Another method that can be used to help you establish how good a horse is, is it's earnings. This is the amount of prize money a horse has collected in its career

When a horse wins a race its earns it's owner prize money and this is the main way that horse owners profit from their horses. Over a career a horse can earn millions of pounds in prize money if it wins big races. Some of the bigger races around the world can net an owner over a million pounds. So you can see that the best horses will be entered into these races. The quality of a race is usually in proportion to the amount of prize money on offer so horses that win these races will usually be better than horses that win races with smaller prize money.

To use this information to pick winners is not simply a case of finding out how much a horse has won in it's career as a horse that has won lots of races with small prize money is not necessarily as good as a horse that has won a couple of big races even though their career earnings may be similar.

As an example a horse that has only raced 6 times and won once but the race they won was a major event may have total earnings of £100000. Another horse that has run 50 races and won thirty of them may have also earned £100000 as well but if the most prestigious race they have won is the Joe Bloggs Handicap which won them £5000 the chances are it will not be as good a horse as the other.

A better method of evaluating the quality of a horse with respect to its career earnings is by working out a value for earnings per race. To work out this value all you do is simply divide their career earnings by the amount of races the horse has run. This value is a better indicator of the how good the horse is than just looking at the career earnings. In the example of the two horses above the value you would give to each horse would be as follows.

Horse A has run 6 races and earned £100000. So their earnings per race would be 100000 divided by 6 which gives a total of £16666 earnings per race. Horse B has run 50 races and also earned £100000 so their earnings per race would be 100000 divided by 50 which gives a total of £2000 per race.

Working out this total is only one way of assessing how good a horse is and should not be used on its own but can be a useful added piece of information when picking your horse.