Thoroughbred Handicapping - How You can Make Money by Understanding Trainer Manipulation

According to popular opinion it’s extremely difficult to make money as a horse player. But as you are about to see, this is not exactly true. If you would like a betting system that is both profitable and easy to use, why don’t you try this great little system? It has 3 rules yet it is so simple that even your grandmother could be a winner with it.

I will show you the rules, and then I will show why the system works and critique its strong points and weaknesses.

The Rules
1. The race must be a claiming race with the exception that it can not be a maiden claiming race. The way to tell if the race is a claiming race is by looking at the race description at the top of either the track program or the past performances.

2. Calculate each horse’s lifetime earnings per start (LEPS) by dividing each horse’s lifetime earnings by its lifetime starts. You can find the horse’s lifetime starts and earnings in the upper right-hand corner of its past performance record.

3. Place a win bet on the horse with the largest lifetime earnings per start (LEPS) if his closing odds are greater than or equal to 8-to-1.

Why this System is Profitable
Because all horses are not the same and they have different levels of ability. So there are different levels of class in thoroughbred horseracing. As long as a race horse is in good condition, he will win easily if he is entered in a race at a much lower class level.

A horse that is selected by this system will almost certainly have run successfully in much higher class levels in the past. The horses selected by this system in general can’t be competitive at their former class level because they have had injuries. So they become “betting tools.” The trainers keep these horses in the stable because they feel that the horses can still win at the lower class level once they become healthy again. The trainer knows that if the horse can get back to its original competitive level even for only a single race, it can easily defeat the cheaper field it will face in the race he is running in today. So because of manipulation by the trainer, these horses do win and will often win unexpectedly without showing any signs of improvement. Also because of trainer manipulation, these horses will pay long shot odds when they win.

The System’s Strong Points and Weaknesses
This system can be very profitable over an extended period of time and will steadily return a profit of over 25% on each dollar bet. The biggest fault of the system is the win percent which will only average from 10% to 14%. What this means is if you start using this system you should expect to see many losing streaks.

The size or number of losing streaks for any system is determined by the system’s percentage of wins. Suppose as an example that your win percentage was on average 14%, which is a fairly optimistic assumption for this system. You should expect to see at the very least one losing streak of 34 losers in a row in every series of 1000 bets. So if we make the assumption of 14% winners, we should also expect see 27 losing streaks of 10 or more losing bets in a row for each 1000 horses bet. This would mean that you would be losing 10 or more consecutive losers about 37% of the time while you’re playing this system.

The winning percentage is one of the most important factors to consider when evaluating any handicapping system. If you would prefer a handicapping system which has a much higher winning percentage than this system, take a look at “The Indicator Handicapping Method” at turfanalyst.com, my website.