Best Ways To Be Successful Handicapping Horse Races

By admin On May 25th, 2012 in Horse Racing /

Do you want to know how to be more successful handicapping horse races? Maybe you want to know how to bet on horses and make a profit. While there are no guarantees that you will ever be good enough to make a consistent profit playing the ponies, there are things you can do to improve your game right away.Horse Racing

One of the best ways to be successful at almost any endeavor is to find out the habits and methods of successful people and then to do the same things. In other words, rather than stumbling along in the dark groping for ways to win, find another person who is a winner and see how s/he did it. I know you may have heard this before and maybe you’ve read some books by the top handicapping writers and think that should be enough, but how about looking elsewhere for tips on success?

Horse racing writers may give you good tips on picking winners and evaluating the runners, but there are people who succeed in other fields and maybe you can learn from them and take whatever you learn and apply it to horse racing. One such successful person that I’ve learned from is Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison not only made a fortune, but he invented and improved many things we use today.

In his time, Thomas Edison was one of the most famous and respected men in the world. While we can’t all be creative geniuses, we can be smart enough to ask, “How did he do it?” We can also read about his amazing ability to solve problems and how he functioned from day to day to get insight into how a true genius was able to find answers to difficult problems.

I honestly don’t know if Edison played the horses, but I’m guessing he was too busy inventing to spend much time at the track. I do know that one of his habits has helped me to be a better handicapper and here’s how you can be a better handicapper, too, though this may not work for everyone.

 
The remedy for collapsing nostrils is a large nasal strip, similar to the ones that human athletes wear, but larger. You may not see them at first because many of them are dark or black and blend right in with the horse’s natural color. I’ve seen racing programs that mentioned a runner was wearing a nasal strip and I’ve also seen horses in the paddock with nasal strips and no mention was made of it. So it’s up to the smart handicapper to check the equipment that a horse is wearing.The addition of a nasal strip can mean a big improvement in a runner’s performance because oxygen is the fuel that the horse needs. Allowing a horse that has been starving for oxygen in the later stages of its races to now have an almost unlimited supply is like adding a super charger to a car.
 
Another such device that is often noted in the past performances is the Cornell Collar, a device developed by the Equine Surgeons at Cornell University. The purpose of the Cornell Collar is to treat a condition called “soft palate displacement.” Soft palate displacement is a condition that affects some horses when their palate actually closes the “windpipe,” shutting off oxygen when they are exerting themselves.An alternative to the Cornell Collar is surgery that is sometimes successful. Once again, a smart horse player may note that a horse has been stopping in its last races, perhaps due to a lack of oxygen. If it is now wearing a Cornell Collar, it may be a good bet.Understanding the basics of what makes a race horse such a great athlete may also help you to understand equipment changes and to find good bets.
 

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