Your three biggest punting downfalls

[graysonscolumn]

1. Betting on any race, however small or large the field, without establishing where any pace is likely to come from or how contested it’s likely to be. Going boots-in with a front-runner set to be taken on by three or four other front-runners rarely yields the desired outcome; ditto backing a horse that stays 6f in a 5f race completely devoid of obvious pace, on the presumption that it’ll still be run to suit.

2. Being put off by big prices when everything else screams in a horse’s favour. Not tipping the 33-1 winner Flamand, the only animal that prevented me going through the card at Stratford during my

Sportsman

days, will haunt me to the grave.

3. Big bets in class 1, 2 or 3 races, especially in big-field events. They’re rarely where my greatest attentions lie nowadays, and it can quickly become good money after bad. Far happier chucking bigger sums at Pointing fancies – Sheriff Hutton this Sunday, here we come…

gc

Adoptive father of two. The patron saint of lower-grade fare. A gently critical friend of point-to-pointing. Kindness is a political act.

[Professortrubshawe]

1) Increasing stake during a winning streak. It ALWAYS brings said streak to a halt. Always, without exception.

2) Not having the courage of one’s convictions during periods of knocked confidence. Every season I see about a dozen horses that the form tells me are worth a good whack. I demur. I suffer. THEN I see something that I am slightly less happy with but I say ‘look what happened last time’, so I back it and lose. Welcome to the hell of punting on horses.

3) Thinking that a form angle that won you money yesterday – or even in the previous race – will win you money now. E.g. you find an easy winner at a good price by realising that it’s been running on wrong ground and has dropped a class and is now 9lb well in or something. Then you start looking for that angle in the next race, but likely as not the next race doesn’t have a horse like that or will be won by a different set of attributes etc. Humans are minded to ‘well, it worked last time’ modes of thinking. Evolution I suppose. But fatal in punting.

[Coggy]

1) Starting in the first place
2) Listening to (and more importantly believing) connections
3) Being swayed by prices / market movers.

[Author]

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