Potential To Win

Posted by ginag2 on Jun 25, 2013 in Blog | 4 comments

By looking at what a horse has done in recent races, and using that as a major factor in our betting decisions – we set ourselves up to make one of the most serious, yet most common mistakes we can possibly make as race players.

The discussion in the last post touched on this – the concept that most handicappers latch onto the most obvious and most recent data to ‘anchor’ their handicapping and decision-making.  But unfortunately for our long-term bottom-line, the obvious is, well . . . obvious!

Which means it’s obvious to all the other handicappers and bettors out there – which means that information will be over-used and therefore over-bet – which then assures us of a steady stream of underlays if we are also making that info a major factor in our handicapping.

Certainly we are not oracles, and we don’t have crystal balls, and therefore must use what we do have; the published past performance data, our own collected data (the handicapping of our personal results), the visual appearance of the horse, and the money flow on the toteboard – as input factors for our handicapping and betting decisions.

But the main point here is that the astute handicapper needs to look for POTENTIAL.

How do we go about this – looking for potential?