Sartin Review of Match Up 2

[THE HAT]

Book Review
By
Howard Sartin


The Match Up 2
By
Jim "The Hat" Bradshaw


Until The 80’s the term Match Up was relegated to team sports, boxing tennis and track.
Jim Bradshaw was a championship team track coach. He was voted into the Oklahoma Track Coaches Hall of fame when his team defeated all Oklahoma teams and made a great showing at a Los Angeles Nationwide track meet.

When he was urged to apply his track coach savvy to horse racing he saw the light and became a winning handicapper. To over 1000 aspiring handicappers the term Match Up became a horse racing buzz word

With The Match Up 2, he expands his following. He also demonstrates that proper use of The Match Up does not mean landing only on favorites because he defies conventional logic, looking more deeply into races than his contemporaries who, since the 1920’s, have applied only "in the box" logic. As a result, they compared the ability of race horses by class, final time "speed" , jockey, trainer, recency, price and other factors that tended to reduce the ability of the horse itself to a mere instrument of man and the ego of man.

Jim elicits the spirit of the Native American Shaman to see beyond the ego-centered experts of the past by viewing not just the last or best of several running lines, but the pattern of an animal's total performance.

From his track coach's experience he understands energy exertion, toxic build up and the dangers of energy depletion. Many of his audiences at seminars and his previous written works, thought that The Match Up was a form of voodoo that was uniquely The Hat’s.He now dispels that notion with "The Five Step Approach" that makes it possible for all his readers to practice his "voodoo." Follow the five steps and you too can enjoy a 60% non-favorite winning experience betting just one horse.

Comparing the Hat's ability using the five steps to my own computer experience I can honestly reveal that for every six races I could do on the computer Jim did 17 with his match up. Where I would win four of six, Jim would win 9 of 17. He bet one horse I bet 2. You don't have to be a math genius to figure who ended up the bigger winner, since 5 of those 9 were non-favorites.

In The Match Up 2 you'll see chapters on how to use running lines to pick true contenders, definition of Early, Presser, Sustained, Late and all variations of those running patterns; adjustments for both same track and track to track;Spot Plays and most important, the race within the race sometimes overlooked by most previous authors.

The Five Step Approach is the Hat’s answer to the "rules" previous authors have dwelt upon. Most revealing of the Hat’s honorable nature, is the fact that he takes each card race by race. Unlike the many other books on handicapping he did not look first at result charts and cull only the long shots for his readers' inspection. From tracks from coast to coast and in between, he did the races as they appeared. Thus he openly shows 40% favorites and 60% non-favorites. His highest mutual is $46.40. Doing races as they lie is something virtually unheard of in previous "expert" works. Neither is being able to do 17 or more races in an hour and hitting as many as 9-sometimes more-winners betting just one horse. As any honest handicapper will attest, all procedures get a number of favorites. Jim "The Hat" does not hide the fact. He merely does the races as they appear. Yet, his ratio of non-favorites to favorites is outstanding.

I handicapped side by side with Jimmy at tracks and off-sites for over ten years. No one is more impressed than I am with his ability to do more races in less time and win more consistently.

This is a most unique and relevant work. The first truly new and pertinent work in almost a decade. Get it, read it, and most of all follow the directions !