it is funny what you will see if you look at a horses total starts if they are say a 4yo+ i have seen some horses that always win 2 in a row.....they have done all thier life......other take 4 starts to fire so as soon as they have hit 4 starts thats when you start putting money on.....others win about the same time every year.....i don't use this method myself but it will work if you have the time to follow up on it.....i just use the last 3 starts plus other bits of form to find the winners....sure it does not work every race or even every day...but thats not what we are trying to do are we....if you are then you are not really using a professional approach.....we just have to win enough races to make a nice profit and that all that counts.

Just out of curiosity, which of the Don Scott books has a more in depth on form analysis ?

Winning More published in 1985 is the best as it captures all of his earlier analysis/techniques of Winning and The Winning Way and overall is more extensive than the other two books.

He did publish another book Winning In The 90's, but that was his most disappointing effort, light on detail, concentrating more on exotic types of betting, but there are better books around than his that covers such topics.

He did publish another book Winning In The 90's, but that was his most disappointing effort, light on detail, concentrating more on exotic types of betting, but there are better books around than his that covers such topics.[/QUOTE]


Can anyone point me to some of those books? I am starting to get interested in exotics a bit. Any help appreciated.

Duritz

Thanks La Mer.

I keep an eye out for that book.

I have been following Peter Bent's method for some time and from what i read on this thread, many of his thoeries are adapted from Don's methods.

Duritz,

You might be interest in Peter Bent's methods as he's specialise in exotic bets. He has a book based on his exotic betting methods.

I think one of the reasons Scott was so successful was that he got the jump on the bookieswith his analysis and as a consequence was able to secure many overlays in the one race, so it was not unheard of for him to back 6 or 7 winners at one meeting. I think he may have even backed every winner on the card a couple of times.Nowadays with the bookies analysis far more advanced , there are less genuine value bets left. There is nothing more frustrating than to spend time analysing a race only to come up with the same prices as the bookies. I think this why many people prefer mechanical systems. While they might not be as reliable, because they use different methods, they might be able to find value that normal ratings cant.

Too true DR RON!

The bookies cannot control mechanical systems per se, but they can incorporate class weight speed time ratings, I'm sure they have the best of them. They then adjust their prices to the public bets. I'm currently operating on a 10% POT with one of my systems which picked Bipolar yesterday, the bookies cannot get wise and suddenly offer 10% less on my selections, as the weight of money and market price has to be included. If they did, they'd get stung every time my selection failed (about 1/3 of the time.

This is where mechanical systems have it over ratings, but if someone comes up with a better ratings system that's not been done to death, then they may have a chance.