Hello Friend

I hope you're having a great week. 

With any luck some of you may have used my Lanzarote trends to land on the 12s winner, Cobblers Dream, who along with three others hit every one of my trends for the race. I was more swayed by the Hobbs horse, typical! But a few members were persuaded by Cobblers and said so pre race in the comments, with any luck some of you were too. All good fun. 

Onto today where I've got something for you to read, and watch if you please... 

That headline is designed to lure you and make you open the email :)

Obviously there is no sure fire way to finding winners in this great game, or even creating shortlists and assessing value. I won’t sit here and say ‘this is how you ‘should’ be doing it. There is no right way, no silver bullet to ‘finding winners’. (or finding overpriced horses) There’s always room for improvement of course, and I could do with having a good latter half of the season.

At times before Christmas I wasn’t overly happy with my performance so I pondered my approach to race analysis, especially my main target races (c3+, 3m+ handicap chases), and tried to re-order my thinking and process, some aspects going ‘back to basics’ with things like trainer form/stats and whether the horse is in form! You can be too clever for your own good in this game and I was guilty of that at times. Having said that, it isn’t an easy game in which to succeed at long term but it’s not meant to be. There is no ‘easy’ way to become a long term winner if picking your own horses/bets out, but you can’t cut corners. Well, if you can, I haven’t worked out how!

After landing on Prime Venture (20s) at Sandown and Eclair Surf (12s) at Warwick on Saturday, I’m in much better form than I have been at times this season. And my ‘morning musings’ (where I use the daily blog content as my ‘way in’, highlighting the ones I like most) have been doing well since I started, in which I also apply much of the thinking outlined below.

So, I thought I’d use The Classic Chase and Eclair Surf as an example, and talk through my thinking and approach. Hopefully I say something useful which you may apply to your own punting, or even if it’s just the mention of a few horses to keep an eye on. Or what I picked up when watching the replays of two of Eclair’s chases, which I talk through also.

Below you can find my video. As always if I’m talking too slowly, you can ‘speed me up’ by pressing the cog in the bottom right hand corner, and increasing the playback speed.

After that you can find out outline of my ‘process’ which I talk through, using the classic chase as an example.

All the best, 

Josh