Patterns In The Sand....

Chapter Three: Profits From Specialisation

Later on in this book we will look at how best to maintain your database of speed ratings, but first you must decide which figures are going to prove the most productive for you to work with. There are 60 race courses in Great Britain, including the very latest opened in 2009 at Ffos Las but not including the all-weather facility at Great Leighs, the future of which is uncertain as the author writes this. There are courses for National Hunt jumps races, and courses for flat turf racing. A number of tracks cater for both codes.

These tracks are all of a different configuration, size, and shape. Tracks such as Wolverhampton and Chester are very tight, whilst a course like Newmarket is wide open and galloping. York is a very flat course, whilst Brighton is undulating with a peculiar camber on the home straight. Courses that turn left handed, courses that turn right. Straight courses, round courses, and oval courses. Tracks with a short run in to the finish, and everyone knows the long run in at Aintree. The multitude different characteristics of each course will all effect the performance of a horse.

There are problems with producing speed ratings for jumps racing. The shortest races under National Hunt rules start at two miles, and a good number are run in excess of three miles. Often when you have small fields of runners, the races can become tactical affairs which result in slow times. When races are falsely run it will inevitably lead to incomparable speed figures. You will regularly see jockeys easing their horses well before the line if the chance to finish in the prize money has gone, in order to preserve the horse. This does happen on the flat, but certainly not to the same extent. Fences can be omitted from the race if ground conditions are deemed unsafe, and sometimes when a horse and jockey falls at a fence it will be by-passed next time around whilst medical staff attend to the injured. Running rails are sometimes moved to preserve the ground, and all this affects the actual distance raced by the horses.

For these reasons I decided fairly early on not to follow jumps racing with speed ratings, and to concentrate instead on the flat racing. Ten years ago at the beginning of the season this approach was fine, as there would typically be one meeting each day, and usually two on a Saturday. But over the last decade the amount of racing has grown, and now there are normally three meetings each day, evening racing several days a week, and Sunday racing. Saturdays will often have four, five, even six meetings, and don't mention Bank Holidays!

Pretty soon I became overwhelmed by the sheer amount of number crunching I was having to do, just to keep my database up to date, that I didn't have enough time to properly analyse my figures, let alone visit the race course. Keeping up to speed (excuse the pun) with more than twenty race meetings each week is a full-time job, and the rest, and when I started to fall behind my figures became useless as I was often missing a horse's most recent performance.

Finally my wife Sarah could see how stressed and tired I was looking, and demanded we take a short break at the family villa in Andalucía (we are extremely lucky to have access to a lovely property owned by my sister-in-law's brother, and it's an idyllic bolt-hole not far from the coast, but in the middle of nowhere, in south-eastern Spain).

I took the time to re-read my bible Picking Winners and also a motivational book by Napoleon Hill called Think And Grow Rich. In that book Hill points out that a "Jack-of-all-trades is seldom a master at any...." and that successful people tend to focus their energies in a single direction rather than spreading themselves too thinly.

It struck me that Beyer had never followed turf racing to any great degree in America where dirt tracks are the norm. And so I decided I would also specialise, leave the turf alone, and use my speed ratings solely on the all-weather tracks in the UK.

I had already found out from past experience that trying to relate speed ratings gained on turf to figures gained on all weather surfaces was an exercise in futility. Very few horses perform equally as well on both. But as I had now made the decision to specialise on the all-weather I could see another potential problem. As the end of the turf season approached around September and October time, a great many horses start to alternate between the two surfaces. Trainers will often elect to keep horses that are in-form running with the aim of picking up a few extra races on the sand. This poses a problem when trying to play in these races, and it will invariably lead to the poor house. I reckoned that this particular issue would run its course by the end of November, by which time only the hard core Winter all weather campaigners would still be running.

The following Spring during March the trainers would start to enter some of their turf horses on the all weather to get them race fit for the new season. So my best estimates were that the speed ratings would be at their absolute best from December through to March, a period of roughly twelve weeks. This is when I planned to do my serious betting.

It does make me chuckle sometimes when I hear comments on The Morning Line such as "The trouble with the all weather, is that it's the same old horses racing against each other week in, week out. All the horses just seem to take it in turns to win." I fail to see their point, as with horses running in and out of form, with some horses improving whilst other are deteriorating, then it seems blatantly obvious you are going to see different winners.

But, and this is the crucial point, the very fact that you have a limited pool of horses running regularly on very much the same surface delivers up an untapped opportunity to make money - provided of course you are armed with your speed ratings!

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