As even the most casual observer of the sports world must admit, the racing of Thoroughbred horses under saddle has undergone a most tremendous expansion in the United States in the past ten or fifteen years. Racing and betting on the races have been made legal and have been instituted in many states that never hoped to see a horse under silks; new tracks have been opened and have enjoyed heavy patronage and most conspicuous suc­cess; there are now many more days of racing in a year than formerly; and the total amount of money wagered on the runners, both on-course and off-course, has reached staggering and almost astronomical proportions. You may like it or you may lament it, but you cannot deny the bare fact that racing has become an important factor in the public finances of many states as well as the most con­spicuous single phenomenon of the world of sports.

Granting that racing has arrived with a fanfare of trumpets, and that it is here to stay so far as any human being can foresee or predict, I wish to explain just what I am going to try to do in the pages that follow.

To many thousands, racing—or rather betting on the races—is merely a vice. To many other thousands it is a thrilling spectacle and sport. To hundreds of horse own­ers, breeders, trainers, jockeys, veterinarians, grooms, stable hands and handicappers making a living from the thoroughbreds, it is a business. Racing as we know it has a background and a history of some three hundred years; its cavalcade of many thousands of fine horses, with their breeders, owners, trainers and jockeys, affords material for a hundred or a thousand books, each with its own viewpoint and purpose. One might concentrate on the horses themselves, and endeavor to trace the development of the Thoroughbred strain from its origins in the time of the English Stuart kings in the mating of North African, Arabian and Turkish stallions with eastern and English mares, down to the best horses performing on the turf today. Or one might take the breeders of this long line of magnificent animals, or their owners, and retell some of the stories and anecdotes that make the history of the English and American turf so fascinating a tapestry of incident, drama and character. Again, one might make a book out of the biographies and deeds of great trainers of horses, another out of the lives and feats of great riders, a third from the careers of individuals who won or more frequent­ly lost great fortunes in betting on the runners.

Racing, the sport, is all color and glamour and action, just as is a field of horses speeding along the backstretch under the bright silks of their riders. But it is not my purpose in this book to attempt to precipitate that color and glamour nor to re-create any of racing's highlights oi action. Instead I propose to confine myself to the more pedestrian—and much more difficult—task of giving sound instruction on the quite technical points of how to go about picking a winner and how to bet him once he has been uncovered. The process of getting a winner involves "handicapping"—to use the correct technical ex­pression—and the process of determining how to bet or back a probable winner once found involves knowledge of some elementary mutuel mathematics that really are Greek to a very high percentage of all horse players.

This book is published at a time when—to put it frankly and also accurately—many tens of thousands of novice players are. making public dunces of themselves at race­tracks and away from tracks. No single book can do much to educate a mob of amateurs who read little but news­papers, but one technically accurate and entirely honest book on handicapping and betting may have some effect by saving money for readers while helping them to escape from the sucker class to the class of competent and in­formed spectators and bettors.

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