Here are a couple of strategies you might like the to try out. There is absolutely no guarantee either will work but they will give you an idea of how you can go about working one out for yourself.

Speed and Earnings

This strategy only takes into consideration two factors relating to the horses ability. Their speed and their career earnings. Finding out the speed of a horse is considerably easier if you are betting on US horse races than it is if you are betting on UK horse races but even if you are betting on UK races the information is available. However, you may have to pay for it.

The basic principal of the strategy is that first off you work out which horses are the fastest and eliminate the majority of the field on that basis alone. Then with the horses you have left you work out who has got the best earnings rating.

Here is an example of how you go about it. Say you are trying to pick a winner in a flat race over a distance of one mile and the race contains 8 runners. There are statistics available that will tell you how fast a horse took to run one mile in their previous races. You then work out what is the average speed each horse ran a mile in their previous three races. You will then have a figure for each horse. Lets say the figures were as follow.

Horse 1 = 1:16.2
Horse 2 = 1.19.4
Horse 3 = 1.20.5
Horse 4 = 1.15.6
Horse 5 = 1.19.8
Horse 6 = 1.21.4
Horse 7 = 1.18.9
Horse 8 = 1.16.3

Now that you have worked out each horses average speed ratings you then have to discount some of the horses. In the above example you can see that Horses 1, 4 and 8 have considerably better mile times than the rest.. So you discount the other five horses straight away. Depending on the figures you get you may be left with more than three horses to consider.

Now you are left with three horses. For each of these horses you give each an earnings rating. To do this you find out how much they have earned in their career and divide it by how many races they have won. So say this is what you found.

Horse 1 has earned £145,000 in 8 races
Horse 4 has earned £75,000 in 11 races
Horse 8 has earned £195,000 in 15 races

This gives each horse a earnings rating of:

Horse 1 = £18,125 per race
Horse 4 = £6,818 per race
Horse 8 =£13,000 per race

So now that you have found out that information you put your money on horse 1 as that horse has both good speed and the best earnings rating of the three. If on the other hand when you have finished working out the speed and earnings ratings and two horses work out to be very similar you just pass this race and try the same thing on the next race.

This system is probably too simplistic and needs to be made more sophisticated. There are a couple of obvious ways in which this could be done. Firstly the way in which the speed is worked out would probably need to be altered to add in some way of altering the horses times depending on what track and in what conditions the race was run. As some tracks are slower than others and wet ground is slower than dry. This could be worked out by comparing the same horses times on different tracks and in different conditions. When you had done this for enough horses you could give a time penalty or bonus depending on where and in what conditions the time was achieved.

With regard to the earnings rating this could be made more sophisticated by grading the money earned depending on how long ago it had been won as a horse who had won a lot of money may have reached its peak a couple of years previously and not won a decent race in a long time.

As you can see there are lots of things for you to consider when working out a strategy of your own. Hopefully this will give you a few ideas.