The Essentials of Studying Form — Part 2 | Ratings Supply the $$ Edge

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 Hartley Jnr set out the second instalment of his rating method: a filter that strikes whole classes of race off the page before a single runner is looked at, then grades whatever survives on fitness alone. It leaves enough races to keep you happy, he says, and takes away a huge number that are too fraught with traps to bother about.

• The first cut, and why he starts there — bet choice, he writes, is the cornerstone of betting: in country and provincial racing, ignore all races below Class 5, strike out everything between Maiden and Class 4, and concentrate only on the races above those classes
• The Right Races Formula in both its halves — the metropolitan list and the country and provincial one, the race types each of them keeps, the field-size limits (14 or fewer runners in town, 12 in the country), the 1050m minimum, and the two further tests, one on the favourite and one on apprentice-riders races, that throw a race out on their own
• What the filter leaves you holding: a ratings bracket of 50 through to 70 — about 13 lengths, he reckons, between a Class 5 runner and a horse like Sunline — along with his own warning that this is a broad figure
• The Fitness Formula: four grades, A through D, settled by two questions and no more — runs this campaign (3 or more, or 2) and days since the last start (14 or fewer, or between 15 and 21) — and why a horse resuming from a spell is left out of it altogether