ok, I'll try to rattle off a few replies all in one :smile:

xanadu, howdy - yes I did say racing, thoroughbreds especially, is boring.
What I meant was that the general format is boring. Nearly every race club of all the codes is struggling and yet they produce the same old crap every week. Nearly every race is completely meaningless. Racing is a huge industry yet it gets barely a mention in the papers.
Its badly organised, and in very serious need of innovative ideas - including inovation in race formats and types.
I will post on this subject another day.

kenchar - fingers??? I type with my toes, the fingers are for scratching my rapidly balding head :smile:

shoto - the winner of the example I provided was number 1, it paid $1.90 and was $4 shorter than the next horse. Impossible to pick from the form but obviously there were other factors known to the racing industry. In smaller betting markets the local knowledge will be critical to the price, I think this is especially so in trots.

late mail - what I have come to realise is that I am not the only person looking at the data, and there are others with more information than us who are also analysing the data.So why should I double up on their efforts?? sometimes, however, the weight of money is emotional - that is what you need to be on the look out for and this is often mentioned by the race caller or analyst on tv.

the favourite places something like 60+% of the time. I assume they just miss the place about 10% and I imagine for about 10% of the time they suffer an unpredictable bit of bad luck - interfered with, fall, blocked for a run etc..
thats a total of over 80%.
If you take out the number of times a horse just doesnt feel like running, has a gut ache, has the hots for the horse in barrier 2 etc...
then the amount of time the weight of money is actually wrong is very slim.

as BC said, its all about keeping an open mind and this is just one of those areas that presents interesting opportunities.
Nobody is suggesting betting on every race, but if one is looking for a low risk bet and is not greedy then seeking out favourites is a reasonable approach.

Merriguy - many a promising angle has come to grief when Sunday racing comes around.
must be donkey day :smile:

well boys and girls, the point of the exercise is to think and be broad minded and consider ideas. Everybody has a different way of doing things and nobody is more right or wrong.
Its just interesting to exchange ideas and try new angles.

see ya
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