The new year is well upon us now and, on this fourth day of January, a few resolutions may remain intact. Chocolate, biscuits, cakes (and especially chocolate biscuit cakes) and beer are largely off the agenda for a bit here - yes, life is currently very dull - but, on a much more interesting note, below are some words around what is on the 2024 agenda for geegeez.co.uk...

 

Racecard Small Changes

We'll start with a 'not very rock n'roll' update: a collection of small changes to the racecards. Although small, most of them are things many users repeat countless times while navigating the software in search of interesting horses.

22nd January Update

These changes are now live and you can see them in action in the video below - there's a timeline below the video:

00:00 Intro
00:31 Save Racecard Filters (desktop & mobile)
02:45 Actual Race Distance in form blocks
04:16 Full Form UK/Ire filter
05:25 'By Time' Racecard view now has time order dropdown
06:40 Asterisked notes
09:10 Run Style added to Full Result
11:00 Removed 'abandoned' meeting non-runners from Tracker
11:35 Outro

 

Editorial Explainer

First up is a racecard menu filters 'memory' - currently, a user must select parameters from the racecard menu filters section each time they close and open the cards menu page. If you use the same filters all the time, you have to reinstate them each time. Faff. We'll sort that.

[Incidentally, if you sometimes see there are no races displaying on the menu page, just hit the 'reset' button top right]

 

Next, an asterisk on the form row when you have a note saved for any/all of meeting, race or runner - to notify you that it's there.

 

Also, we'll be displaying the specific race distance and any distance amendments when you hover over the 'Race Conditions' on any form row:

 

And, if you choose to view the racecard menu page 'by time' you can view the race dropdown ordered by time.

 

If run style is of interest to you, we're adding each horse's early pace position to the full results:

 

We'll get those small, but perfectly formed, changes live later this month.

 

Betfair Data

One of the projects for later in the year is to incorporate Betfair data - Betfair Starting Price (BSP) as well as in-running high and low prices. We actually have these data in our system but adding them appropriately to results and into the tools will take a while. But it's on our to do list.

For a lot of readers who have been restricted, some of the BSP results are likely to make eye-opening reading, certainly when compared to SP.

 

Ratings Model

This is one of those dreaded rabbit holes into which I vowed we'd never delve. Well, we have already sunk a good few hours into the project and we've made some promising progress; but there is  much still to do. I'm at the point now where, for the first time, I do believe we can produce a set of ratings that a) finds a lot of winners and b) highlights some value.

The process involves creating separate models for separate groups of races, and if/when we get as far as publication, we'll do it piecemeal. That is, once we're happy with, for instance, our all-weather sprint handicap model, we'll publish numbers for all-weather sprint handicaps. And so on.

There are loads of ratings out there, many of which are very good at finding winners - but due to the fact they're published so widely they are significantly loss-making. Our Peter May ratings get close to break even at Betfair SP with their top rated picks every year, sometimes turning a small profit and sometimes a small loss. And we might not be able to fare better than that.

My main point is that, unless we find something of utility, as opposed to the somewhat ornamental numbers produced by the fashionable houses, we'll not publish.

 

Query Tool

QT is a powerful means of analysing large chunks of racing data and, once that's done, of saving specific 'QT Angles' to your own account and being notified of qualifiers each day. It's been unchanged for a few years now, and we've aborted a few attempts at an upgrade; but I have so many things I want to add to QT - a majority of them from your feedback and suggestions - and, once we've re-engineered a QT 2.0 engine, it will be relatively straightforward to deploy that extra functionality.

This WILL happen in 2024, it's been too long.

 

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As you can see, apart from the small changes due for release this month, we've got a couple of pretty big 'how long is a piece of string' projects for later in the year. The Betfair element shouldn't be too onerous but I'd like to put some developer time into the modelling next. Very, very loose timeline would be aiming to get some flat rating models on stream for the start of the turf season; then perhaps pivoting to the Betfair and QT projects before reverting to the remaining race code ratings models.

There is a lot of scope for timelines to change, but these are the 2024 resolutions for geegeez. Let's hope they last longer than my personal attempts at self-improvement!

Matt

p.s. away from the bright lights of geegeez, there are a couple of other interesting projects on the go. One, a tote ticket builder, should hopefully be available very soon (I've been using it for a year!), and the other, TennisProfits.com, is a site for tennis traders that we're hoping to make more accessible for bettors, too. I'll share snippets on these from time to time as the year progresses. The tote ticket project especially is one that I think will be of great interest to many geegeez readers/racing punters.