freowaytogo,

I am not discounting the fact that the occassional race may be fixed - but it would be a very small percentage of races run these days - the risks are simply too high. I certainly doubt it would happen often enough to make a big difference to you long-term profit or loss.

A bigger problem for the punter, I believe, is that in many cases horses are not always given the best chance to win because trainers want to try out different strategies in lower quality races to see how the horse performs (eg. instructing rider to restrain horse at start of race to see whether it can come from behind or going out hard to see how it lasts, etc). Now this is mainly going to be a problem with the shorter priced horses in lower quality races (no trainer is going to throw away a major race) so the simple answer is avoid backing these horses.

The simple solution, which you already seem to have found, is simply avoid odds-on horses (a sensible idea anyway in my opinion). If you always back the longer odds horses then fixing, if it exists, will never be a problem for you because you will be more likely to benefit from it than be hurt by it!

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