How is a horse rated and handicapped?

Question

How is a horse rated and handicapped?

Answer 1

They are handicapped on performance and the rating is measured in pounds.  With horses which normally run in handicap races, the handicapping is a bit of a numbers game, up for a good performance and down for a not so good one. It is all a matter of the handicapper's opinion. However the difficulty arises with horses which are new to handicapping.  Unless a horse has won a race, it must run 3 times before it can be assessed.  Having run 3 times it has usually run against some horses which might already have been assessed and then it is rated against those.  The hardest job is handicapping 2 year olds as these have no performances at all when the season starts.  Nursery races, by which name 2yo handicap races are known, did not use to be run until the beginning of September but are now run from the beginning of July.  The handicapper measures a winning distance in terms of lbs so that over 5 or 6 furlongs a length may be equal to 3lbs.  However that does not mean that 5 lengths equals 15 lbs - don't ask me why but it does not work like that - and the ratio of lengths to lbs increases the longer the distance of the race being assessed.  If you wanted to make a serious study of this, my advice would be to buy your self a results book to try to figure out how the handicapper dealt with nurseries over the last flat season, and why some horses got the ratings they did.  There are races from class1 to class 5 - anything lower is rubbish - and racecourses are also graded into about 4 categories so there are plenty of variables.

When you get into older horses there is a weight for age scale which is designed to allow horses of different ages to compete against one another. A horse does not reach full maturity on the flat over 2 & a qtr miles until it is beyond 4 years old.

I can tell you it is a hard game to keep your head above the water line.

Answer 2

weight, age, and numder of races and wins are the key factors in handicapping horses

Answer 3

Handicap racing, in a perfect race each horse should pass the winning post at exactly the same time. The handicapper will take into consideration the wins of a horse, its age etc how far he won by, that is why you see horses being eased down before the line so they dont win by too far and their weight doesn't  go up for the next race.

The handicapper will look at these points when assesing what weight to allocate each horse to give each one an equal chance