Choice is a beautiful thing, it surrounds us – what career should you pursue? Where should you live? How to get to work? All the way down to the pair of socks you’re wearing today. Hmm how did you choose those?

Of course, in the case of racing and betting the usual question or choice to be made is simple, which horse should I be on? But there follows a further conundrum, one that is ubiquitous in the modern age of internet betting. Which market to play? No longer simply, each-way or on the nose? Instead questions arise like, when do you place your bet; before the off or in play? Do you back or lay the favourite? Perhaps you’d rather remove them from the market altogether?

Now that thing about choice being a beautiful thing, while we all think of having options as beneficial, there can be times when the choices on offer simply become too vast. Consider the situation of being confronted by a whole supermarket aisle of different brands of biscuit. You only walked down it to find something to accompany your cuppa, but here you are scanning through gleaming packets of virtually every type of confection under the sun ultimately just to select one. Help…what do you do? Usually your favourite – mine a caramel wafer – assumes precedence and finds its way into the basket, but there are times when you can waver. It would seem then that too much choice can at times make you unsure of simple things like your own preference.

In the last ten years the internet has undergone sustained and dramatic changes; you can now order things direct to your home from all corners of the world, play live poker through the night streamed in from Vegas, in a day swipe through hundreds of attractive potential romances waiting to begin. And betting online is no different, even if you choose to bet with a traditional bookie and have a confident fancy, you’ll still be faced with a healthy selection of different ways to get your money on.

Choice, choice, choice surely this is all getting too much, what we need is a bit of rationale. Otherwise cue potential diabetes, a nasty concoction of STIs and a bank balance on the slide.

While all this choice on the face of things is welcome; naturally it gives the punter the edge doesn’t it? Previously, laying the favourite was the domain of the bookmaker, now the choice is open to anyone active on the exchanges. Traditional bookmakers are always keen to expand their offering of markets, things like cover bets, place betting, match race betting and so on have become commonplace.

A plethora of choice of different markets is not all. Now there is more racing than ever before, with the all-weather extending the flat season and more summer jumps cards, there are seldom days with fewer than four race meetings. That’s 30 plus races a day, with much of the mid-week fare being low quality big field handicaps.

In this an environment, as in the supermarket aisle, it’s easy to take your eye off the ball. Such array of choice can be more distracting than worthwhile to the punter. Without some sort of strategy there’s no way to rationalise this number of races, runners and markets. Now it must be remembered, a punter’s greatest weapon against the bookies is their ability to utilise choice. They unlike the bookie can choose when to get involved in a race and in a market. How then is this powerful choice best exercised to your advantage?

Let’s go back to the start for a moment and something we’ve missed, only, perhaps the most important choice in betting, a choice that is all too often overlooked – whether to have a bet at all. Do you need to stake your hard-earned in an 18 runner Catterick class 5? Have you really found a realistic prospect of a winner in the last at Flamingo Park? If yes, you’ve a strong fancy, then by all means get stuck in. This is a choice that must by necessity come before any consideration of which runner to back or which market to play. While it may seem a plainly obvious statement, I believe true awareness of this initial choice will make you reflect on your betting and ultimately make you a shrewder and more prudent backer.

It should be noted that I am not saying the average punter has an inability to control their betting, but merely the greater awareness of choice to involvement as a punter, which may lead to the crucial question ‘Do I have strong enough evidence bet on this race?’, can be hugely beneficial. What follows such awareness is the realisation that if you are serious about making a profit, you need a system of betting and ideally a staking plan to go with it.

A betting strategy works principally by limiting the amount of choices that you are faced with. Immediately races are eliminated from your mind as potential betting mediums, markets as well depending on your preference. There is no point trying to scan through the 13 odd cards on Boxing Day to look for a bet, that’s well over 500 runners and it’s a ludicrous pursuit.

How to form a strategy then? Consider one example, a situation where you focus solely on racecourses local to your area, it might be that you attend race meetings there and so have built up an amount of knowledge of the track and how it races. I often find that having been ‘on course’ so to say is hugely beneficial to reading of form, predicting how races will be run and the runners that might be suited to the track. From there you can reduce your choice further, perhaps you choose to specialise in sprint trips, focusing on races over 5 and 6 furlongs. There are courses with notable draw biases, Chester being a well-known example, where particularly over sprint trips those runners drawn low hold a significant advantage. Use this advantage to your own ends. Although, with this being common knowledge, there probably isn’t much value to be had backing those from a low draw at Chester. There are other courses where runners can gain an advantage through things like draw or front running suitability that are not perhaps as well known. Ayr is a course quite local to me and before the big sprint races that provide the highlight to its September Gold Cup meeting there is always much debate about the quickest part of the track. Focusing on certain courses and particular trips can be an effective means of rationalising and forming a strategy.

You may not be interested in limiting your betting horizons to certain tracks or trips, however. Luckily the choice of what to choose to specialise in is vast. What makes most appeal to you? Be it Group races or handicaps, older established horses or new potential, trainers or jockeys, decide upon your preference and focus upon that. Perhaps you choose to back only favourites or only outsiders. All these things might form the basis of a betting strategy. While there are still important choices to be made – is the favourite for a race correct? – this is a far more manageable choice than before.

Back to the biscuits briefly. We are pretty good at knowing which biscuits we like and don’t. We do this primarily by knowing our own preference, which spares us from examining every packet in the supermarket aisle in detail. There are perhaps only several brands you could feasibly buy. Most people it seems are biscuit specialists! Can we specialise to this extent in a racing scenario? Absolutely so, don’t be afraid to test ideas out, work out your own preference and then stick to it. You will then naturally be on the way to specialising in a certain aspect of race betting, you will have the foundations of a strategy in place, it will be all the more easy to build up knowledge of your niche and you’ll be well on the way to establishing an edge over the old foe the bookies.

Of course, your choice of what to bet on will be limited, but in this instance it’s entirely a good thing. Don’t let the bookies bombard you with unnecessary options, know your preference and dictate your betting. Through choosing the correct race to get involved in, a contest where you can use your knowledge and edge to your advantage, your betting will become more prudent and ultimately more successful.

Time for a caramel wafer.

Ed Culham