Menu
Track conditions and weight are the two Australian horse racing form factors most punters skim over — "the in-a-hurry punters of modern day racing", as Richard Hartley Jnr put it in Practical Punti...
Australian horse racing form study often ends the same way: an hour on the form guide, half the field circled, and still no idea which one to back. Writing in Practical Punting Magazine, Richard Ha...
Most of a Saturday card is not worth studying — which is why Australian horse racing form study starts with picking the race, not the horse. Writing in Practical Punting in June 2000, Richard Ha...
Before you rate a single horse, Australian horse racing form study starts with a question about the race itself: is it even worth analysing? Writing in Practical Punting in May 2000, Richard Hartle...
Don Scott's first book turned the racing world upside down, and it did it with ratings: for the first time an Australian horse racing punter could put a figure on the race, then a figure on every r...
The 6-Point Divisor Plan is an Australian horse racing staking plan from 1989, and the thing that keeps it survivable is not the arithmetic — it is the safety brake. You run into four losers in a r...
Weight ratings or speed ratings? Philip Roy tested both on Australian horse racing form, three months at the Sydney tracks, and one of them finished a long way in front. Writing in Practical Puntin...
In Australian horse racing, 99 per cent of punters fail to make money over a 12-month period — and exotic betting is where they lose fastest. Don Scott, a professional punter who spent the sixties ...
There is no short cut in Australian horse racing, and Don Scott is the proof: he worked 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, at form study. Practical Punting's Brian Blackwell interviewed him i...
In Australian horse racing, most punters bet with bookmakers all their lives without ever learning how a bookie makes his book, and it is hard to beat a man at a job you cannot describe. Statsman, ...
PROFESSIONAL punters across Australia have made it clear over the past 48 hours that Peter Moody will win Saturday's Doomben Cup in Queensland, but it won't be with the mare who this time last year...
Alf Sorbillo an American punter who made a fortune betting on the Californian races in the 50s and 60s used to tell anyone who asked for the secret of his success: "I made my own luck." By this, ...
In the second part of our Great Debate feature, two of our contributors, P.B. King and Mark Merrick, continue the analysis of form handicapping. This month they discuss the pitfalls facing punters...
Ask any professional punter if he's a gambler and he'll say NO! Most punters look on themselves as business people. They see their bets as investments. They set long-term goals, and they try to ru...
There is no royal road to profits in horse racing — you have to do at least some work. Ratings are that work: measuring what a racehorse can actually do and writing it down as a number you can comp...
Nick Mordin caused something of a publishing sensation back in 1992 with his book Betting For A Living. It became a bestseller and remains much in demand today, years later. Mordin has sinc...
I wonder if we will ever discover what really happened to Don Scott? The great professional punter was found dead in his bed last year amid rumours that he had killed himself with a massive overdo...
Back in 1987, I interviewed professional punter Don Scott. He was hailed as the 'greatest' ratings guru of them all. His books were best-sellers. At the time, Don had more or less given up going ...