Best Horse Racing Handicapping Books and What Each Teaches

The best horse racing handicapping books are Handicapping 101 by Brad Free for most first-time readers and Betting Thoroughbreds for the 21st Century by Steven Davidowitz if you already read past performances and want the whole craft of class, form and money management in one volume. For speed figures, read Picking Winners by Andrew Beyer, and read it before Beyer on Speed. For pace, the book is Modern Pace Handicapping by Tom Brohamer. For multi-race tickets, it is Exotic Betting by Steven Crist, if you can find a copy. Each pick is based on what published reading lists, a site that sorts books by audience and discipline, and the horseplayers on the PaceAdvantage forum say the book teaches. This site has not tested any of the methods itself.

Which one to buy depends on what your game is missing. In 2015, America's Best Racing noted that used copies of Crist's Exotic Betting had sold for more than $100. The book was out of print, and it is a paperback about building Pick 4 and Pick 6 tickets. The people paying that price were not collectors. They were horseplayers who knew exactly which part of their game was leaking money and wanted the one book that addressed it. That is the right way to buy a handicapping book.

Beginners asked the question plainly on the PaceAdvantage thread titled "Books for Newbies", and Brad Free's book was the consensus answer. Posters praised it as well written and organized around three factors: class, form and speed. MyHorseBets lists it at 228 pages and describes its language as accessible and non-technical. The page count matters. A reader who has only looked at a Daily Racing Form on Derby morning can finish this book before the next big race.

This book is the right first step because a past performance is, in MyWinners' phrase, a compressed racing resume. Date, track, distance, class, running position, finish, speed figure, jockey and trip note are stacked across a horse's prior starts, and nothing else on the shelf is readable until those lines are. Free's three factors line up with the basics of speed, class and form that every later book assumes you already know.

The drawback is what the book leaves out. NYRA Bets teaches pace as one of its three pillars of handicapping, and forum descriptions of Free's book name form in that slot instead. Plan on a second book for pace. None of the sources lists a current price. Skip this book if you can already read a running line without effort.

One step further back is Richard Eng's Betting on Horse Racing For Dummies, which America's Best Racing lists as a guide for first-time bettors. It suits a reader who has never placed a wager at all, which is a different starting point from someone who bets but cannot read the form.

David Hill, writing for America's Best Racing, called Steven Davidowitz's book "the handicapper's bible." The phrase is earned by its range more than its reputation. Hill credits it with covering class analysis and money management, and he notes that its editions have been revised over more than thirty years. MyHorseBets lists it at 380 pages. Its list of topics shows how current the revisions try to be: handicapping software, synthetic surfaces, "super trainers" and wagering syndicates. MyHorseBets calls it "the best take on modern handicapping ever written," and PaceAdvantage posters often suggest the latest edition as a starting point.

Class is where this book pays off for a Triple Crown bettor. North American racing runs from maiden to claiming to allowance to stakes. NYRA Bets warns that a sharp drop down that ladder can signal a trainer's doubt about the horse, not just an easier spot. Learning to read that signal is the kind of judgment Davidowitz's class chapters are praised for.

The drawback is weight. At 380 pages it asks more of a reader than Free's book does, and a beginner who opens it first may stall. No price appears in the sources. Skip it if you want to fix one narrow weakness, such as pace or exotic tickets, since a specialist book will get you there faster.

Andrew Beyer published Picking Winners in 1975. MyHorseBets lists it at 240 pages and calls it "a classic among classics." America's Best Racing credits it with introducing the speed figure concept that changed handicapping. Beyer's name is now on the Beyer Speed Figure printed in Daily Racing Form past performances, and for a Derby bettor that number is hard to avoid. MyWinners reports that every Kentucky Derby winner since 2000 posted at least one Beyer of 100 or higher in a prep race, and that the average winning Beyer across the last ten Derbys was 102.3.

The book is older than the figures you will actually use. When it was written, a serious handicapper built figures by hand. Today they arrive printed in the past performances, and services such as TrackMaster describe a three-step calculation: a raw figure from the finishing time, an adjustment between tracks, and a daily track variant based on how that day's winning times compared with par. Beyer's value now is in explaining why a figure means what it does, so that a single outlier does not mislead you. NYRA Bets makes the same warning about over-relying on one anomalous top figure.

The drawback is the dated mechanics. A reader who never plans to make his own figures will find some chapters describe work that a data service now does for him. Target currently lists the paperback at $10.99, down 45% from its $19.99 list price.

Read Beyer on Speed next. The reading lists place it as the follow-up and describe it only as a further argument for speed figures, so it makes the most sense once the first book has laid the foundation. The Winning Horseplayer is the third Beyer title buyers ask about. MyHorseBets presents it as an advanced sequel on track bias, pace and past performance data. It is often called the trip-handicapping book, but none of the sources cited here describes its trip content, so look at the table of contents before buying it for that purpose.

"Pace makes the race" is how Matthew DeSantis puts it on NYRA Bets. His explanation is simple enough to use on a Saturday. When a race has many front-runners, the pace runs hot and favors horses sitting mid-pack or closing. When there are few front-runners, the pace runs cold and a lone leader can go wire-to-wire. The 2026 prep horse Commandment, as MyWinners describes him, sat last of six in the Florida Derby before rallying to win, which is exactly the pattern pace handicappers try to see coming.

Tom Brohamer's book, now in a revised edition, turns that intuition into arithmetic. America's Best Racing says it teaches how to calculate comparative pace and speed within a race. MyHorseBets says the method demands significant time and effort and delivers powerful results for serious handicappers.

That effort is the drawback. Skip this book if you bet a handful of races a year and handicap them the night before. Buy it if you already trust speed figures and keep losing to horses whose figures looked worse than they ran. No price is listed in the sources.

Crist's book addresses a single, expensive problem: how to include enough horses on a Pick 4 or Pick 6 ticket without letting the cost grow out of control. America's Best Racing recommended it twice, first in 2015 as a strategy guide for multi-race wagers and again in 2020 as a guide to multi-race and multi-horse bets. On Kentucky Derby day, with an all-stakes Pick 4 on the card, that is the book most once-a-year bettors actually need.

The drawback is getting a copy. As of the 2015 article the book was out of print, and used copies had sold for more than $100. The sources do not say whether that is still true. Skip it if you bet win, place and show. Its lessons only pay off when you are building tickets.

A related title is the DRF Press anthology Bet With the Best. The only volume the sources describe is Bet With the Best 2: Longshots, which collects advice from several professional handicappers on betting longshots. Hill says he has gone back to its advice at the track many times.

The best horse racing handicapping books are the five below, and if you buy only one, make it Betting Thoroughbreds for the 21st Century by Steven Davidowitz, which America's Best Racing calls "the handicapper's bible." Which of the others you need depends on what you can already do.

• Handicapping 101 by Brad Free: for readers who cannot yet read a past performance.
• Betting Thoroughbreds for the 21st Century by Steven Davidowitz: for the one-book reader who wants class, form and money management together.
• Picking Winners by Andrew Beyer, then Beyer on Speed: for bettors who use Beyer figures without knowing what goes into them.
• Modern Pace Handicapping by Tom Brohamer: for serious players willing to do the pace math.
• Exotic Betting by Steven Crist: for anyone building multi-race tickets.

If you want a dedicated trip-handicapping manual, none of these sources names one with confidence, so wait until you can see a table of contents before paying for a book on that promise. The bettors who paid more than $100 for Crist's out-of-print paperback were not buying a library. They were buying the chapter they needed, and it was worth the price because they already knew which chapter that was.