The focus of the racing world is on Moonee Valley this weekend with the Manikato Stakes meeting Friday night followed up by the Cox Plate on Saturday.

So this week on the podcast we're focused on finding value at what is a unique track and Rick Williams explains his approach to betting at the Valley.

Punting Insights You'll Find:

The best spots to be in the run

How the rail position affects his analysis

Whether experience at the track is a bonus

A surprising negative to look out for

This discussion is a follow-up to this week's 'Horses for courses' analysis.

Today’s Guest:

Rick Williams

Get the Transcript:

David Duffield: The focus this week is Moonee Valley, so let’s have a chat about the track itself and how you approach analysing a race and formulating your ratings there. Obviously it's a unique track in a few different aspects but do you do anything differently when you're betting there?

Rick Williams: Well the first thing I do is just go through the normal process and that's highlighting and basically doing the market and working out who's the best horse. From there obviously you can make some little adjustments or just mental notes regarding where the rail is. Generally it's a pretty dry track at Moonee Valley. It doesn't normally get too wet so you're generally working on a good to dead surface. Sometimes it's slow but generally it's pretty well draining. Certainly the rail, wherever that is, is probably the thing that you have a look at.

David Duffield: And that gets talked about a bit. When the rail's out, that it tends to favour on pacers and that's not the same for every race, because sometimes there can be an over-reaction but how do you change your assessments depending on the rail position?

Rick Williams: Not enormously. I think if you've got a leaders track and you've marked the horse that's going to lead quite short and you really like it then there's certainly reasons to be giving that a couple more ticks.

The other side, if you've got a slow horse and it's going to lead it doesn't necessarily mean because it's a leader's track it's going to win. I guess good horses or stand out horses in a race can generally, most of the times overcome moderate issues. Whether it be a moderate bias or moderate block in the run or different things. If it's a severe bias or if it has a severe check then certainly a lot of horses would struggle to overcome something severe that happens.

It's just balancing out the ability of the horse. Looking at where it will be in the run, or whatnot and what it has to overcome to win and basically making a judgement call. Is the horse good enough to overcome this issue? Or the fact that the horse, you've got it rated on top and it looks really strong and it’s going to have all the favours in the run. It's how much more do you bonus this horse?

David Duffield: And speaking of positions in the run, with the new database we can run a report and have a look at the lengths behind the leader and the average margin for those winners at Moonee Valley and also depending on where the rail is. How do you incorporate that into the work that you do?

Rick Williams: It's just nice to know. It's not really anything that there's a column for in the spreadsheet or anything like that but it's just nice to run the report and you get an idea of where the rail is and generally what happens. As the rail gets out further there's generally not a lot of racing. We're not dealing with huge samples but certainly there does tend to be patterns and I guess as the rail gets out further at Moonee Valley generally the closer you need to be to the leaders upon settling.

David Duffield: When the rail's true or close to it, if a horse has raced wide, how do you bonus or otherwise assess that horse as opposed to when the rail's been out a fair way?

Rick Williams: You just go through the runs and generally you look at the sectional. Even if they've ran wide,