No prizes for guessing that today's piece is all about leaving notes for
yourself as a reminder of something that the horse did and in turn something
that you should do next time it runs. As punters we often refer to these
situations as Comments and/or a Black book entry. These issues will be covered
in a two party series of posts.
Making Comments
Unless we are talking about small notations that you might enter as you are black booking a horse,
race / video comments are only generally recorded by professional punters.
For the professional punter that records comments for each
horse in each race, we have developed a module within Axis named "Axis Pro Functions" that is the
result of extended consultation with several professional punters who make
race/video comments frequently. This simple yet powerful facility allows them to perform this function
with a of fuss and has the ability to sort and organise the information using several
but relevant ways that allow for the separation between meeting, race, horse
comments and personal horse flags.
Importantly, the ability to make comments is available to
everyone using the Race Day Portal (the softwares main interface). Comments are
there to remind you of situations and events that you would otherwise forget
about, especially with the amount of racing today. You don’t have to comment on
every horse, race or meeting. For instance if you wanted to make note that the
’fence was off’ or that there was a ‘leader bias’ at a meeting then its as
simple as entering a meeting comment against just one horse from that meeting.
Axis then takes care of the rest by
populating the comment against all runners from that meeting. The same goes for
race comments (populates the comment against all runners from the race etc).
These reminders can make a big difference and stay with the horse, race or
meeting as part of the historical form
within Axis. Of course you can at any time edit or delete a comment as
necessary.
Making a comment is an art form in itself. We have come
across some less experienced clients
that make the mistake of entering too much detail into their comments.
This is a waste of time both in terms of reading and writing apart from which it uses
additional computer recourses to both save and/or retrieve the data.
Take a look at this horse comment:
“Blasted out of the
barriers, eyeballed the leaders 3 wide, kicked at the turn and courageously
battled on just beaten on the line.”
Very detailed and it paints a picture when you read it!
Firstly it took time to write, more importantly it takes time to read and
comprehend and when you have to read 16 of these just to compare horses last
starts from just one race you’d better watch the clock so that the race does
not start before you are finished reading. Comments like these serve no benefit
to you.
If you intend to make comments on a regular basis then you
need to be consistent about the way you make them. Consistency is the
cornerstone of punting and it applies to making comments just the same as to
betting or anything else. Your comments should have a structure which answers the
necessary questions as to what happened in the race. Let’s breakdown the above
comment and see what relevant information we can extract from it.
The first part deals with how the horse began, next with
what happened in running and lastly what happened at the turn and in the
straight. It is also a good idea to read the stewards reports so that you can
note of any important information that occurred post race or identify something
that you might have missed in running.
Further, we have no need to write words when a few acronyms
make reading speedy and precise. So the
format is “START,INRUNNING,TURN/STRAIGHT,AFTER”. This turns our above comment
into:
Jg h3w kt bog Interpreter please!
“Jumped good, handy 3wide, kicked (at the turn) boxed on
good ”
You can just make these comments only when something important
happens because commenting on how every horse jumps is wasting your time as
most horses jump OK. Just like any other
language in a few weeks you’ll understand your own version of abbreviated comments
with absolute fluidity. You will be able to record them quickly and read them
just as fast saving you valuable time. No you have the ability to open doors
that were previously not available due to all of this extra condensed
information. It takes work in order achieve the results that most don't, but
it's doing what others don't or won’t that sets successful punters from those
who make up the losing statistics. Axis provides these and other necessary tools that
are not available in other racing software packages, tools that will transform your
punting and assist to keep you in front of the game.
The R2W Team
