When you are looking at your racing paper in the morning and pondering whether or not to have a bet, what emphasis, if any, do you place on the form of the trainer.

You might take a cursory glance at the "trainers in form" section of your paper, however, this only gives you a trainer's form for the last 14 days. You need to dig deeper.

Consider this statement: "You will be amazed if you break down stable winners by months, how often the pattern repeats itself." – Ian Marmion – Head of Victor Chandler Ireland, April 2006.

If the bookmaking fraternity take key betting angles like this seriously, don't you think that you should. I certainly do, and I spend a lot of time compiling statistics to help me back winners.

I do think, however, that one needs to be even more accurate in assessing a trainer's form and a number of other factors definitely need to be taken into account.

What about a trainer's course form, do his two year old horses perform well at a particular course? What about race conditions? You could go on forever.

What is plain, however, is that trainers are creatures of habit. They learn from their success and will try and repeat what has worked before.

A good example of this is Sir Michael Stoute. If we analyze his late-season, two-year old maiden runners we discover that horses, which are not fancied, are sent to one of five separate tracks and they never win. However, when they are sent to one of two tracks they have a startling record. At Brighton, for example, in September and October the record is five winners from seven runners, an astonishing winning strike rate of 71.42%. If you had backed all seven horses with at £10 ($19.90 US) level stake, you would be in profit to the tune of £211.60 ($421.24 US).

So how do we find these nuggets? Basically, it takes many hours of research. The best tool to use is Raceform Interactive, which is available from Raceform Ltd. Raceform are the publishers of the official formbook in the United Kingdom and are, therefore, the most reliable source of form and results. Raceform Interactive is not cheap to subscribe to, but it does have an excellent query facility that speeds up form research no end.

How about another example. This time we will look at Eric Alston. If Sir Michael Stoute runs one of the powerhouse yards, the same cannot be said of Alston. At the present time he has just 36 horses in training at his Longtown, Lancashire yard. However, don't let this put you off finding profitable trends.

If you had backed all of his horses ages four years old and older running at Ripon at one mile, and one mile and two furlongs only since 2002, you would have had four winners from 11 runners (36.36% strike rate) and you would have been in profit by £426.20 ($848.46 US) to a £10 ($19.90 US) level stake. But, if we dig a little deeper and follow the same criteria, but only backing runners in May and July we have four winners from seven runners (57.14% strike rate) and our profit to £10 ($19.90 US)  level stake would have been £466.20 ($928.09 US).

The above two examples have given you a good start on stable analysis, but where do you go from here. You can either start to do your own research and keep your own records or you can purchase a statistical guide to help you.

I have published "HorsesForCourses TrainersForTracks," which give 98 statistics pointing to 39 trainers' chances at various courses. If you are interested in purchasing this fully interactive eBook for just £19.95 ($39.71 US)), please visit my web site at www.horsesforcoursestrainersfortracks.com