I notice on today’s nominations for Randwick Races next Saturday there are two races with 4 starters and one with 5...

Surely they can't run races with 4 starters. can they?

How do bookies or punters profit from that?

OzPunter

Ive often wondered why sydney has such small fields. Very often less than 9 runners unlike melb which has big fields often. Can anyone enlighten me? Is it the gai and hawkes domination or is the money better in vic?? Bookies vary rarely loose and i just think there profit might be smaller compared to the large fields.

Trust me... Bookies do loose, often... In a very small field one horse will be the outstanding favorite at deadly odds and almost no one will bet on the race. So you have the cost of setting up, paying staff and more and might take a handful of $10 bets..

Melbourne racing benefits from strong provincial racing where runners only need to travel 50 - 100 klms to get to the city tracks. Even Adelaide feeds horses into Melbourne events, whereas Sydney has a provincial circuit from Wollongong to Port Macquarie and out to Canberra. You have to bring the horse in days before a race house them somewhere, pay staff etc It's all too hard and the prize money for place getters doesn’t cover the costs... There's no real solution till you get the public more involved through television broadcasts on pay TV.... Which is yet another bungle?

My Point was that there are three races on next Saturday and not enough horses... They all when south and west for the carnivals and then to the spelling paddock

Are you sure that these are the races and not the trials.

I once was mistaken when they had a Randwick Rosehill formguide and one was the real races, the other was trials. Couldn't work out why they had fields of 4 and 5.

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Noms are a nothing for me... I wait until finals b4 I even look at a race.. I think that is about late wednesday ( for saturdays) .. so plenty of time for those races to attract a few more runners

As for running races with 4 or 5... they do it very regularly on the Country and Prov tracks... why should the city be any different? I remember waterhouse saying she was running a horse that had no real chance of winning, in a GR1 that attracted 5 runners, just to collect the prizemoney, for 5th... Some People still win with the small fields... just need to use your mind...

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I once had one system (well known mob too ) Which went -
Bet the LONGEST priced in fields of 4 - 6 .

Cheers.
darky.

OzPunter,

This is only the original nominations for the races. It's nothing out of the ordinary for there to be small fields at nomination time. In cases like that, what they do is extend the nomination deadline, and then they often end up with bigger fields. If you look here, that's exactly what they've done:

http://www.racingnsw.com.au/extendednoms.asp#12020

If there is still a race with only 4 runners after tomorrow's extended deadline, they may delete it. They do have 9 races programmed, so they could afford to lose one race, possibly even two. The final fields for Saturday's races aren't known until Thursday morning after acceptances.

Thanks for the info ozpunter.