Inform Racing – A look at their Master Ratings
Over the past three decades I have crunched horse racing data via a variety of different sources, going all the way back to RSB – Racing System Builder. I first used RSB back in the 90s / early 2000s. Before the advent of RSB my horse racing research process involved working my way through old Timeform or Superform Yearly Annuals which had UK racing results for the whole year. I would extrapolate the data I needed from a particular race, wrote it in a notepad or exercise book and then moved on to the next one.
It took a good while to even collate 100 races with the data I was looking for.
At the time Racing Systems Builder was revolutionary in terms of my, and the racing research of others. After popping the RSB CD rom into my computer I could now test several years of horse racing data using different variables or parameters, at essentially the touch of a button. Suddenly I had gone from getting data for 100 races that could take me several hours or even days, to getting data from thousands of races within seconds. It was such an exciting time.
Of course, things have moved on considerably since then with many more options / choices for researchers and punters alike. For example, some racing websites have their own system builders that are part of their site, while for others you download the software onto your computer and use it that way. In this article I am going to share with you my initial findings for Inform Racing and their Master Ratings.
The Daily Picks you receive as being part of the On Course Profits Platinum membership use the Inform Master Ratings as one of their filters. Hence, I thought it would be interesting to investigate the Master Ratings to try and analyse their performance.
Getting a good and consistent set of results from any horse racing ratings method is not easy. Many have tried and failed in the past.
The Master Ratings found at Inform Racing are one of a selection of different Ratings you get each day on their Racecards. All the different ratings can also be accessed via the system builder, which means you can back-check past results as well as get future declaration for any systems you create. Therefore, you have the opportunity to test these Ratings ‘raw’, or in combination with other Ratings, or combined with other system builder parameters such as the age of the horse, LTO finishing position, how many days since its last run, etc, etc.
The Inform Racing Ratings are a just small part of a varied and comprehensive racing package.
I have mentioned the system builder which you can build your own systems either with or without the use of the ratings. In addition, you have betting in running tools to help your betting in play, there is also a betting tissue facility that helps to produce your own prices on races.
As you can see, Inform Racing is not just a one trick pony.
Having given you some background it is time to drill down into these Master Ratings in some depth focusing on the top-rated runner.
I have taken data from all codes of horses racing (flat, all weather, jumps) from UK racing between 1st January 2021 and 9th November 2024 (the time at which I crunched the data). I could have gone back further (2014 being the earliest), but I wanted to look at a more recent set of results.
Profits have been calculated to Betfair SP with commission which has been set at 2%.
Let me look at the overall results first – so every top rated runner in every race over this 4-year period:
This is a very impressive starting point considering this is ALL races and ALL top-rated runners with less than a 1 percent deficit in terms of returns. Not only that, but the strike rate for the top-rated runners is one win in every five.
This is around what you would hope for with a good set of ratings, but another positive for me.
If we look at the yearly breakdown, we can see the following:
As you can see, the strike rates are consistent, within 2%, and returns vary between + 0.04% and – 0.04%.
Yes, the strike rates have been slightly lower in the past two years, but this not is not statistically significant.
I now would like to split the results by race code so turf flat, all– weather flat and jumps:
There is a better win strike rate over the jumps, but this is probably due to smaller average field sizes rather than the ratings being more accurate within this sphere. Overall, the figures are very similar, and one has to say decent.
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