One Bold Cat Horse

Don Scott's first book turned the racing world upside down, and it did it with ratings: for the first time an Australian horse racing punter could put a figure on the race, then a figure on every r...

The 6-Point Divisor Plan is an Australian horse racing staking plan from 1989, and the thing that keeps it survivable is not the arithmetic — it is the safety brake. You run into four losers in a r...

Weight ratings or speed ratings? Philip Roy tested both on Australian horse racing form, three months at the Sydney tracks, and one of them finished a long way in front. Writing in Practical Puntin...

In Australian horse racing, 99 per cent of punters fail to make money over a 12-month period — and exotic betting is where they lose fastest. Don Scott, a professional punter who spent the sixties ...

Every winning punter is really doing the same thing: reading a race for the signs that matter. In this episode of Practical Punting, Gordon breaks down the 10 key factors the professionals weigh in...

When a Practical Punting reader asked which form factors matter most, he listed twelve — and The Optimist turned the answer into a two-part masterclass. In Part 1, Gordon covers the first three: da...

The trifecta is one of racing's toughest bets to crack — but the professionals do it again and again, and it's not luck. In this episode of Practical Punting, Gordon walks you through the killer st...

Can you tell a genuinely fast run from one that just looks fast? In this one, Gordon unpacks "par times" — the smoothed average time for each track, distance and going — so you can read the clock t...