Mentally there are fewer greater challenges to the average person than to survive the rigors of what we humans call life especially in the raising of a family. There is, however, another great challenge that awaits those choosing this path and that is to "nut out" a hard horserace. One such race is Race 6, the Victoria Handicap, at Caulfield on Easter Saturday, 2009.In my initial run through, where I just assess the horses that have been running well recently, I "narrowed" th
Mentally there are fewer greater challenges to the average person than to survive the rigors of what we humans call life especially in the raising of a family. There is, however, another great challenge that awaits those choosing this path and that is to "nut out" a hard horserace. One such race is Race 6, the Victoria Handicap, at Caulfield on Easter Saturday, 2009.
In my initial run through, where I just assess the horses that have been running well recently, I "narrowed" the number of chances to a staggering 15 out of the 19 runners!! Starting with a blank sheet of paper I listed the fifteen with their barriers and simply did what any scientist would do: I went to work on the problem.
My usual attack involves comparing a pair of horses against one another and in this race there were 6 pairs and one treble to work on. When comparing Tears I Cry and Cocinero I had Cocinero as the A selection and Tears I Cry as the B selection. This process is repeated all the way down the list of chances. Eventually I ended up with 7 A selections to whom I applied the same technique thus having 2 pairs and one treble of original A selections to work on.
The massive problem I had with this race was the barrier draw because several of the really strong chances were badly drawn and in situations like this it is really important to construct a speed map. In a speed map the punter attempts to determine which horses usually go forward early, those that amble out and those that literally fall out of the barriers. Now, some horses may go forward normally and sit either on the pace or midfield because they do not have the flying early pace to rocket to the actual lead. If such a horse is drawn wide Lady Luck is going to play a huge part with their chance of winning as most likely they will be caught wide all the way. It is not desirable to be caught wide in a 1400m race at Caulfield.
What happens in the finish is that quite a bit of the formwork you attempt in such a race becomes guesswork however it is fair to call this educated guesswork. Normally you do not want to be playing the guessing game as a punter however in races with the difficulty of the Victoria Handicap the pay off can arrive via better odds than a normally straightforward race offers. At around 3.25 pm this Saturday we will all know if I have been rewarded for the effort.