FAQ

Better Race Class Wins in the CSV Report

From February 2016 the CSV has a number of new columns added to show horses which have won better race classes and these need a little explanation.

The columns within the CSV which are of interest here are PB to PM, inclusive.

Better Race Class Winners (Cols PB-PD)

Column PB is the important column here. If the horse has won one, or more, better class races before then the latest better class race is mentioned. The figure here, if it's positive, shows how much better that earlier race was in terms of class compared to today's.

Note for values which are positive we're looking at the last better class winning race and not necessarily the horse's best win. For example, if the class today is 100 and the five races ago it won a class 102 race and the race before that it won a class 110 race then the race that's mentioned is the 102 race which happened five races ago and not the 110 race which was six races ago.

The reason is that we can look at the data to see if there are any recent better race victories which is more important than that massive Derby win ten years ago.

If the horse hasn't won a better class race then we then look to see if it's won any races in it's history and how close that race was to today's race class. In this case the value presented in column PB is negative.

In the case that the horse has a negative value please be aware that we're looking at the highest class that the horse has won no matter where it comes into the horse's history.

If the horse hasn't ever won in the past then, clearly, all of this is of no consequence and the values for the three fields will be zero.

Assuming that column PB is non-zero, i.e. either positive or negative, then the next two columns may be of interest. Column PC tells us how many days ago this event that's mentioned is PB occured and in PD we are told how many races ago this happened.

Better Race Class & Weight Winners (Cols PE-PG)

This is much the same as the first three columns, but this time we're looking at the combination of Class & Weight rather than just the Class.

Quite often an example helps and this is no exception here. So, look at the following extract of the PDF file for the 4.00 Southwell race on the 2nd of February, 2016. In this instance we're looking at the form for the horse named Stun Gun.

We can see by looking at the last row of the PDF data that the race class today is Class 99 and the horse's weight is 8 stone and 13 pounds (apologies for having the name chopped off the screenshot along with the column headers).

The last time that this horse won a race which was better in Class & Weight was at Southwell on the 29th of December, 2013. That day Stun Gun won a combined Class & Weight race of 226 which compares to 224 today. Note that the horse has won three times since that Southwell race but all three had a lower Class & Weight values (214, 216 and 218) so these don't count here.

We can look at the CSV for the horse and look at columns PE to PG (a considerable number of columns have been hidden so that one can see the horse name and the race today).

So looking at the column Better Class Weight Win we can see that Stun Gun's winning race of 765 days ago was two pounds better than today's Weight & Class race. We can further see that this was 31 races ago.

In these examples we can also look at the Better Class Wins that were discussed in the previous section.

Column PB for Stun Gun gives us a negative value. This is because Stun Gun has never won a race which was classed higher than today's race which is classed at 99 (the bottom row of the PDF reminds us of this) and the nearest that Stun Gun has won is a race which took place two races ago, thirty-two days in the past when the race that he won was almost three and a half pounds poorer than today's.

Race Types (columns PH-PM)

So what of the last six columns?

These are much the same as the first six columns (PB-PH) but for this data we are looking at the same race type as today's race only. In our example of Stun Gun it is running today in an all-weather race. Therefore the data for these last six columns are doing the same analysis; the Better Class Win and the Better Class & Weight Win but looking at the historical all-weather data only.

Updated 2nd February, 2016