Sunday, May 6, 2012

Greyhound Handicapping - Win With This Type of Dog in Cold Weather


Greyhound Dog Racing Tips.

If you play Bluffs Run, Wheeling, Southland or any of the greyhound tracks where winter weather is a factor, you might want to think about adjusting your handicapping a little. While you still have to look at every dog's lines and percentages, there's one factor that matters more in cold weather than it does at any other time. This factor is age.

Think about it. Greyhounds start racing when they're about 2 years old. Most of them run until they're between 3 and 5 years old, depending on how well they weather the rigors of racing. So, in most races, you have dogs as young as 2 and as old as 5. To us, 3 years isn't a big difference, but in the relatively short life of a dog, even a few months difference in age can have a significant effect on performance.

In cold weather, muscles don't work as well. And the older you are, the more of an impact the weather has on muscles. This is why I shift my betting focus from breakers to closers in cold weather, and I start to look more closely at the age of the dogs I bet on.

Given a choice between a young dog that breaks and an older dog that breaks, I'll take the young dog every time, as long as the rest of its stats are good enough. And if an older dog seems to be the best pick in a race, I'll hesitate to bet it if its success has depended on getting out fast and taking the lead. My reason for this is that in colder weather, it's probably going to have trouble breaking and won't get the lead.

The only older dogs I favor in the colder months are the ones who get out reasonably fast, but not blazingly fast, then run near the lead and close at the end of the race. Even with these dogs though, if there's a young dog in the race - one who breaks out a lot faster than the older dogs do - I'm hesitant to bet the older dogs over the younger one.

It's funny. For 3 seasons of the year, I pay very little attention to the age of a dog, unless it's at the very young or very old end of the spectrum. But when the winter temperatures start falling into the single numbers and the wind blows from the north, age becomes a much bigger factor in how to win at the dog track.

Greyhound Dog Racing.