Sometimes a horse may not be reaching its full potential for a multitude of reasons. Maybe it doesn’t like the travelling involved in getting to meetings, it may feel spooked by the large crowds and under perform. There could be numerous factors behind why a horse initially does poorly during its early runs. So if a horse is showing signs of improvement then there is every reason to believe that this improvement will continue.

This is why the handicappers have such a tough job because racing results and winning and losing margins are often very misleading. So what we are looking at here is a situation where the official handicapper must try to estimate just how much “extra” this horse actually has. As you would imagine, this is a very difficult task and one which leaves a good scope for those who follow small groups of horses very closely to be able to get an edge.

But this is where the true advantage is because there are simply too many horses with too much history for any one punter to follow them closely all the time. Some professionals try to short cut this by using computer software to try and speed up the process or to use algorithmic strategies that do not require deep long winded thinking and analysis. This can help tremendously but it does leave one vulnerable to not having worked something out properly.

However form can be looked at both ways and it is also amazing just how many punters blindly follow horses simply because they have had good results in the past. Usually past performance can indicate future performance but it is certainly no guarantee of it. One only has to look at this years Football World Cup for analogies and France were a very short price to qualify from their group……they came bottom. But those prices are based on France winning the 1998 World Cup and 2000 European Championships followed by reaching the 2006 World Cup Final.

But closer inspection reveals that the 2006 World Cup Final came in between failures at the 2002 World Cup and the 2004 and 2008 European Championships. This is clearly a case of a team being past their prime but yet many punters still back them in the belief that they are going to experience past glories. This principle is exactly the same with horse racing.