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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, ...
In this final section of a review of the unconscious factors that may adversely affect our judgement when gambling, we will look at only one factor - but a very important one. The myth of skill. ...
When you go to gamble you make a decision. There are a number of components - what to be on, how to bet on it (win, each way, doubles, quinellas, etc.) and how much to bet on it. Are you aware o...
Last month, we looked at the psychological pressures of "negative recency" and "utility" and how they affect the average gambler. We tried to highlight how these factors may influence you uncons...
An academic colleague vaguely interested in horse racing (a rare breed!), asked me if I had heard of a book he was reading about horse racing and written by a psychology professor in America. I us...
Russell Clarke is one of Britain's most successful professional punters. He writes for the popular magazine Odds On and runs his own Internet site. In this special article, he gives his views on b...
One of the most vexing problems facing punters is to decide how much betting their pockets can stand. To put it another way: can you afford to bet as much as you are betting? Or, is your betting ...
Tell the truth: Have you stuck to your New Year's resolution to change your silly betting habits? Or have you drifted back into your old destructive patterns of betting? I pose these questions be...
Last month I stated that laststart winners repeat at about an 18 per cent strike rate, roughly twice the strike rate of horses selected at random. Backing all these last-start winners, I pointed o...
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...