Almost everyone knows that the morning line is an estimate of what the odds will be at post time. The morning line is usually determined by a track handicapper who has some knowledge of the horses because most have been at the race track and trained by a local trainer. The handicapper is also experienced at picking winners and rating each horse’s chance of winning.

While the morning line is not infallible, it still does a pretty good job of finding the winner among the top 4 horses based on the assigned odds. Looking back over the results charts for your favorite track for the last month you’ll find that if you’d just kept your bets on horses that were in the top four horses in the morning line or in the top three favorites at post time, you would have chosen many winners.

Therefore, let’s start the elimination process by crossing out any horses in our program that are not in the top four choices according to the morning line. The winner is usually in this select group about 70% of the time. All further consideration and handicapping will only be a matter of choosing among these four horses.

The next step in the elimination process is to determine whether a horse is moving up in class, moving down, or staying at the same class level. It’s hard for a horse to move up in class and win. It does happen. but if we want to use statistics to quickly find the main contenders in a race we can look over the four horses we are now handicapping and cross out any of them that is moving up in class since its last race. The only exception to this rule is a horse that won its last race by at least five lengths.

You should have weeded a few horses out of our original four by now, but we’re not done yet. What about the people who are involved with the horse? Their ability or lack of ability is indicated by their winning percentage. Would you want to be in partnership with a person who only won five times out of one hundred races? Eliminate any horse that has a trainer or jockey with a win percentage of 5% or less.

The next step in this process is to watch the odds at post time and to find a horse among your contenders that is in the odds range from 5-1 to 9/5. The reason we use this range is that many winners are at less than 5-1 but betting on a horse at less than 9/5 usually doesn’t pay enough to make it worthwhile.

This system is meant for entertainment purposes only and should not be considered as an inducement to gamble.