Gambling Times Guide to Thoroughbred Racing

Rating:
Summary: Painful.
Review: R. G. Denis, The Gambling Times Guide to Thoroughbred Racing (Gambling Times/Lyle Stuart, 1984)

R. G. Denis, the back of this book proclaims, is one of "the world's greatest racing authorities." Which makes me wonder how he can think that a colt becomes a horse "past the age of three" (a colt becomes a horse when he turns five), or that Lexington's 238 winners, "a record not likely to ever be endangered," had already been broken at least once by the time the book was written (Noholme II, who died in 1983, sired two hundred seventy-nine winners; I suspect that Glenelg broke it long before that, but can't find the numbers I need to be sure of that). The complete lack of any link to reality in the book's opening pages casts quite a pall over it. This continues thanks to a large number of errors that may also be factual, but have an equal probability of being typographical.

Still, that's not to say there's nothing here of value. Denis discounts the two most overrated factors in handicapping, weight and workouts, and is one of the few writers before the nineties to have done so. Also, when he finally does get into handicapping (a very, very small portion of this very, very small book; barring examples, about five pages of this book are spent on handicapping discussion), there's some good common-sense stuff that most folks might have picked up on whilst learning themselves, but that I've never seen written in a book before, and I've read a whole lot of handicapping books (there are over a hundred in my bookshelf at home, and add to that those I can get from the local library).

Still, a colt becomes a horse at four? * ½