How I started betting on horses?

Fortunately for me, I was brought up in the house hold of a professional punter, which should have meant that I understood the way sensible betting works and not to lose all of my money in one outing to a bookmakers. Needless to say, that didn't happen. The first time I walked into a bookmakers was just after my 18th birthday, a small Ladbrokes branch in my town, Clevedon. Obviously, I got asked for identification and once that was out of the way, I picked up a betting slip, found the favourite for the next race ( a odds on shot at 10/11) and stuck down a few twenty pound notes. Now at this point, I had a small knowledge of the way odds work and how that correlated with the likleyhood of the horse winning. Therefore, a 10/11 shot seemed like a pretty reliable option and I was pretty confident I would get my money back as well as a few extra pounds in my pocket. What happened next, should have made me stop betting altogether. I lost every penny I had on me and I couldn't understand why. The 10/11 horse had lost by a long way, 20 lengths in fact.

Betting became my life and I would always be looking at prices online and sticking a fiver down on the horse that was either the favourite or I liked the look of it's form. Those were simply the two factors in my decision making. If a horse was 10/1 and its form was 55579PU5, then I would completely disregard it and it would not enter my final selection. It wasn't until a long time after that I started to understand how thick I had been. A horse's form shown in the Racing Post gives the average punter only a very small indication of where the horse is likely to finish this time around. Obviously with horses like Frankel and Kauto Star, the form is spot on and it would only take someone with half a brain cell to watch one of those races and conclude that those horses were stars.

That only applies to the very minority however. A horse with poor form should never be disregarded until researched thoroughly beforehand. It may have finished way down the field in it's last 5 starts, but how competitve were those races? They may have included the very top horses in the country and for me a horse that finishes 7th in a race with very competitve opposition is a much better option to one that has finished 1st against very poor opposition. The majority of novice punters or people with a very low IQ will fall into this trap and will therefore, never make any money from betting.

Take my advice and you will reduce the amount of losers you back.


JH