Swanston Horse

Track conditions and weight are the two Australian horse racing form factors most punters skim over — "the in-a-hurry punters of modern day racing", as Richard Hartley Jnr put it in Practical Punti...

Australian horse racing form study often ends the same way: an hour on the form guide, half the field circled, and still no idea which one to back. Writing in Practical Punting Magazine, Richard Ha...

Most of a Saturday card is not worth studying — which is why Australian horse racing form study starts with picking the race, not the horse. Writing in Practical Punting in June 2000, Richard Ha...

Before you rate a single horse, Australian horse racing form study starts with a question about the race itself: is it even worth analysing? Writing in Practical Punting in May 2000, Richard Hartle...

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...

MOONEE VALLEY I love Moonee Valley. I'd go there anytime. It's easy to get to, as any Melburnian knows. Just get a tram from Elizabeth Street, or Swanston Street, and ask the conductor. A goo...

Bart Cummings and his superstar So You Think were the talk of the annual Melbourne Cup parade - and they weren't even in it.The Cups king scratched himself from the parade to rest up for the 150th ...

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...