Thanks to Comply Or Die I'm a hero, but it could all be so different next year

General / Jack Houghton / 05 April 2008 / Leave a Comment

Jack Houghton on the lessons Aintree has taught him

An experience any racing fan will be familiar with is the annual contact from a bunch of people you haven't heard from since last Grand National day - all expecting you to provide the winner.

There are three broad approaches for dealing with these requests. One is to confidently select a horse or two whom you think offer the best value and proclaim their chances to all who ask. If you get it right, your reputation as profitable-punter-extraordinaire will grow among all those who know you. If you get it wrong, they'll consider you a waster of no use to humankind.

Another approach is to select the 20 most likely winners and tip a different horse each time you are asked. This way you will disappoint the majority, but are all but guaranteed hero-status with at least one enquirer.

The third approach is to tell them all to bugger off. They haven't spoken to you since last year so why should you talk to them now?

Possessing a fragile self-confidence I couldn't countenance the last approach; one call a year is better than none. And approach two just seems too lily-livered. If you're going to hit a ball, try and make it a home run.

So hopefully, by the time you're reading this, Simon or Comply Or Die will have waltzed to victory, and I will be carried high on the hands of an army of admirers chanting my name.

Whichever it is, the moment will mark the start of a rest-stop in the racing calendar; a lull in proceedings between the climaxes of jumping past and Classic stories to come. A time of year to reflect on what you have learnt and resolve to do better in future.

Here, humbly, for your edification, is the biggest lesson I've learnt this year: race results are never definitive.

In one sense, this statement probably sounds ludicrous. If you've backed a horse that loses, you've lost your money. That is definitive. But what I mean is that on too many occasions this year I viewed race results as final and irrevocable answers to questions of relative horse ability. They're not. All they do is provide more evidence upon which to base your judgement next time around.

An example. Before the Queen Mother Champion Chase I felt Voy Por Ustedes was a slightly better horse than Master Minded. Not a lot better, but perhaps one or two pounds superior. After a 19-length trouncing, I had to concede I had been wrong: Master Minded was clearly vastly superior.

So although there was a voice somewhere telling me that yesterday, on the balance of form, Voy Por Ustedes represented value to overturn that defeat, it was drowned by a vision of Master Minded streaking away as he had at Cheltenham. And so there went a potentially lucrative winner unbacked.

This saga supports the oft-repeated cliché that racehorses are not machines, and demonstrates that although the mathematics of the sport are of great assistance to punting, on different days and with different conditions, the same horses can produce very different results, so the maths needs to be assessed in its entirety. Perhaps Voy Por Ustedes underperformed at Cheltenham, perhaps Master Minded underperformed at Aintree, perhaps the different race conditions skewed both results.

What I'm saying is that in future I intend to weight recent information as a little less important than I had previously. Yes, recency is important, but it's not omnipotent.

In my last job, I was lucky enough to meet and talk to a lot of successful punters, and, although it's taken me a while to realise it, they all shared a common mindset: they were never absolutist about what would happen in a race. I never heard one of them say that a horse "can't win" or "won't get beat" (you know, the kinds of things you hear in betting shops every few seconds, just before the person who said it traipses out in their slippers).

Instead, they talked about percentage chances and value. They assessed all the information they had to hand, recent and not so recent, and came up with a balanced view of what prices different horses should be. All they were interested in was being able to get it more right than the market did more times than they got it wrong. By doing that, they knew, that with discipline and a consistent staking plan, they'd eke out a profit in the long-run. I can't help but think that most of those punters laid Master Minded yesterday.

There you go - that's what I've learnt. Please go ahead and share your lessons from the year below. I'll tell you what, if you were all asked to come up three bits of advice for a new horseracing punter to follow, what would they be?