You have checked all the latest horse racing betting tips and you're settling in for a day on the punt in front of Sky Racing. There are lights flashing, horse ratings, late mail and numbers everywhere.
It can be a bit confronting for newbie punters so we thought we'd give you a hand in understanding things. That's why we have our guide on how to read a TAB Sky Racing screen.
As you can see in the above image the next two horse races on the board appear at Eagle Farm and Belmont. The image on the right at Belmont displays the horses going into the barrier and below the image you can see the countdown clock at -0:22 indicating that the race is 22 seconds past start time.
Alternatively, Eagle Farm on the left is five minutes and thirty-seven seconds away from the registered start time. The race number for both tracks appears at the top left hand side of the odds grid. Belmont is up to Race 3 and Eagle Farm at Race 5.
Underneath the track name at both venues you'll see the top seven runners in each race that are ordered by their position in the market. That is, favourites at the top.
These are sorted by the fixed odds price at the local state TAB for that track. As Belmont is a track in Western Australia you can see that the WA Tab prices are in the green column followed by the three tote prices for S-Tab, NSW and UBET.
For Eagle Farm being a track in Queensland the UBET prices are in the green number one slot followed by the three different totes.
The far left column of each race that is seen above in red also contains the number of each runner listed in the market snap shot. You can see that the favourite at Eagle Farm is Cruising Speed that is currently paying $2.90 on UBet fixed and is the #11 in Race 5.
At Belmont the favourite is Rich Red who is paying $2.50 fixed with WA Tab and he is number 2 in the race.
The green column always indicates a fixed price where as the three grey columns always indicate a tote price that will fluctuate based off the amount of money that is going into the pools.
At the very bottom of this screen there are two horizontal columns of information. The first one is the countdown in minutes until the scheduled jump time of the races.
In this specific example you can see Belmont, Eagle Farm (5 mins), Flemington (13 mins) and Newcastle (17 mins). Below that are the fixed odds on a rolling ticker for races that are upcoming.
If you ever see this screen and the races outlined are in BLUE not in red then it's indicating that the particular race in question is to be shown on Sky Racing 2.
As a general rule they'll put all of the metropolitan meetings in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Melbourne on Sky Racing 1 (RED) as a preference and push the country, provincial, greyhound and harness racing over to Sky Racing 2 if there are any schedule clashes on start times of races.
