With The Works Rankings

At Racingwithbruno, we don’t just like to play the races, it is what we do. Every product we offer our clients was initially developed to give us an advantage at the window. When your bills and your employees depend on that little extra something in the sauce, you stay ahead of the curve.

Winning is one part of the game, but getting prices is what makes a horseplayer successful longterm. You can’t reliably and consistently find prices by relying solely on mainstream information. You might get lucky sometimes, but it’s damn hard to pay the bills that way.

I’ve learned that you can lead good people to good information, but you can’t make them use it and I’ll say it as simply as I can: Trust the information. Put your ego aside and trust the information. If you think you know better, either don’t subscribe to our service — or when we tell you a horse is doing well and you choose to ignore that information, do it at your own peril.

Published workouts are obviously a commonly used handicapping tool and there are myriad ways the public can access the date, distance, time, and where the time of a particular work falls in relation to others at that distance on that day. For those who want more information, the Racingwithbruno team shakes the bushes at dawn to provide clients with independent, qualitative observations of those works.

Not all tracks and training centers grant access to independent workout analysts,however, and it is not possible to have qualified analysts at every track. Because I want that extra edge on the information I use to play, I began looking for ways to go deeper than time, date, and distance, beyond the 1 of 32, or 10 of 89 you see in your past performances.

How to get that extra something about workouts at tracks where Racingwithbruno’s boots aren’t on the ground?

After months of trial and error, I developed a system for ranking workouts and tested it at the windows with my own hard-earned money. During this “Bruno Beta Test”, I retrofitted my plays and analysis and honed the system, continuing to refine the formula until it became a product I felt confident using myself.

In the beginning, I constructed the rankings by hand. It was time consuming and tedious and so we developed an algorithm that made it a product I could offer clients, and that allowed the rankings to be produced for any track across the country.

Alma Derby 4 star work on May 18 at Churchill Downs Trackside Training Center charted higher than horses above his or her class.

Our rankings rate works on a scale of horses relative to others in their peer group. We don’t just look at time, we look at maidens versus maidens and maidens working with maidens versus maidens working with more esteemed company. I’m not going to give our system away, but the rankings reliably indicate how a horse has been working in relation to its company at a particular facility.

We noted our observations on all but one of Nolo Contests works.

I think we forget the basics and horses that are doing well run well. I don’t care how much a horse blew up the track last out, if that horse isn’t training well, they aren’t going to run well today. Someone once boiled it down like this: “Bruno, if they work good they run good.” He was a smart man, just not a very articulate one.

Listen to the information. This isn’t a hobby for us and I don’t put my name on anything I don’t use myself.