What is the best way to develop your own horse racing system? Well, there is no best way – there is a way – but it needs to make sense for you.
The first thing you need to do is write down a specific objective. I want to win a lot of money is not specific.
Here’s one that is much better: I want to make $500 a day betting sprint distance horse races at XX race track.
What you have done here is narrow down your expectations and determine how you plan to reach that goal. The next thing you need to do is get a bunch of old racing forms, a pen and lots of notebook paper and start backtracking. (I’m assuming you’ve chosen the goal of making money betting horse racing, because you know something about it. If you are clueless about horse racing, you need to educate yourself or your long-term plans will fail).
To find past results for old races in the USA and Australia I use racingchannel.com. You will need to evaluate at least 1,000 races for this to be valid. Make sure you look at the same track, and the same distance. This will add a solid foundation for your data mining experiment.
Next, you need to determine what trait the majority, if not all, of horses that won those races had in common. What percentage of horses finished 1st in their last race? What percentage moved up in class? What percentage moved down in class? What percentage had more weight? etc.
You need to build out about 10 -20 pieces of criteria to measure against one another. Once you do this you will start to see a picture appear of what traits the majority, or a good percentage of winning horses had.
Now you need to take that data and back test it again. See what your win percentage would be, and how much your ROI would be. ROI means return on investment. For example if in the long term, betting $10 per race, I bet on 200 races and collected $3,000 in winnings, my ROI would be 50%. Or for every dollar I wagered, I’d expect to get back $1.50 on average.
Many “expert” players toss that number around to sound smart, but don’t even know what it truly means. Basically APR in a bank the same as ROI. If you put money an Bank X offering a CD at 3.5% interest…your ROI is about 3.5% less fees etc. So no, it’s not a mystery number and don’t let horse racing system sellers throw it around like it means more than it really does.
So you repeat these steps until you find your niche betting system. One that you understand, feel comfortable using, and that shows a good ROI. Remember also, ROI means over the LONG TERM. Don’t expect to make $1.50 every single time you go to the races. This is gambling and it does involve risk and losing and winning streaks.
Be wise. Bet smart.
