Horse Racing Handicapping Tip For Your Consideration

August 9, 2009
By Profitus Maximus

Handicapping a horse race can be a confusing thing for a beginner. To help clear things up, here are a couple of horse racing handicapping tips that might help.

In assessing the relative strength of the contenders in a given race, first try to determine which horses have raced against each other. The past performances will clue you in by bolding the horses that raced against each other, but only if they finished in the top 3, otherwise you will need a sharp eye in order to see that they raced on the same date in the same race.

Once you have determined that two horses in today’s race have faced each other before, the results will help determine how they are likely to perform against one another today.

A second horse race handicapping tip is when trying to assess the strength of a given entry, look at the horses the entry in question has faced in the past. Most past performances will give the top three finishers in any given race, so you will have access to at least two horses the entry has faced. The question is how did those horses perform in the past, and how close did today’s entry finish to them? One thing to do is to use Racereplays.com to determine when those other horses' have last raced, and watching a replay of those races will help you determine just how good those horses are.

For example, if Silver Brook is racing in today’s race and in her prior race finished second beaten a head by Lucky Lucy, you can search for that horses' last race on Racereplays.com to see how she did. If today’s race is a 16,000 claiming race and Lucky Lucy won a 25,000 claiming race two races back, the chances are that Silver Brook fits at today’s level. However, if Lucky Lucy’s prior race was a 12,500 claiming race in which she was all out to get third, then you'll need to take a closer look to see if Silver Brook belongs at today’s level.