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A Q and A with Roger Hargrave of Visual Form Guides

Roger Hargrave is the founder of Visual Form Guides, a service that aims to simplify race cards and make it quicker and easier for punters to find selections.

Hi Roger, and many thanks for joining us this month. Firstly, would you tell our readers a little about yourself and how you came to create the comprehensive form cards that appear on the Visual Form Guides site? What is your background?

Hi. And thanks for inviting me. I’m from Cambridge so my first racing experiences were as a teenager with trips to Newmarket, Huntingdon and the point to points at Cottenham.

Professionally my background is working in in financial reporting mostly in London. That involved spending most of my time developing systems to turn financial information into pretty reports and charts. Combine that with the amount of time I was spending at the time at the dogs at Romford and Walthamstow it wasn’t a huge leap to think that turning all those times, distances and abbreviations into something visual would make form reading easier.

Applying the visual idea to horse racing was a bit trickier because of the extra factors to consider but once I had come up with the “grids” concept, it fell into place.

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Our readers will mostly be interested in your horse racing cards, is that the case for your service? Having looked through them I see that they look nothing like the traditional race card. Would you tell us a bit about your colour coded charts and how they would help the average punter?

Probably a majority of my users focus on the greyhounds as it was the first on the site and because it’s a simpler concept: times, abbreviations shown visually.

There’s a guy on Twitter who posts horse racing nostalgia stuff like racing form from something like 1892 and it strikes me that it’s pretty much the same information in the same format as you’ll get in most form guides today.

We are trying to be different.

The starting point was to consider that “traditional” form that might read something like 2502-604 is telling us next to nothing.

The fourth last time out may have been beaten a distance 4th of 4 or beaten ½ length 4th of 28 at Royal Ascot. There’s a bit of a difference.

We show finishing positions in terms of lengths behind the winner as it’s much more relevant than the bare finishing position. We show these finishing positions in a series of grids.

The “Adjusted Form Grid” factors in race class and weights so we can get a true comparison of runs. We colour code to show runs over different codes and turf or AW runs.

The “Going Grid” shows a horse’s career finishing positions by going and “Distance Grid” does the same by trip. This means the user can assess at a glance if today’s ground and trip will suit.

All this means the average punter can weigh up a race quickly and effectively without being an expert or spending hours studying.

It is obvious that your goal is to make winner selecting quicker and easier for punters, but do you have any secret sauce that punters can’t get elsewhere i.e., are any of your graphics displaying info that is not generally available?

Yes, I think presenting information like this makes assessing a race accessible to many more people but there are plenty of benefits for more experienced punters.

It’s not that we’re showing information that’s not out there if you look hard enough, we’re just taking the most relevant information and making it easy to read.

If you want to know if a horse stays 3 miles our visuals shows you in an instant what would otherwise take all manner of clicking or page turning.

Another big plus I think is that being visual we also make it a lot easier to identify trends. Seeing if a horse is on the improve or otherwise is obviously a huge factor in assessing its chances but not so easy to spot using more traditional study methods.

Do you have any big players or super successful bettors on your customer base, people that would say the Visual Form Guides are the reason for their success?

I suspect if there were I’d be getting mega tips into my PayPal account all the time. I do get nice emails from members when they get a monster tricast up or something, or just to say that what we’re providing is helping them be more profitable generally.

How would you suggest that a customer views and uses the guides on offer to get the best from them? Some of the guides appear quite complicated. Are there tutorials for people to follow?

Yes, at first glance they may seem complicated but once you get the fact that all the grids show finishing positions as lengths behind the winner it really is quite easy.

My mother got to grips with the horse racing form after about ten minutes explanation and if she can anyone can.

There are tutorials on the site, and I am always available to answer further questions.

Once you’ve got the basic concepts it’s a matter of looking through the runners checking their recent form, how this compares to the other runners and whether the trip and ground will suit.

That’s the starting point.

Then to go a bit deeper users can look at course form, discount certain runs because say the ground was too soft, race times and numerous other factors.

How would a customer look to use your Horse Racing guide for example when making their daily selections? Are the Form Guides open to personal interpretation?

Yes, definitely open to personal interpretation. That’s what I want. I don’t want to be a tipping service, there’s thousands of them out there and way too much pressure!

Anyway, isn’t it more rewarding if you pick a winner using your own judgement?

My focus is to make it simple for people to do that by having all the relevant information in one place in an easy to read format.

Personally, I focus most on adjusted form together with the going and distance grids. Then depending on the race, I might factor in other things like race times over shorter trips or for certain tracks I’d want to see decent course form.

Would you say that you have a “typical” working day, and how would you describe it?

There are the daily tasks, database maintenance, form preparation, website updating, promotion stuff which is a fair few hours when there’s so much racing on in the summer. I think Christmas Eve is the only day of the year where there’s no form to prepare for the next day.

I usually have one or two special projects going on. At the moment it’s preparing a form guide for golf which is proving a bit of a learning curve.

If you look on the PGA tour site, there’s about 70 different stats for driving alone. The challenge is to focus and present only those most relevant from a punter’s point of view.

I also do other freelance work. Some in the betting world like developing automated trading systems or trainer/jockey analysis, and other stuff back in the world of finance.

Do you regularly bet yourself? What style of approach do you take to your betting? What do you think of staking plans, loss retrieval systems etc.?

I treat betting as a hobby rather than the day-job and bet regularly but to small stakes. I focus on looking for value so will go through the horse racing form guides every day to find a few I fancy or any I want to take on.

A bit more discipline would probably help me take it up a level. I know for example I should probably go through yesterday’s form together with the results to see if there’s anything I have missed or put too much emphasis on, but I tend to do this now and again rather than every day.

I am interested in the mathematics of betting so yes, staking plans and systems are things I like to investigate.

I focus on value betting, so I’m much more interested in applying concepts like the Kelly Criterion rather than anything that involves chasing losses.

New and old punters alike can struggle to make a success of their betting. If you could give them just one piece of advice to improve their profitability, what would it be?

Get informed enough to decide whether the price is in your favour and play accordingly.

If you’re betting blind, you’re miles better off betting on roulette than backing say at SP on a dog race. At the same time, you know with roulette the price is never in your favour. So, get informed, keep learning and enjoy it.

What do you do to relax and unwind? What interests have you outside the world of horse racing?

I have two young boys, so they keep me busy. They’re both at the dinosaurs and being adventurers’ phase so we like to get out and about in the countryside and explore a lot.

I do need to escape family life pretty often though, so I’ll nip out for a beer and watch a football match or something or if I’m really lucky escape for a day at a test match.

I see you’ve now added football and golf form to the website. Are there plans to add other sports? What’s the future for the site?

Yes, golf was something I added this year.

I am not a golf expert by any means, so I am looking to find a partner who is to take the golf form project forward, hopefully to a wider, more US focussed market.

My focus though is to improve the form for the sports we have before starting new ones. I always have several ideas in mind. I have a colour coded “crowding indicator” on the greyhound form and I’d like to incorporate this idea into the horse racing form so you could discount a run say if a horse was hampered badly in running.

If and when I do get round to other sports tennis would probably be next.

You can visit Visual Form Guides and take a free trial here.

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