Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125094 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-29
• Binding: Paperback
• 95 pages

Customer Reviews

Another book for the gullible
Purely in the interests of research (yeah, OK, and to make money) I bought this book - in hope rather than expectation. The books "hook" is that it provides a by-the-numbers approach with a view to establishing a quantitive assessment of a horse's prospects.

The "system" basically combines a number of statistics freely available in the racing press into a single number. There are pages of instructions telling you to, (and I kid you not)

* "Press the "1" button,
* then press the "+" button
* then press the "1" button and
* then, to complete the calculation press the "=" button.

Quite frankly, you could distill the "method" into 5 pages - but few people could get away with that anywhere other than on eBay, so the book is padded, and padded, and padded.

The target market for this book would be completely novice "punters" that can barely count their change to buy "The Racing Post" let alone be let loose on a pocket calculator.

In these days of internet forums, sophisticated software programs and 24 access to race data from the Racing Post web site, this book represents all that is worst in "winning systems for horse racing" genre.

Save your money and invest in books such as "Braddock's Complete Guide to Horse Race Selection and Betting". They may be heavier going, they may require a modicum of intelligence but, in the long run, understanding the subject of horse selection will always win out over "get rich quick" simple systems that only make money for authors and publishers.

Clear explanations of using a calculator to study form.
This book provides clear and simple explanations of how to use a hand calculator to study form. This involves a sixteen step button pressing process that can be adapted to one's own ideas. A suitable guide for a novice punter. It uses methods simply explained for ease of comprehension. I would have liked a little more detail on some points. For instance what amendments do daily newspapers include in their form ratings. Its method does however seem to work. This book will certainly help punters pick winners in a more methodical manner.

Snakes alive, it gets a five.
As a seasoned punter, I didn't expect too much from a book of this price, but I was pleasantly surprised. The author makes some valid points about the necessity for discipline and thoroughness - something this mathematical approach to race appraisal admirably assists the punter to do. Whilst some may find the arithmetic a trifle daunting to begin with, it becomes progressively easier with practice. Moreover, it makes for a consistency of performance, doing away with many of the excesses that come from the 'average' punter's arbitrary and indisciplined approach. Initial results have been extremely favourable, having used the guidelines to create a refined spin-off selection method emanating from this book. I have found however, that using the Racing Post as recommended, does indeed prove more effective than using standard daily papers. If The Post is not available, then don't despair - you can do it all by accessing the paper's online version, which is more than sufficient for this purpose. The more selective your mentality in seeking good races to plunder, the better your strike rate will be with this method. But the bottom line is, it has improved my punting performance considerably. Long may this trend continue.