Phats 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 ...

There is no short cut in Australian horse racing, and Don Scott is the proof: he worked 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, at form study. Practical Punting's Brian Blackwell interviewed him i...

In Australian horse racing, most punters bet with bookmakers all their lives without ever learning how a bookie makes his book, and it is hard to beat a man at a job you cannot describe. Statsman, ...

Linda Meech has answered a call from Peter Moody to partner his two Rosehill runners on Saturday including exciting three-year-old Moment Of Change.It will be a rare Sydney visit from the New Zeala...

In the November PPM, I chronicled my journey into the Victorian State Library to obtain a copy of the very first formguide I kept for research purposes and expressed surprise at how little informa...

On April 25 I celebrated my 40th “official” year as a punter, which I calculate via the fact that the first formguide I kept for research purposes was from an Anzac Day meeting of 1967. Since the...

She currently occupies third position on the Victorian Jockeys Premiership with a superior strike rate to all other riders inside the top 50 but Linda Meech isn’t getting carried away ahead of a b...

British trainer Mark Johnston came to Australia with such high hopes of winning the 1995 Melbourne Cup that he decided to fully savour the experience by travelling to Flemington by train and in a k...

In recent years, country racing has become such an integral part of our betting life that it's still surprising how much we don't know about it. In-depth form guides for the country meetings, in...