conditions are good.
The next thing you'd want to do is click on the horse one who is called Helium and check there previous distance form for the last five races. The filters I would personally have is a 1f parameter either side of 2m 5f, so that would be 2m 3f - 2m 5f and the horse has either won or came within 10 lengths of the winning horse. For each qualifying race score the horse one point to a maximum of five.
From the screenshot above I've placed the black dots against potential qualifiers from it's last five races. The race at Towcester the horse came 2nd 4 lengths behind the winner, the next one at Taunton the horse won the race by a head and the final race at Market Rasen the horse came 4th 9 and a quarter lengths behind the leader. The next stage is to open up each of these three potential races and check the distance parameters of between 2m 3f - 2m 5f.
From the screenshot above we can see that the Towcester race was over 2m and therefore doesn't qualify within our distance parameters.
From the next screenshot of race two at Taunton we can see that the race was won over 2m 1f, but again it doesn't qualify within our distance parameters.
From the final screenshot of our three races from Market Rasen we can see that our horse came 4th, but again it doesn't quality as the race was over 2m 1f and not within our accepted distance parameters, so you would award Helium no points for the distance category.