Brighton racecourse are running an end of season special offer starting at their penultimate meeting on the 14th October 2010. Buy a Grandstand and Paddock ticket for £14 and a mate can get in for just a fiver!

For further information please visit the Brighton Racecourse Website or call the race team on 01273 603580.

Wolverhampton are giving away free racecourse admission tickets for the rest of January.

In order to help punters get over the excesses of the New Year and Christmas, and to attract new racing fans, Wolverhampton racecourse are allowing punters to go racing for free for the remaining 11 meetings in January 2010.

To get your free tickets telephone the course on 01902 390000, text RACE to 60070 or email the course at info@wolverhampton-racecourse.co.uk

For further information please visit the Wolverhanmpton Racecourse Website

Full marks to Fakenham racecourse for making it easier for young persons to get into racing. Fakenham are offering a special deal for racegoers aged 18 to 24 who wish to go racing. The deal is for an membership to the 2009/2010 season at Fakenham racecourse for just £45!

Membership includes:

• Entrance to all Fakenham National Hunt meetings for the 2009/2010 season (from October to May – Ten meetings in total)
• Full use of the members enclosure facilities
• A designated car parking area which can also be used for picnics
• No dress code

This is a good initiative by Fakenham racecourse as it encourages younger racegoers to come racing. All racecourses should follow up with similar schemes.

For further information and to order your membership please visit the Fakenham Racecourse Website

Saturday 3rd October 2009 Redcar are staging their most important horse racing occasion of the year when just under a quarter of a million pounds of prize money will be won.

The eyes of the racing world will be focused on Redcar Racecourse – and the cameras of Channel 4 will be present – for one of the most eagerly awaited races for the youngest racehorses in Britain and Ireland.

In total there are seven great races including the feature race, the Totepool Two Year Old Trophy with prize money of £150,000, the Listed Guisborough Stakes with prize money of £40,000 and The Boddingtons Redcar Straight-Mile Championship Final – as the name suggests this £30,000 Handicap contest is the culmination of a series of qualifying races held at Redcar throughout the summer over the straight mile.

Redcar host one of Europe’s Richest 2yo Races

You can’t bring that cucumber sandwich in here, sir

Racecourses like to champion their hospitality. They may have plenty of facilities for keeping customers fed and watered such as with various restaurants, burger vans, and hog roast stalls. But what do you do if you do not want to sit at a formal table eating (great) but relatively expensive food, or if you want to eat more healthily?

One option is to bring your own food with you – have a picnic at the racecourse. With plenty of open space, and fresh country air racecourses are an ideal place for picnics. But don’t expect the same type of hospitality at every racecourse. At some courses bringing in your own food is banned! whilst at others you are forced to eat in a seperate enclosure away from all the main activities and amenities.

A random sample of racecourses were emailed asking them of their picnic policy. The replies were quite different and shows that some courses are not that picnic / family friendly.

For British turf racing the going is classified as:

• Hard
• Firm
• Good to Firm
• Good
• Good to Soft
• Soft
• Heavy

The ideal going is Good and ground staff will thrive to produce that type of ground. In the summer they may add water to the track to take away the firmness. After heavy downpours they have to rely on good drainage to stop the course turning really muddy.

The British Horse Racing Authority website is a very useful resource for finding the Latest Going Information.

Another useful resource is the Turftrax website. Turftrax provide ‘going stick’ information for courses and show going maps for most racecourses. The going maps are useful for seeing if the going is consistent across all parts of the course.

Systems go wrong when punters fail to use them properly. Just as with a diet, if you do not stick to the rules the plan will fail; if you get greedy and bite off more than you can chew the plan will fail; if you think you have had too much recently and starve for a while the plan will fail.

The main reason why systems do not work is indeed because the punter is not following the rules properly. The rules which are broken the most are the rules about betting discipline and money management. Punters either get greedy and overbet or think that they should back off for a while and ultimately end up understaking. Just like the dieter who goes into a feast / famine mode the punter loses control of his goal and ultimately fails.

Money Management

Before using any system punters really need to learn about money management. A system can give them many winners but if they stake the wrong amounts on a horse they are going to throw away a golden opportunity to make a profit.

One term associated with bad money management is “the heat”. This is were a punter loses his cool and starts making rash bets. He will either be overconfident and bet too much, or be under confident and bet too little.

A good example of a punter being overconfident and betting too much is after a big win. A punter then assumes he is playing with the bookies money and so decides to double his stake on his next bet! After all, this is the bookies money right? Wrong! It is the punters money – most of which is his money from previous losing bets.

Another example of heat is when a punter is on a losing streak. This is the worst kind of heat because it can make a punter make extra bets just to try and generate a few wins. What the punter will do is deviate from the core system rules and start looking at other bets such as backing sure thing odds-on horses, or listen to hot tips from media pundits, newspapers and other punters at the racecourse. That is not the right thing to do. What the punter should do is just sweat out the losing streak and wait until his luck changes.

Of course, if a punter is having a really bad time and is getting totally demoralised with the game then the best advice would be to give up gambling for a while. Go on vacation, or take up some other recreation activity. The punter should totally forget about betting for now and return refreshed and more focused.

Free Horse Racing Systems

You can read articles on dozens of horse racing sytems (some which work, some which are proved to not work!) over at our main stats and systems site: Flatstats. The Flatstats site contains information on popular systems including old chestnuts such as:

• Backing the outsider in a three horse race
• Backing grey horses
• Backing favourites in the last race of the day
• Backing horses where the third letter in the name is ‘R’
  (Yes, some people actually believe that is a system!)

There are many useful systems you can view and follow at the Flatstats site. Don’t forget though, that no system is going to work unless the punter operates it correctly. Learn about money management techniques and be disciplined.

Free Horse Racing Systems

Those resources will just show basic ‘number of wins’ and ‘strike rate’ stats. But from a betting point of view it is best to use stats which are based on ‘value’. This is because stats can tell you which jockey has won the most races, or how many times the favourite has won at the racecourse, but if the stats do not tell you how much profit you would have won then you have no way of knowing if you are likley to be in profit or not.

Soundbite Stats

Beware of bland ‘soundbite stats’. These are stats reeled of by media pundits or newspaper tipsters. Stats such as “A Trainer has had 2 winners from 3 runners at Ascot this month” is pretty meaningless as it does not say if a profit was returned!

Not only that but the sample size is far too small to be reliable. So the trainer had 2 winners from 3 runners – that is a 67% strike rate. If I tossed a coin three times and it came up heads twice would you then assume that backing heads is the way to go?

Negative and Positive Stats

Stats can be used for positive and negative reasons. Not only will they tell you if a type of race is exceptionally good for favourites, or that a particular jockey and trainer combination have returned year on year profits, but they can also point out reasons why you should not be backing a specific horse. These will be stats with low strike rates, and big losses (big negative ROI’s or Return on Investment).

Now if you could find a race where the favourite has a bad record, and the trainer of the favourite is using a jockey who has achieved a low strike rate, and the second favourite is using a jockey with a good, profitable strike rate… you could find yourself a nice bet!

You can read a simple introduction to horse racing stats at the Flatstats website.

There are many different types of bets you can place at the racecourse. The most common type is betting with one of the on course bookmakers. But if you are a complete novice you would be better off locating the Tote betting windows and picking up one of their useful guides.

The on course bookies and the Tote allow two main types of bet: Win and Each Way. Win is where you name a horse to win the race, and if it does you get paid out at X times your stake. Each Way is where your horse can finish 1st or 2nd, mostly 3rd and in some big races 4th. 1st is classed as winning whilst 2nd-4th is classed as placing. If a horse places you win roughly a 1/5 of the win odds, whilst if you win you get the full win odds plus the 1/5th win odds for the place.

The Tote also take a range of exotic bets such as:

• Forecast / Exacta – predict which horses will finish 1st and 2nd. The payouts for this can be big
• Tricast / Trifecta – predict which horses will finish 1st, 2nd and 3rd. This is a very hard bet to win but the payouts can be huge
• Placepot – predict which horses will place in the first 6 races of the meeting. This is an inexpensive bet which is a lot of fun and can return anything from a few pounds to a few thousand!
• Jackpot – predict which horses will win the first 6 races. This is extremely hard to win but can generate a life changing win

Exotic bets can have many combinations. e.g. For an Exacta bet you can pick a combination of, say, three horses such that if any two of the three finish 1st and 2nd you will win the bet. Note that the more horses you add to the combination, the more your stake is increased. Three horses combined in an any order Exacta costs 6 x your stake.

Placepots are great fun and can also have any number of horses in each leg of the bet. This is a good bet for sharing with friends, where you each pick one or two horses per race and share the stake.

Note that gambling is a risky business. Never bet with money you can not afford. If you are new to horse racing betting then put aside a small bit of cash for betting and expect to lose some or all of it!

Popular race meetings often cause traffic problems and some of the smaller racecourses are often out in the back of beyond so make sure you plan to arrive at the course early else you may miss the first race!

Be particulary aware of big festival meetings such as Cheltenham, Aintree, Epsom and Ascot as tens of thousands of race-goers attend these meetings and it is no fun sitting behind a queue of Bentleys and Porches.

At these festival meetings you may want to leave your car behind, or at a designated park and ride location and use the extra public transport which is laid on.

If you do drive to the racecourse be aware that trying to get out of the car park at the end of the day can be a bit of a struggle. Some racecourse car parks only have one or two exits and all the extra cars snarl up the surrounding rounds. Either return to your car early soon after the last race or save some of that picnic food for the end and wait until most of the other cars have gone.