Form is one of the most important factors when evaluating a horses chances of winning a particular race. At the races you will hear people talking about it all the time.
Form is basically the record of a horses performances and achievements in its ' previous races. Much is written about form and it ' s importance. The form of a horse is usually how bookmakers work out the odds of a horse before any betting has started. So you can probably guess that the favourite when the betting starts is usually the horse with the best form. Coupled with the fact that roughly 35% of races are won by the favourite you can see how important form is.
Form is the basis on which most gamblers decide which horse they choose. As a result most of the money will be bet on the horses who have the best recent from. Therefore these horses will usually be overbet so it is going to be difficult to find many really good betting opportunities if the only criteria you use for selecting your horse is form. Of course if the form horse is, in your opinion, an absolute dead cert to win, then there is no point betting on any other horses in the race. The way to make good money betting on the form horse is to find races where the odds of a particular horse don ' t seem to represent the chances of the form horse winning. For example if the form horse is priced at 10/1 and has won it ' s last two races against similar opposition then this may be a decent bet, but if the form horse is priced at evens and there is another horse in the race with similar form then this is probably not a race worth betting on.
The form of a horse can be found in racing publications and on internet sites. Usually the more detailed the information the more you will have to pay for it. This information is vitally important and it may well be worthwhile spending that little extra to obtain information that could be the difference between winning and losing bets. All this information is written down and as a result it sometimes doesn ' t paint a true picture of why a particular horse performed badly. They might of got stuck behind other horse, or the jockey miss-timed the sprint for the line. There are numerous reasons why a horse may have lost a race and form books do not always have this information. So there is no substitute for watching the races themselves. The more times you watch a horse races the more information you will have to assess their chances in future races.
