The Next Episode Horse

Australian horse racing form study usually stops at picking the horse: you do the form, then walk up and take whatever price is showing on the board. In Practical Punting in October 2000, Richard H...

Australian horse racing form study often ends the same way: an hour on the form guide, and a bet on the one whose name you liked. Writing in Practical Punting in September 2000, Richard Hartley Jnr...

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...

Do lucky saddlecloth numbers win? In 2007 a Practical Punting writer counted 660 Australian horse racing results — 7,363 runners, every TAB number from one to ten — instead of arguing about it. Num...

The favourite looks like the safest bet in Australian horse racing, and across 660 races counted one at a time it lost 25 per cent on turnover — even though the first favourite won 174 of them, mor...

There is no royal road to profits in horse racing — you have to do at least some work. Ratings are that work: measuring what a racehorse can actually do and writing it down as a number you can comp...

Two horses won at 12/1 and 50/1 in the same Sydney spring. Neither was a fluke, and neither was a secret. The reasons were sitting in the form guide the whole time, in plain sight, for anyone who s...

Most punters read a form guide without ever deciding which parts of it matter. This is horse racing form study from 1992 that still holds up: what a formline tells you, and what it quietly hides.

Most punters pick the right horse and still take the wrong odds. This is horse racing betting from 1988 that still holds up: the same selection, a better price, and the four seconds that pay for it.