Greyhound Handicapping: Are You A Sprinter Or A Router?

If you were a greyhound, would you be a sprinter or a router? Are you fast out of the box, but then fade in the stretch? Or do you start out slowly, gain speed and really pour it on at the end? Dogs have different styles of running and bettors have different betting styles also.

I’m a router. I take a while to go over a program. I examine each race, carefully looking for the factors that I use to throw out three or four dogs, before I get down to really handicapping. If you’re a router, you probably take an hour or more to go over your program.

Sprinters, on the other hand, open their programs, glance over each race, looking for winners and quickly flipping to the next race where they do the same thing. They can “go over” a program in five minutes or less.

However, when it comes to winning, routers like me do a lot better than sprinters do. We do a much better job of weighing the dogs’ odds of running in the money. When the races go off, we have more information to work with as we figure out what to bet and even WHETHER to bet.

That’s a very important difference between handicappers who take their time and speedballs who rush through their programs. If you go too fast, you miss things. If you only look for winners, you don’t know enough about the other dogs to really decide which dog is best.

I’m not saying there aren’t people who are good at making snap judgments. Some people are very good at analyzing data quickly. But, even so, there’s enough data on a program page to take even the fastest handicapper at least fifteen minutes a race.

If you find that you’re finished going over a race in less than fifteen minutes, you might want to think about doing a more in-depth job of handicapping. Ask yourself if you’re missing essential information by just scanning, instead of really reading, the dogs’ lines.

Maybe it would help if you went over the races a second time. Maybe you should think about leaving yourself more time to go over the program by buying it or printing it out earlier. Or maybe you’re doing your greyhound handicapping with friends and paying more attention to them than to your program.

The bottom line is that there’s only so much you can absorb in five minutes. If you’re sprinting through your program, slow down and really take in the information that helps you make money – or lose it.

To win at the dog track, you need a winning system. You can learn the basics of handicapping from a program or online, but to really make good money at the dog track consistently, you need proven Greyhound Handicapping Systems.

In return for a family of its own, a retired racing greyhound will give you lots of love. Hey, you can sit on the couch together and watch the dog races. Who knows? You might even get some inside information from your fast friend.