0CHAPTER THREE

JUMPS / TURF OR ALL WEATHER

00Before deciding the best way to store and retrieve the figures, you must first decide which figures you are going to work with. There are 42 jump courses and 38 flat including the 3 all weather circuits. They are all different shapes and sizes, some undulating like Brighton others flat like York. There are those with sharp bends like Chester and Wolverhampton and wide open galloping courses like Newmarket. There are right hand courses and left hand courses. Straight courses and round courses. There are long run ins and short run ins. The differences are endless. All these factors affect a horses performance.
Take jump racing first, the problem with allocating speed ratings are as follows :-
The shortest races are 2m and many are 3m and upwards. Small fields and tactical races often result in slow times. This in turn leads to incomparable speed figures. Quite often before a race has finished you will see jockeys pulling horses up and walking to the line. You could argue the same happens on the flat, but not to the same extent. Fences can be omitted because of unsafe conditions or dolled off after a bad fall. When the ground gets churned up running rails are often moved altering the distance of the race. Finally on the occasions when your calculations are correct, there is suddenly an unseated rider, your horse is brought down or the worst scenario of all, it falls at the last when ten lengths clear.

00It was for these reasons that I decided to leave the jumps alone and concentrate on the flat. At the beginning of the season things were fine with only one meeting a day and perhaps two on Saturdays, but as the season progressed there were more and more. Two meetings an afternoon, night racing three times a week and then Sunday racing, not to mention Bank Holidays. I soon got bogged down with the figures and reached a stage were I was so busy crunching numbers I didn’t have time to do anything with them. To compile ratings for every horse running in 24-28 meetings a week is a full time job and them some. I ended up that far behind, the figures were worse than useless.
00Eventually, I gave up the ghost and got a late booking for Calla Millor. While I was away I re-read my bible Mordin on Time and a book by John Train on the stock market. John Train was a successful stock market investor and in his book, The Moneymasters, he makes the following comment when describing a successful investor. “ It is sufficient to be a master of one game rather than try to learn two or three, as long as you retire to the sidelines when the game you know is no longer being played.” I immediately realized that the same principal applied to gambling. I decided that I would leave the turf alone and using the ratings, concentrate on the all weather.

00I had learned from past experience that trying to relate all weather speed figures to turf was futile as few horses ran equally as well on both. Now I had decided to concentrate solely on the all weather I could see another problem looming. During the back end of the turf season a lot of horses would be alternating between the two surfaces . Some trainers would be tempted to keep ‘in form’ horses running after the turf season had finished and try to pick up a few races on the sand.. Gambling in these type of races can only lead to the poor house. I figured that this problem would persist until the end of November, and that after that, we would be left with a hard core of winter all weather horses. By the end of February and beginning of March trainers would have started to enter their turf horses on the all weather to get them revved up for the flat season. So the ratings should be at their best between December and February, roughly 10-12 weeks. This would be the time for some serious gambling. I have to laugh when I hear some of the comments on the Racing Channel. One of them goes something like this. “The trouble with the all weather is, the same horses race against each other week in and week out. They just seem to take it in turns winning.” Well horses are continually running in and out of form and if some horses deteriorate and others improve then its obvious that you are going to end up with different winners. The very fact that you have this group of horses running regularly on the same surface provides an ideal opportunity to make money. As long as you have the ratings.