Horse racing handicapping is the art or science of picking winners and evaluating horses in order to determine each horses chance of winning. The reason we evaluate all the runners and not just the obvious few who seem by far the best is because sometimes a long shot does win a horse race. If you determine that a horse has a chance to win a race and if the same race was run ten times it would probably win at least one of those times, then you may say the horse has at least a one in ten chance of winning.

If you look at the odds board and see that the above-mentioned horse is at odds of 20-1 you have just found a betting situation that will double your money, if you play it often enough, that is. Handicappers look for these situations and wager on them to make a profit. Like all human endeavors, sometimes they work out and sometimes they, "...come a cropper," as they say. The lesson to be learned from that is that betting on horse races is risky business, but may possibly be rewarding.