How To Tell If A Horse Is Well Handicapped A UK Racing Approach

This is a great question? 

Now many punters and handicappers have a pre-defined method of handicapping horses. I have my own handicapping method and in theory if a horse race is handicapped well and correctly all the horses should finish in a straight line. But that has possibly never happened, but you do get 3 or 4 horses finishing in a close finish especially on the flat and AWF -all weather horse racing, less so on the National Hunt racing or as they call it the jumps. There is normally a finishing distance of a node, head etc between the horses at the winning line.

My Approach To Tell If A Horse Is Well Handicapped

This is a great subject, and I love UK handicap horse races especially class 6 and 5 AWF – all weather races. The approach is as follows,
1.    Look at the head of the market, the favourite in the race and use the brilliant Betfair betting exchange for this.
2.    Identify if the favourites BHB Official Rating - OR rating has increased significantly over the last 5 or 6 race positions. Also check if the race result positions are correlating to this rise in OR over the last 5 or 6 races. In other words, is the favourite getting slammed with large losing distances or is it winning.
3.    With point 2 above factor in the weight and class the horse is running in as well and compare with the last 5 or 6 races.
4.    Repeat 1 to 3 above for the other horses in the race.
You should now have a list of horses that could be well handicapped as a result of applying steps 1 to 4 above.
A word of caution I ignore 3yo – three year old races but that is my choice!