Inform Racing Review – Tried & Tested: Is It Worth Using?

Inform Racing Review – Part Two

In part two of this Inform Racing review, I will take a look at the Daily Race Cards and System Builder tools. I will create a test system to see if we can produce a profit using the Inform Racing Speed Ratings.

Let’s get into it!

Inform Racing Race Cards

A standard feature of any horse racing form tool is the race cards.

Here we can see the race card for the 16:00 Chepstow on June 16:

All the standard information such as number, draw and silks are present, and if we click on the dropdown button, we can see more detail on the last 10 runs of any hose:

However, the unique aspect of the Inform Racing race cards is the set of ratings. Eight ratings are provided:

Of the ratings, the Master Rating is the most predictive in terms of finding an edge in a horse’s price. I will demonstrate in the next section of this review how to use the system builder to build a profitable system with this rating.

Also note the smaller figure above the Master Rating denotes the number of days since that race.

Generally speaking, I am more interested in a horse whose Master Rating was in the last month or two, and less interested if it was several months ago.

Another useful feature is the ability to export the entire days race cards into excel format.

Let’s say we wanted to find all horses running today with a master rating greater than 85. A few clicks in excel and there it is in an easily digestible format:

Additionally, if you click the ‘form guide’ button at the bottom of the race card, you can drill further down into each horse’s form which is useful for further analysis.

Inform Racing System Builder

Perhaps the most exciting feature of Inform Racing is the system builder.

This allows users to test their own backing or laying ideas and analyse the results to SP and BSP, with results dating back to 2015.

There are hundreds of rules and filters to choose from relating to race details, Last Time Out (LTO) form as well as horse, jockey and trainer specific form.

A unique aspect of the System Builder is the ability to test the performance for each of Inform Racing’s ratings. I created a test system to demonstrate how useful this tool can be.

My system has three rules, which you can see below, and Betfair Commission is set at 2%.

The system is centred around the Master Rating Rank (i.e. the horse with the highest Master Rating in the race).

Once I have run the system, the results analysis breaks down the performance of win bets to SP and BSP, as well as place bets.

This system produces 200.62 points profit and a modest 0.56% ROI betting to win, whilst losing 351.91 points in the place market. Note the larger number of bets (36,147).

Next, I will look at the breakdown of my results.

This highlights any areas where the system has excelled, which I can then potentially use to add further rules to narrow down the selection process.

Results breakdown to 1 point per bet:

By Year

By Month

By Day

This is particularly useful for systems such as this with a large volume of bets.

For example, one area that requires further investigation with this system is the ‘Horse Distance Winners’.

You can see below that horses with zero or one win at today’s distance have lost over 300 points to BSP, while those with two or more wins have produced 502.49 points profit.

If I add this rule and run the system again, you can see the system has now produced 319.26 points profit at an ROI of 3.98%. The bets have been reduced dramatically to just shy of 8,000.

Another area of interest from my initial system is ‘Days Since Last Run’. There is a clear trend here favouring horses who have run in the past 31 days.

Let’s adjust the rules again and see how the improved system has performed:

We have now reduced the number of bets by over 30,000 from our initial system whilst seeing the ROI jump from 0.56% to 6.76%, and also producing a small profit in the place market.

For clarity, here are the final rules of this test system:

This shows the power of the Inform Racing system builder, as using logical filters combined with their ratings can produce promising systems.

The important thing is to not overfit a system with too many rules in search of the perfect system, particularly if there is no logical reason for the rules you have picked.

For example, my ROI could be improved considerably if I focused only on Saturday races, or races held over exactly 6 furlongs, or races only in the month of August. But there does not appear to be any logical reason for those filters to improve results, so it is most likely due to variance or a small sample size.

You can export the full results history of any system to excel to conduct further analysis.

Additionally, you can export the upcoming selections (2-3 days) of all saved systems to have all your upcoming bets in one place.