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Welcome! Always great to see new people who enjoy horse racing!

First thing I would do is start by learning the terminology. This will help you get a few of the basics down.

Books I would recommend would be:

Betting Thoroughbreds for the 21st Century

Beyer on Speed

Exotic Betting

Overlay, Overlay

These are not the only books out there, but they helped me when I was started out, helping me think about forming tickets, money management, and generally how to think about wagering.

I can not recommend enough keeping track of your wagers in an excel spreadsheet or something else to help track what type of wagers you play and how you do on them. I enjoy horizontals, but I have a much better ROI in playing straight win bets. But everyone is different. Keeping track will help you establish a style that works for you. Also, search through this sub, there is a ton of great insight from users like u/hodsct59 and u/writerdave

Hope this helps and best of luck.

If you're betting horses, there are really 2 separate things that are happening:

• Handicapping the race
  
• Betting the race
  
  Handicapping the race is deciding what the probability of each horse winning is. There have been volumes written on this, but the best thing that you can do to test your handicapping, is to make a line for a race and then, over time, compare your line to the actual results of the races. For example, do the horses that you make 3/1 end up winning races 25% of the time? Do the horses that you make 1/1 end up winning 50% of the time? If you can get a large enough sample size and be confident in your line making, then you can be confident in your handicapping.
  
  Betting the race is deciding if the expected return of a particular bet is better or worse than the probability of a the event's occurrence. To help you with this I recommend a very short, and readable, book called ["Money Secrets at the Racetrack" by Barry Meadow (http://www.amazon.com/Money-Secrets-At-The-Racetrack/dp/094532202X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394651338&sr=8-1&keywords=barry+meadow).
  
  Best of luck and enjoy the challenge of handicapping and betting races.
  

Modern Pace Handicapping by Tom Brohammer was a good book to learn pace.

Andy Beyer's Speed Figure handicapping books are still relevant.

Here's a bunch of articles to read: http://www.icapper.com/ - Joe Takach's stuff on how to look at horses is useful. See if you can find some of his videos, they are pretty good.

Bonnie Ledbetter and Tom Ainslee wrote a book on Horse's Body Language - I've found that to be useful.

My favorite beginner's guide to betting horses is Brad Free's Handicapping 101, I recommend that book to everyone who's looking to learn the basics.

Aside from that, check out John Jeremiah Sullivan's Blood Horses, which is partly about horse racing (the good and the very bad), partly about the history of human/horse interaction, and partly about his late father, a longtime sportswriter. It's hard to sum up. It's a beautiful book and you really just have to read it.

My initial thoughts are the past performance aspect needs to be much more detailed and the layoff line can probably be eliminated. Some trainers are just so good off the layoff (Chad Brown for example) even a 180 day layoff might not mean a lot. I would also be interested in how you come up with speed. Is is just the time of the race or a figure?

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Past performances: You need to figure out a way to grade those performances into better numbers. Essentially you need to figure out how to create your own speed figure. It might be worth checking out a book on that as its way more than one post could answer. This is really the hard part to figure out. However to get started you need to address:

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How do you compare a class? Whats the relative difference between 1st in a G3 and 2nd in a G1?

There should be some variable for the surface.

How fast did they actually run? This is the hardest one. Especially considering biases might not become apparent until after the race .

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To eliminate a ton of variables might I suggest maybe sticking to one race type? Whatever your favorite track is pick a distance and surface they will run every day you're watching (easy one is usually 6f on the dirt) and try give each horse a rating. Then compare those ratings to other figures and see where you disagree. Or at a minimum stick to one track. Trying to build a system that handicaps Charles Town and Belmont both very well is going to be incredibly hard.

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In my case I like turf routes, especially on less than firm turf. I think Beyer speed figures are not very reliable in those races and cause some goofy odds (as they are the most used tool in US racing). In these route races you can often find European horses that look a cut below but will relish the softer going and outrun their odds.

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I know hes often clowned in horse racing circles I think you might benefit from reading Andy Beyers Picking Winners: A Horseplayer's Guide. He goes into details on how he came up with this figures. All you got to do is figure out where he went wrong.

Form, Class, Speed, Pace

Form: How well has the horse been running lately? Has he been winning a lot or at least been within a few lengths of the winner?

Class: What company is the horse running in? Going up/down classes or staying the same?

Speed: How fast is the horse? What kind of speed figs has it been posting? Are the speed numbers being put up close to par?

Pace: what running style does the horse have? What does the pace of the race look like? Lots of early speed? Lone Speed?


Check out Handicapping 101:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0028QHGM4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

I was where you are about a year ago. I ended up finding Handicapping 101 by Brad Free and really enjoyed it. (http://www.amazon.com/Handicapping-101-Horse-Racing-Primer/dp/1932910808)

I also am currently reading The Winning Horseplayer by Andrew Beyer (http://www.amazon.com/The-Winning-Horseplayer-Andrew-Beyer/dp/0395701317)

Both have significantly helped me read the DRF and I have learned plenty about class, pace, and speed.

http://www1.drf.com/products/learn/how-to-bet-horses.html

If you can find in a library:
https://www.amazon.com/Betting-Thoroughbreds-Professionals-Horseplayer-Reference/dp/0452270421/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1477963330&sr=8-2&keywords=betting+thoroughbreds

stick with win/place/show and exacta betting (exacta is picking the 1st place and 2nd place horse in a single race).

There's going to be some really great races this weekend. Have fun. Play in moderation.

Good read written by the man himself if you’re interested in understanding how the speed figures are calculated:

Beyer on Speed

https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Pace-Handicapping-Revised-Brohamer/dp/0964849372/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502665828&sr=8-1&keywords=tom+brohamer

and

Paceandcap.com

It's a rabbit hole like I've never experienced before.

I'll start. Though it's not exclusively about racing, I loved Stud by Kevin Conley. Conley's not an expert on racing, but his writing is witty and insightful, and the book is full of colorful characters he travels around interviewing.

How To Make Professional Bets - available on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Make-Professional-Bets-liabilities-ebook/dp/B00O99U8CS/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1414181737&sr=1-2&keywords=betting

Joe Taylor’s Guide