Horse Racing Tips

Horse racing is almost inarguably the sport most synonymous with betting, with punters making up a very large proportion of its viewers. This infatuation with racing from bettors harks back well over 100 years, back when on-track bookmakers would take bets in the form of cold hard cash. 

While that remained the status quo for a long time, betting on horse racing is today a markedly different game. Nowadays, there are innumerable old and new betting sites available for punters to peruse, and you’d be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t offer all the basic markets on every race in Australia and any of the remotely significant ones overseas. 

Interest in horse racing might have waned slightly in recent years, but it remains a hugely popular option when it comes to betting. Below, we walk you through everything that you need to know about betting on horse racing, and how we can help you out.

With so many race meets going on both around Australia and the world each and every day, it’s impossible to keep an eye on absolutely everything horse racing. But at MyBettingAustralia, what we do do is ensure that we provide horse racing tips for all the big Saturday meets in Australia, as well as multi bets for the weekend. 

And when we do cover a race meet, we don’t just fling a few tips at you and expect you to take our word for it. These Australian horse racing tips are accompanied by in-depth analysis from our experts, each of whom has a lifetime of experience following racing, and about a lifetime minus 18 years of experience betting on it.

These individual race meet pages provide a whole lot of information, including some of the day’s best bets, the best jockey to follow, as well as a couple of multi bets and exotics. And as for our individual multi pages, generally these focus on three particular runners during the course of a day, with some cold, hard data to back up our free horse racing tips.

To round out our extensive horse racing offering, we also put out a few articles which, rather than just offering expert horse racing tips, provide some specific analysis about something topical within the industry. Generally, this is something that can help to inform your betting, such as the rise of a particular jockey or trainer.

Our horse racing tips come from experts who have been following the industry for a long time, and know exactly what they are looking for when making their horse racing predictions. 

Our experts are the kinds of people who grew up on a diet of horse racing; whose childhood Saturday’s were spent with the television on in the background and who, once they ticked over to the age of 18, were able to head down to the TAB and put their money where their mouth is.

Horse racing is, of course, notoriously difficult to win money on, with pretty big margins from the bookmakers combined with, well, the uncertainty that invariably comes with racing animals. But betting isn’t about winning every time; it’s about trying to develop an edge over the bookies that puts you in the box seat to do so.

By considering a wide range of different factors, our experts come up with horse racing tips that we think are always worth taking a look at. So what exactly are those factors? Read the below section to find out more.

There are a number of different things that you need to consider before betting on anything, and horse racing has its own unique set of factors that we take into account before posting our professional horse racing tips.

Form

Just as you would in a regular sport, form is one of the first things that any horse racing tipster will consider when analysing a race. Horses, just like players, go through bouts of good and bad form, and checking how they have been running of late is vital. This can extend beyond just their general form, too; you’ll want to consider their form in certain specific conditions, which we will go into more detail about below, as well as how they have been running in this particular preparation – more about that below, too. 

Track Condition

Track condition is something unique to horse racing which plays a really, really big role in how a race plays out. Every betting site you use for horse racing betting will show you the track rating, which essentially tells you whether it’s firm, soft or heavy – firm being when conditions have been dry, soft when there has been a bit of rain and heavy when there has been a lot of rain.

This can have a massive impact on how the race is run. Some horses absolutely thrive in wet conditions and a heavier track, the better – others simply can’t compete nearly as well as they would in dry conditions. This is often for a clear reason; for example, a horse that generally runs the race at the back of the pack before coming from behind might struggle in the wet but thrive in the dry, simply because it’s harder to make up ground in wet conditions.

Other times, however, it’s a little less clear, and a horse might be a wet track specialist just because, well, they are. Regardless of the reason, betting sites will always have a horse’s record on a firm, soft and heavy track listed, and our experts always use this before making their horse racing tips. 

Prep

If you’re not a horse racing fan, this does not mean quite you think it might. Prep isn’t referring purely to how a horse has prepared for a particular race. You might have seen terms like ‘1st up’, ‘2nd up’ and so on when reading our horse racing tips, phrases which essentially refer to which stage of a prep a horse is in.

Horses can’t just run race after race after race, so typically they will run in a handful of them before being sent back to the stables for a bit of time off. Their trainer will then have a program which attempts to get them as well-prepared as possible for another stint of races.

A horse that is 1st up is having its first run in this ‘prep’ – basically, their first race in a while. Often horses struggle a little 1st up, needing a race or two to get into gear, but this is not a universal truth. Some horses tend to run their best 1st up, while others might have a good record later in their prep.

This info will always be available on your betting site – both what stage of their prep a horse is in, and how they have historically performed at this stage. We will always use this information for our horse racing tips.

Distance

This is a pretty obvious one, but it might have more impact than you think and that’s why our expert horse racing tips always factor this in. Horses obviously have a preferred general distance – you won’t have the same runner in a 1,000-metre race as you do in a 2,500-metre race, for example. But even small differences in distance can be significant.

A medium-distance runner, for example, might run in predominantly 1,400-metre races and 1,600-metre races, but won’t necessarily perform equally as well in both of them. 1,400, for example, might just be a little too short for them, with other horses getting into gear more quickly, or alternatively 1,600 metres might be right on the edge of their limit and see them often tire towards the end.

Track Factors

One of the final factors we consider relates to the idiosyncracies of a track. This is not always relevant, with some tracks pretty stock standard in their shape, but others have unique elements to consider.

Take Moonee Valley in Victoria as an example. The straight at this racetrack is notoriously short, which means that it is particularly hard for backmarkers to come from the back and win as they generally have to make their move on the final bend, rather than having a long straight on which to catch up. In contrast, this benefits leaders, who only have to hang on to the lead for a shorter period of time once they round the bend.

Our horse racing tips come out a few days before the races which they are covering, so if you’re looking for horse racing tips for tomorrow then you know where to look. These are, as discussed above, well-researched predictions from our team of experts, so when it comes to the horse racing tips of the day, we think ours are right up there with some of the better horse racing tips in Australia. So before betting on a big meet, take a look at our expert’s articles, either to simply inform your own tips, or to get some tips to directly follow.

Above, we eluded to the different ways that you might use our horse racing tips. Different punters will take different things from the various resources available to them, including our tips, and how you use them is really up to you.

If you’re an experienced punter then you probably have your own thoughts and research methods that go into your tips. If that’s the case, then you might not want to directly follow our tips. But with the detailed analysis that comes alongside them, they can still help you to build your knowledge, and may either sway you to make a particular bet you were already considering, or pull you away from the direction you were heading in.

Alternatively, if you are looking to place some bets but are not exactly an expert yourself, then you are probably more likely to just directly follow the horse racing tips you come across. It is always good to be prudent with your research, but we do stand by the fact that our horse racing tips are well-researched by some experienced horse racing minds, so you could certainly do worse than following us outright.

History does play a big role in horse racing, and analysing historical data and trends will always play a major role in the development of our horse racing tips. A lot of this relates to the things that we talked about above, all of the factors that we take into account before making our horse racing tips.

This includes form, prep, and track condition to name just a few. All of this data is available on any betting site you will use to bet, with historical data for any particular runner generally available simply by clicking on its name in order to bring up a drop down menu.

So how far back do we go? It really depends, but as a general rule there should be a bias towards more recent history. If a horse is five-years-old and has struggled as a youngster at a certain distance, but this prep has put in a couple of really good performances at that distance, then we will weight the latter of that information a little more heavily.

You can never really do too much research, but in general, by focusing on a horse’s current prep and perhaps their previous one, and combining that with longer-term historical data, we get a pretty well-rounded picture of how we think a runner might perform, and this helps to inform our horse racing tips.

While the vast majority of the time, punters focus on upcoming horse racing meets, you can find more than just horse racing tips for today or horse racing tips for tomorrow out there. Of course, this is only for certain events – you’re not going to be able to bet on Race 6 at Gawler on a Tuesday afternoon in six months’-time. But when it comes to the bigger events, betting sites will put out markets well in advance of the actual meet.

Predominantly this relates to the Spring Carnival, with races like the Melbourne Cup, the Cox Plate and Sydney-based events such as The Everest having markets many, many months prior to the actual running of the race.

You will also find markets for some major international races a long way in advance of them being run. Think the Kentucky Derby, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, or the Gold Cup at Ascot. These are spread throughout the course of the year and markets will go out months in advance, so if you think you have a good read on them, betting in advance can give you a good chance to get some decent value.

Of course, this is a really hard way to bet primarily because you do not know which horses will be in the race, while it’s also hard to predict the form of each runner, the weather, and plenty more variables.

What you can do, however, is research how the careers of certain runners have been tracking, how much emphasis their trainer is likely to put on preparation for that particular event, and how both the horse and other horses trained by the trainer in question have fared at that event in the past. This kind of data is evergreen and will be relevant even months out from an event, and can subsequently give you good insights into a race well before the markets are properly set.

What’s more, with the fact that the odds are likely to change significantly prior to the actual running of the event from when you bet if you are betting a long way out from the event, there is always the prospect of involving yourself in a little arbitrage betting. Basically this means that you hedge yourself, making it far more likely that you win.

Imagine, for example, you bet on a horse at $20 to win six months before an event. By the time the race rolls around it’s in to $5, and you’re confident that the winner will come from it and a couple of other competitors. You can do the maths to find out a way to bet on those other couple of horses, too, and profit whichever of them wins. Of course, this does not work if none of those horses wins, which is why arbitrage betting is more common if you’re using a bookie that’s better known as an NRL betting site or bookie focusing on two-team events, but you can still try your hand at ‘arbing’ with horse racing.

Below, we take a look at some of the most frequently asked questions punters have about horse racing.