How to Find Reasons a Horse Will Improve

Recorded November 2025 for 10 Betting Systems That Actually Work. Any figures mentioned are from that time.

The thing I look for above anything else now is a reason for a horse to improve. Not a reason it rated well last start. A reason it will be better than it was. That is where the edge sits, because ratings and numbers describe what has already happened. They do not always account for what is about to change.

What counts as a reason to improve

It can be a gear change. It can be a horse coming back quickly on the backup. It can be a horse that is going to get the race run to suit, where the tempo and the map work for it rather than against it. It can be a horse that had a genuine excuse last time out, something like a cardiac arrhythmia, where the run on paper tells you nothing about the animal. The question I keep asking is simple. Why is this horse going to improve? And then the follow up question, which matters just as much. Is this something the ratings or the numbers have overlooked? If the answer is yes, the next step is working out whether the horse can actually go to that next level.

A bet that lost and was still right

Beast Mode is the example I keep coming back to. The result was wrong, but I was still very happy with the bet, even though the horse was coming off a peak rating. I was not saying the rating was going to increase. I was saying it could decrease and the horse would still win. That rating could come back two or three lengths and Beast Mode gets the job done. As it turned out, it came back more than two or three lengths, because it did not get the eleven hundred.

But I thought it would get the eleven hundred. The superior ratings were part of the reason, not the main one. The main reason was the blinkers going on. I thought the blinkers had taken that horse to a new level and that the new level would carry it over the trip. I isolated the last two runs and did not look too much further back, because the last two runs were the ones that reflected the horse as it is now. I was aware it was a risk. That is exactly why I was taking the price I was taking and not a shorter one.

You will not get them all right

Was I wrong in the end? Yes. The horse did not win and I was wrong about the trip. You are not going to get every one right, and if you judge your own thinking only by results you will talk yourself out of the bets that actually make you money. The week before, I had a horse in Brisbane that firmed hard into the race on the same kind of thinking. Same process, different outcome. That is how it works.

So when you go through a race, do not stop at who rates the best. Go looking for the horse that has a reason to be better than its form reads. Dig deep enough to find it, decide whether the market has accounted for it, and then accept that being right about the reasoning and wrong about the result is part of the job.

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More from Kingsley

• Why a Jockey Rating Should Measure Profit, Not Ability
• Why Horses Travelling Interstate Can Show Misleading Time Ratings
• What Sectionals Tell You About a Genuinely Classy Horse

From the full video: 10 Betting Systems That Actually Work

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