Let me take you back to the late 90s. After betting on horses for a few years you might have expected me to know something about horse racing. But the fact was I knew very little.

Although I had been kidding myself to the contrary, what I did know subconsciously was in the long run the bookmakers always seemed to win. The occasional lucky winning streak aside, punters by and large would end up losing their money.

Despite thinking I might be different, and not like other punters, I was actually no different at all.

Just like everyone else, I would try to make sense of the form, read the Spotlight comments in the Racing Post, saw what the experts had to say, and subscribed to several tipster services. But at the end of the day my horse racing selections were little more than guesswork and I was greatly influenced by the opinions of others.

Fortunately a series of events transpired that changed the whole way I approached betting.

The first happened one Friday afternoon in 1998 which served as my wake up call. I blew a ridiculous amount of cash on one horse, trying to chase the losses I was suffering by following a particular tipster. That one painful bet pretty much wiped out my betting bank, but the experience fired me up and that day I made some decisions, and started to implement some changes.

I started to read more, and not just the pages of The Racing Post. These were proper works of authority on horse racing, such as Ainslie’s Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing by Tom Ainslie, and The Best of Thoroughbred Handicapping by James Quinn. I started keeping my eyes open for anything that would expand my knowledge, encouraged by the notion that if I knew more than the average punter, I would have the edge on the average punter, and start to make some profit.

Then one day I was browsing the book section of the Save The Children charity shop on Tring High Street when I came across a dozen or so books all about horse racing. They were not there the week before so I guess someone had donated their whole collection. I snapped them all up for less than a fiver, and when I got home I excitedly emptied my carrier bag of paperbacks onto the kitchen table. Among them was Nick Mordin’s Betting For A Living, 100 Hints For Better Betting by Mark Coton, Against The Crowd by Alan Potts, and several books on how to compile your own race ratings. It took me several weeks to go through them, but I read them all.

The one book that changed my approach to betting entirely was also sitting there among those new additions to my horse racing library. It was a book that talked about speed ratings. I read it twice from cover to cover, and started to compile my own speed figures.

Having read books before depicting mechanical systems to make money on horse racing, I was sceptical at first, and on a couple of occasions I was on the verge of giving up on speed ratings as another tried-but-failed idea. But this approach was different. It wasn’t a purely mechanical system.

Then out of the blue something truly inspirational happened. The horse that I had figured top rated on its speed performances romped home at a lovely 12/1 and well clear by 7 lengths coming away. None of the experts had mentioned it but according to my figures it was a stand out selection. The book that had started my fascination with speed ratings was Picking Winners by Andrew Beyer. It was like someone had finally switched on the lights!