Horse Racing & RaceMetrics Glossary

A/E (Actual over Expected)

Actual wins divided by the wins the market expected.

Expected wins are the sum of each runner's implied chance from its Betfair Starting Price (a 3/1 shot contributes 0.25). Betfair SP is used rather than the bookmakers' Industry SP because it carries no built-in margin — on Industry SP a runner with no edge at all would score about 0.85 rather than 1.00, which makes "beat the market" impossible to read at a glance. An A/E of 1.0 means the selections won exactly as often as the market predicted; above 1.0 means they beat it — the hallmark of a genuinely profitable angle rather than one that just backed short prices. Shown for every System Builder back-test alongside Impact Value and chi-squared, and available as My Card columns for the trainer, jockey, trainer–jockey pairing, the horse itself, the draw, and the sire and damsire. A/E and Impact Value are not the same measure: A/E compares wins against the market, IV compares them against chance.

AI Rating RaceMetrics

The rating from RaceMetrics' AI-generated racecards, on its own scale, distinct from the core RaceMetrics Rating engine.

Shown with a within-race rank on AI Race Cards (Enterprise tier). Coverage begins around March 2026 — roughly 8% of historical runs — so it is strong for today's and tomorrow's qualifiers but thin for long back-tests, which is why the System Builder treats it as a recent-data field.

Draw IV

How well a particular stall has performed at a course and trip, against its fair share by chance.

Take every flat race at that course, race type and distance over the previous five years, and compare how often the horses drawn in this stall won with how often they would have won by chance alone. 1.0 is exactly par; above 1.0 means the stall wins more than its share. It is computed strictly from racing before the race in question, so it is safe both for back-testing and for today’s card. Jumps runners have no draw, so the figure is blank for them. When a horse is withdrawn before the off, the stalls close up on the track and the surviving runners’ draws are renumbered live — so a runner’s stall (and its Draw IV) can change during the day, and always matches the stall it will actually break from and the draw the official result will record. A high Draw IV is not the same as an edge — see Impact Value; the market usually prices a known draw bias in.

Draw × Pace IV

Whether horses drawn in this half and ridden this way actually win here.

The sharpest of the draw-and-pace figures, because it tests the combination rather than either part alone. It only counts past races with a field size close to today’s — a low draw in a six-runner race is a different proposition from a low draw in sixteen — and is deliberately left blank where that sample is too thin to mean anything. Flat racing only. Available on the racecard and as a System Builder filter and breakdown.

Pace IV

Whether the way a horse is usually ridden tends to win at today’s course and trip.

Horses tend to be ridden a certain way — making the running, racing handily, or held up for a late run. Pace IV takes that habit from the horse’s last ten runs, weighted towards the most recent, and asks how that style has fared at this course, race type and distance. It is blended: a horse that leads 38% of the time is credited with 38% of the front-runner’s figure, not all of it. Because it is built from previous runs it is known before the race, but it describes a habit rather than a guarantee — a jockey can always change tactics. Roughly 7% of flat runners have no running-style history at all and a further 19% only one to three runs, so it is worth checking the sample before trusting the figure.

Tactical Score

Draw IV and Pace IV combined into one number.

Weighted towards the draw at sprint distances up to seven furlongs, where the stalls matter most, and towards the pace beyond that. Over jumps there is no draw, so it is simply the Pace IV. Above 1.0 means both the stall and the horse’s usual running style point the same way.

A/W (All-Weather)

Synthetic racing surfaces used year-round at six UK and Irish courses.

All-Weather racing runs on either Polytrack (Kempton, Lingfield, Chelmsford City, Dundalk) or Tapeta (Newcastle, Southwell, Wolverhampton). Going is described as Standard or Slow, rather than the turf scale of Hard through Heavy.

Ask RaceMetrics RaceMetrics

AI-powered natural language query tool that answers racing questions in plain English.

Built on 25+ years of Proform Racing data. Type a question like "best UK trainers on heavy ground in handicap chases" or "trainer/jockey combinations with positive ROI in Class 3 hurdles" and get back sortable tables and charts. Daily query limits vary by subscription tier from 5 to 100 per day.

Auto-build Premium

System Builder tool that builds a betting system toward a stated goal, one proven rule at a time.

State a goal — for example "Betfair SP ROI of at least 5%, keeping at least 500 runs" — and Auto-build runs Goal Seek repeatedly, adding the best rule each round until it reaches the target or cannot safely go further. Every step is holdout-guarded: it trains on the older data, tests each candidate rule on the held-out final 12 months, and only keeps rules that hold up out-of-sample. When the best remaining rules only work in the training data it stops and says so — a deliberate refusal to hand over an over-fitted system. The finished draft loads into the builder for review; nothing is applied automatically. Requires a Proform Premium subscription.

Beaten Favourite (BF)

A horse that started as the favourite but did not win the race.

Often considered a positive form line for the next race — if the market thought it was best and it underperformed, it may go off a bigger price next time out. RaceMetrics tags these with a BF history badge in At-a-Glance view.

BHA (British Horseracing Authority)

The official governing and regulatory body of British horse racing.

The BHA publishes Official Ratings (ORs) used for handicapping, sets the rules of racing, and licences horses, trainers, jockeys and owners.

BOG (Best Odds Guaranteed)

A bookmaker concession that pays out at the higher of the price taken or the Starting Price.

If you back a horse at 6/1 and it starts at 8/1, you get paid at 8/1. If it shortens, you keep your original 6/1. RaceMetrics' Tips dashboard tracks "Breakfast BOG" and "Morning BOG" P/L variants.

BSP (Betfair Starting Price)

The official starting price published by the Betfair exchange at the off.

Calculated from money matched in the seconds before the race. Used as the standard reference price for P/L calculations on RaceMetrics — exchange-driven, fair, after a typical 2% commission deduction.

Bumper

A National Hunt Flat (NHF) race — a flat race for jumps-bred horses with no obstacles.

Used to introduce future hurdlers and chasers to racecourse experience. Race type 5 in RaceMetrics' classification.

Chase (Steeplechase)

National Hunt race over fences (steeplechase obstacles).

Race type 3 in RaceMetrics. Fences are larger and more solid than hurdles. Distances typically range from 2 miles to 4 miles 4 furlongs.

Chi (Chi-Squared Significance) Premium

A statistical test of whether the gap between actual and expected wins could plausibly be luck.

Shown on every System Builder back-test. A value of 4+ reads as probably real, 5+ as very probably real. It needs at least 5 expected wins to register — below that the test lacks power and a dash is shown instead. Chi is the first defence against a system that looks good purely because it caught a winning streak; pair it with ROI Significance, which runs the same question on the money rather than the win count.

Class 1 to 6

UK race classification scale where Class 1 is the highest and Class 6 is the lowest.

Class 1 includes Group 1, 2 and 3 races, Listed flat races, the top National Hunt Grade 1, 2 and 3 events, and some handicaps. Classes 2-6 are tiers of most handicaps with rating bands, novices, maidens, etc. RaceMetrics' filters and pattern conditions use the same 1-6 scale throughout.

Clear-by RaceMetrics

How far a rating leads the next-best in the field, in rating points.

Rank finds the leader; Clear-by finds the standout. A horse top on Combined Score by 1 point is a very different proposition from one clear by 60, and the System Builder carries the Value / Rank / Clear-by trio on every rating family so that distinction can be filtered directly.

Collateral Form & Collateral Score RaceMetrics

A shared-rivals form measure linking horses through common opponents rather than direct meetings — the score runs roughly −5000 to +5000.

Positive means the runner's form is franked by collateral lines: horses it beat have won since, or horses that beat it have proven good. About 19% of runners have no shared-rival lines to draw on and are flagged as unscoreable rather than shown as a misleading zero. Each verdict carries a Confidence grade — High (5+ shared data points), Medium (2–4), Low (1) — and the 3D network view shows exactly which opponents are doing the work. The conversion uses a weight-adjusted pounds-per-length scale, normalised for jumps.

Combined Score RaceMetrics

RaceMetrics' weighted average of six connection ratings — Owner 20%, Trainer 20%, Jockey 20%, Dam 18%, Sire 12%, Damsire 10%.

The horse's own rating (H) is shown separately, not included in the Combined Score. Historically the highest Combined Score in a race wins 22.97% of the time — 2.15 times the rate you'd expect from random selection. Elite Combined Scores (1600+) have a 43.75% strike rate.

Connections

The collective term for the people and bloodlines associated with a horse — Trainer, Jockey, Owner, Sire, Dam, Damsire.

RaceMetrics rates all six connection types separately, plus the horse itself, giving seven distinct rating profiles per runner.

Course DNA RaceMetrics

A course-and-distance profile summarising the track's characteristic biases — typical pace shape, draw effect and structural quirks — shown ahead of the Draw & Pace detail.

Read it as the prior before today's specifics: what normal looks like at this course and distance, before checking whether today's field, rail position and ground confirm or override it via the Draw × Pace heatmap and Stall Impact Values.

Course Winner (C)

A horse that has previously won at the same course.

Shown as a C history badge in RaceMetrics' At-a-Glance view. Course form is one of the strongest historical predictors, particularly at unusual or undulating tracks like Cheltenham, Goodwood and Epsom.

Course & Distance Winner (CD)

A horse that has previously won at the same course over the same distance.

Shown as a CD badge, which overrides C and D. The strongest form indicator of the four standard history badges.

Course Direction

Whether a racecourse turns left-handed (anticlockwise) or right-handed (clockwise) from the runner's perspective.

Used as a pattern condition for horses that prefer one direction over the other. Most UK left-handed courses include Ascot (round course), Goodwood, Epsom (downhill section).

Dam

A horse's female parent (mother).

RaceMetrics tracks every dam in the database with full progeny statistics, rating history and profitable angles. Dam quality particularly influences stamina, temperament and ability on testing ground.

Damsire

The sire of a horse's dam — i.e. the horse's maternal grandfather.

Often a strong indicator of stamina, jumping ability and surface preference, because broodmare sires shape physical type as much as direct sires do. RaceMetrics rates damsires by the cumulative performance of their daughters' offspring.

Distance DNA Premium

A trip-suitability verdict built from a horse's stride cadence compared with winning horses at the distances it has been running.

Winners' cadence falls in a clean staircase as trips get longer (about 2.39 strides/sec at 5–6f down to 2.15 at 2m+). A horse galloping with a markedly slower cadence than the winners at its raced trips profiles as built for further; a quicker cadence suggests sharper trips. Shown as a card on horse profiles with the winners' cadence curve. Needs at least 3 measured stride runs. Available with Proform Premium plus the TPD Sectionals Add-On.

Distance Winner (D)

A horse that has previously won over the same distance, at any course.

Shown as a D history badge. Less specific than CD (Course & Distance) but useful for stamina assessment.

Divergence Finder Premium

Surfaces runners a subscriber's own My Ratings scale rates No. 1 that the standard RaceMetrics ratings don't.

Where your own handicapping method and the platform's Combined Score reach different conclusions about the same race, the disagreement becomes visible and actionable — linking into the System Builder's Qualifiers. Most useful once your own scale has been validated and you trust a genuine divergence rather than dismissing it as noise. Part of the My Ratings toolset.

Draw

The stall number from which a horse starts a flat race.

Drawn 1 is closest to the inside rail. Some courses heavily favour high or low draws over certain distances — for example, big-field handicaps at Chester favour low draws because of the tight turns. RaceMetrics' Draw & Pace tool (Enterprise) maps these biases.

Drawdown (DD), LWR & LLR Premium

Drawdown is the deepest peak-to-trough losing hole a level-stakes bank would have suffered; LWR and LLR are the longest winning and losing runs.

The practical could-I-stomach-this questions a headline ROI never answers. The System Builder also shows an expected longest losing run alongside the actual one — a real losing run close to the expected figure is the mathematics working at that strike rate, not the system breaking.

DSLR (Days Since Last Run)

The number of days between a horse's last race and the upcoming one.

Used for fitness assessment. Common windows: under 14 days (recent racing), 15-28 days (typical), 29-90 days (mid-break), 90+ days (extended absence). Trainer-specific DSLR patterns are a common profitable angle on RaceMetrics.

Each-Way (E/W)

A bet split equally between Win and Place outcomes.

A £10 each-way bet is £10 to win plus £10 to place — total stake £20. UK industry place terms vary by field size and race type: 1st-2nd at 1/4 odds in 5-7 runner races, 1st-3rd at 1/5 odds in 8+ runner non-handicaps, 1st-3rd at 1/4 odds in 12-15 runner handicaps, and 1st-4th at 1/4 odds in 16+ runner handicaps. Individual bookmakers often enhance these on bigger races.

Elite Rating RaceMetrics

A RaceMetrics rating of 1600 or higher, indicating top-tier performance.

Elite participants (horses or connections) historically win 43.75% of races they enter when topping the Combined Score — 3.54 times random chance. Full RaceMetrics scale: 1500 average, 1550+ strong, 1600+ elite.

Evening & Breakfast Prices

With the Morning Price, the three recorded market snapshots before a race: the previous evening (~8.30pm), breakfast time (~7.30am) and mid-morning (~10.30am).

Movements between the three expose steamers and drifters through the day. Unlike SP, all three are known before the off, so each carries a live per-race rank usable in System Builder qualifiers — an honest pre-race market position rather than a retrospective one.

Exp W (Expected Wins) Premium

The sum of every runner's implied probability across a sample — what the market's own prices said should have won.

A 3/1 shot contributes 0.25 of an expected win. Exp W is the denominator behind A/E and WAX, and the platform's standard sample-size guard: records generally need 5+ expected wins before they are trusted, because raw run counts alone don't account for how short-priced a sample's runners were.

Field Size

The number of declared runners in a race.

Used as a pattern condition. Smaller fields (4-6 runners) favour favourites; large handicap fields (16+) are more random and reward outsiders. RaceMetrics shows field size on every racecard and in profile breakdowns.

Flat Racing

Racing on the level — no jumps. Includes both turf and All-Weather.

Race types 1 (Turf Flat) and 2 (All-Weather) in RaceMetrics' classification. UK turf flat runs roughly April to October; All-Weather year-round.

First-Season Sire

A stallion whose first crop of offspring is racing for the first time — also called a freshman sire.

A stallion's first foals reach the track as two-year-olds several years after he retires from racing, so a first-season sire has no progeny record for punters or the market to work from. That uncertainty is why the angle is followed: prices are set with less information than usual.

When a sire's first crop arrives depends on when he retired, not on his age — a horse retired after his three-year-old season has his first runners when he is seven, a year later and it is eight, and one who raced on to five nearer nine. RaceMetrics therefore counts crops from when a sire's progeny actually began running. In the System Builder the First-Season Sire filter matches the first crop exactly, and Sire's Crop Number lets you select the first, second or later crops.

Form Expert RaceMetrics

RaceMetrics' historical performance analysis tool showing strike rates filtered by going, class, distance, field size and race type for every runner in a race.

Switch between all seven participant types (Horse, Trainer, Jockey, Owner, Sire, Dam, Damsire), match the current race's conditions in one click, and toggle between Win, Win & Place, and PRB (Percentage of Rivals Beaten) modes.

Form String

A horse's most recent finishing positions, read right to left (most recent on the right).

Positions 1-9 shown as a single digit; 0 = 10th or worse; F = Fell; U = Unseated; P = Pulled Up; R = Refused or Ran Out; B = Brought Down; S = Slipped Up. Year breaks shown as a dash ("-") or slash ("/").

Form Temperature

A 0–100 score of how hot or cold a trainer's or jockey's last two weeks have been, measured against their own five-season strike rate.

Shown as small coloured pills next to trainer and jockey names on racecards. The last 14 days' record is put through a binomial percentile test against the yard's own benchmark, so big and small stables compare fairly: 95 or higher means a fortnight that good comes up by luck fewer than 1 time in 20 (hot, red pill); 5 or lower is the same on the quiet side (cold, blue pill). Scores between 25 and 75 are normal variance and show no pill. Hovering a pill — or pressing and holding it on a phone — reveals the fortnight's record, the benchmark and the luck odds. It measures how unusual the recent run is, not betting value — hot yards win more often, but the market largely prices that in.

Frontier Premium

System Builder tool that sweeps one numeric rule across a ladder of values and charts bet volume against return at every step.

Most systems have one number doing the heavy lifting — odds under 8, a rating rank of 3, a field of at most 12. Frontier asks why that number: pick the rule and it re-runs the whole back-test once per value (up to 12, tightest first), charting the trade-off between how many bets you get and what they return, with a rule-off point showing the same system with the rule removed entirely. The shape of the curve is the diagnostic — a smooth slope means the edge fades gently and the threshold is a preference; a sudden cliff means one value is carrying the whole result, a classic over-fitting warning worth a robustness check. Click Use on any row to set the rule to that value. Requires a Proform Premium subscription.

FSP% Diff & Efficiency Premium

FSP% minus the par FSP% for that section — positive means the horse finished faster than the ground- and context-adjusted par.

The column to quote when writing about finishing speed, because par is calibrated to that race's winning time, going, class, weight and maturity — so the adjustment for race shape has already been made. The related Efficiency rank (1 = closest to efficient) summarises how well-distributed a horse's effort was. Requires Proform Premium or RaceMetrics Pro with the Sectionals add-on.

FSP% (Finishing Speed Percentage) Premium

A horse's speed from a point in the race to the finish, measured as a percentage of its own average speed for the whole race — not the field's.

So 100% means that closing run matched the horse's own race average; above 100% it was travelling faster than its own average, below it was slowing. Whether the finishing speed was actually good is judged against the race's par — a ground-adjusted benchmark shown above each column that varies by section, typically falling into the high 90s by the line as horses naturally slow. A horse can read below 100% yet still beat par. Available with a Proform Premium subscription plus the TPD Sectionals Add-On.

Full of Running Premium

A flag for a beaten horse that crossed the line with clear energy in reserve: a top-2 run-out speed in the field and a faster-than-par finish.

Run-out speed is measured two seconds after the line. Beaten horses with this profile never had a hard race — historically they win about 16% of the time next start against a 10% baseline for all other beaten horses. Flagged runs show as a "FoR LTO" badge on racecards and a chip on the horse's profile until the horse runs again. Available with Proform Premium plus the TPD Sectionals Add-On.

Future Form Score RaceMetrics

A 0–100 score of how well a runner's recent races have worked out since — whether the horses it met have gone on to win or run well.

A lens on hidden quality a bare finishing position can't show: strong opposition franks the form even when the horse finished midfield. Roughly 8% of runners have too few recent races to score and are flagged as unscoreable rather than given a misleading zero. Best read alongside the Collateral Score, which measures the related question through shared opponents.

Gate Speed Score Premium

A 0–100 percentile of how quickly a horse breaks from the stalls, measured from its times to reach 10mph.

Built from tracking data over the horse's last five measured runs (a score of 100 = the fastest starters in training). Fast-gate horses reach the front two early roughly twice as often as slow-gate horses, so the score feeds the Predicted Running Styles model and appears as the "Gate" column on racecards. Available with a Proform Premium subscription plus the TPD Sectionals Add-On.

Goal Seek Premium

System Builder tool that finds the single best rule to add to a betting system for a chosen target.

Pick a target — A/E, Betfair SP ROI, win strike rate or profit per run — and Goal Seek scans the system's breakdown dimensions for the one rule that would lift that target the most. Every suggestion is significance-checked (chi-squared) so a fluke line from a small sample is not promoted as an improvement, and each carries a one-click robustness check against the last 12 months. Apply a rule and re-run to find the next improvement on the now-tighter system. Adding rules shrinks the sample, so the guidance is one or two strong suggestions rather than ten weak ones. Requires a Proform Premium subscription.

Going

The firmness of the racing surface, scaled from Hard (driest) through to Heavy (wettest).

Turf scale: Hard, Firm, Good to Firm, Good, Good to Soft, Soft, Heavy. All-Weather uses Standard or Slow. The going strongly affects horses' performance and is one of the primary pattern-matching conditions on RaceMetrics. Some courses publish "official going" (pre-race) and "actual going" (post-race) — Proform Premium users can toggle Form Expert to use the actual going for more accurate historical analysis.

Going Adjustment (GA) RaceMetrics

The actual going derived after racing from the day's race times — how the ground really rode, as distinct from how it was described before racing.

The official going description is set before racing and never corrected, however the ground actually rode; the times-derived actual going is the honest record of the conditions each run really happened under — and the two disagree in roughly half of British turf races. Premium users can switch Form Expert to analyse a horse's history against actual going instead of official for exactly this reason.

Going Predictor (DiffPerMile) RaceMetrics

A forecast of how much slower or faster a mile is likely to be run in the day's conditions versus a good-ground baseline.

The forward-looking companion to the Going Adjustment: where GA records how the ground actually rode after the event, DiffPerMile estimates what today's surface is likely to do to the clock before it. Useful alongside the Weather Centre when conditions are changing through a card.

Handicap

A race in which horses carry different weights based on their Official Rating, designed to equalise winning chances.

Higher-rated horses carry more weight; lower-rated horses carry less. The BHA handicapper assigns ratings based on performance. RaceMetrics' filters distinguish handicaps from non-handicaps in every analysis, because the betting dynamics and form patterns are very different.

Handicap Analysis (Hot/Soft Index) Premium

A 0–10 composite score of how competitive a handicap is likely to be, built from the field's Official Rating spread, exposure, speed-figure form density and long-handicap runner count.

A Hot reading describes a tightly bunched field where small edges matter and outsiders are live; a Soft one, a race with one or two standouts. The SF Frame and SF All views compare a runner's recent speed figures against its full history — a recent spike against a weak career record deserves more scepticism than the same figures backed by a consistently strong one.

Hard-Luck Finder Premium

An automated flag for runs where a horse's sectional and in-running data say it was significantly hampered by circumstance — blocked, checked, denied a run — rather than beaten on merit.

Horses carrying a genuine hard-luck story have historically won next time at around 19% against an 11% baseline, with a next-time ROI edge of roughly 3–4% — a rare case where the finishing position materially understates the performance, and the market tends to under-rate it for the same reason. The strongest cases pair the flag with corroborating sectional evidence such as a high MaxU or a beaten-favourite line. Requires Proform Premium or RaceMetrics Pro with the Sectionals add-on.

Headgear

Equipment fitted to a horse's head, typically to aid concentration or steering.

Common types: Blinkers (B), Visor (V), Cheekpieces (P), Hood (H), Tongue Tie (T), Eyeshield (E). In At-a-Glance and racecard views, a "1" indicator shown in bold marks the first time that equipment is fitted — often a strong angle when paired with a new trainer or returning from a break.

HHI (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index) RaceMetrics

A measure of race predictability borrowed from economics, where it measures market concentration.

Each runner's odds are converted to implied probabilities, normalised to remove the overround (bookmaker margin), and the squares of each probability are summed. RaceMetrics displays an HHI band on every race: Wide Open (under 0.15) — very competitive, no clear favourite; Competitive (0.15-0.25); Moderate (0.25-0.40) — market has clear preferences; Concentrated (0.40-0.60) — strong favourite present; Dominant (over 0.60) — heavy favourite, very predictable race.

Horse Rating (H) RaceMetrics

A horse's own RaceMetrics rating, shown standalone in the H column.

1500 is average, 1550+ strong, 1600+ elite. Updated after every race. Crucially, the H rating is not included in the Combined Score calculation — the Combined Score is the weighted average of the six connection ratings only.

HP Dots (High Performer) RaceMetrics

Six dots representing the six connection ratings — each filled gold if that connection is rated 1550 or higher.

A horse with 5-6 filled dots has elite connections across the board. A horse with 0 filled dots has below-average connections. Shown on every racecard and A-Z runners view as a quick visual quality check.

Hurdle

National Hunt race over hurdles — smaller, flexible obstacles versus the larger fences in chases.

Race type 4 in RaceMetrics. Hurdle distances typically range from 2 miles to 3 miles 1 furlong.

Impact Value (IV)

Actual wins divided by expected wins, given field sizes — a measure of how much a participant outperforms random chance.

1.0x = average (random chance); 1.5x = good (wins 50% more often than expected); 2.0x = strong (wins twice as often); 3.0x+ = exceptional. RaceMetrics' What Wins tool ranks profitable angles by IV across 11 filter combinations.

In-Running (IR)

Betting that takes place while the race is underway.

Prices change second-by-second based on positions and how horses are travelling. RaceMetrics records each run's In-Running High and In-Running Low — the highest and lowest Betfair prices matched during the race — plus the percentage each sits above or below Betfair SP. A horse that traded 90%+ below its BSP in-running usually came very close to winning; one whose low never dipped below BSP was never travelling like a winner.

These fields appear on horse form lines (via the Columns chooser) and in the System Builder's filters, breakdowns and run listings for RaceMetrics Pro / Proform Premium subscribers. Ask RaceMetrics also includes In-Running price-pattern recipes for analysing trading angles.

ISP (Industry Starting Price)

The official Starting Price published by traditional bookmakers, derived from on-course prices at the off.

Used for level-stakes P/L on RaceMetrics. Differs from BSP (Betfair's exchange SP), which is typically higher because there is no bookmaker margin built in.

Jockey Claim

A weight allowance — typically 3lb, 5lb or 7lb — for inexperienced jockeys (apprentices on the flat, conditional jockeys over jumps).

Shown next to the jockey name on racecards as a number in brackets (e.g. "J. Smith (3)" = 3lb claim). The horse carries less weight as a result, which can be a meaningful edge in tight handicaps.

Laytown

An Irish racecourse on a sandy beach in County Meath — the only beach racing in Europe under official rules.

One meeting per year, typically in September. Treated as its own surface ("Laytown") in RaceMetrics' pattern engine, distinct from Polytrack and Tapeta.

Maiden

A horse that has never won a race, or a race restricted to such horses.

Common entry-level races for two- and three-year-olds. A "maiden auction" is a maiden race restricted to horses bought below a certain price at auction as yearlings.

MaxU (Maximum Upgrade) Premium

The most pounds a horse could have found by running any of the last four sections more efficiently — performance left on the table by how the race unfolded.

A high MaxU means the run was worth more than the result: the horse went too hard early, was checked, or delivered its effort at the wrong moment — all forms of pace inefficiency, not only traffic trouble. The after-upgrade companions translate it into pounds and lengths behind the winner, and a theoretical finishing position, with that efficiency recovered. Requires Proform Premium or RaceMetrics Pro with the Sectionals add-on.

MOR (Median Official Rating)

The median Official Rating of a race's declared field.

Class depth at a glance: two Class 4 handicaps can be very different races, and MOR shows it instantly. On historic form lines it tells you whether a horse's rating that day sat above, at or below the field it met — essential context before trusting a bare finishing position from an unfamiliar race.

Morning Price

A bookmaker price published in the morning of race day, after the breakfast lay-out.

One of three price columns on RaceMetrics' racecards: Evening (previous night), Breakfast (early morning), Morning (just before the race). Movements between these three prices reveal market confidence and "steamer" patterns.

My Ratings

A RaceMetrics feature letting Proform Premium members define their own weight-adjusted handicap ratings, computed automatically for every runner in every race.

The member chooses a pounds-per-length scale (by race type, going and distance); each performance is then rated from the class par, the weight carried relative to the winner, and the beaten distance converted to pounds on that scale, with official weight-for-age applied. Ratings cover the member's whole recent history on activation and update with every new result, appearing as a sortable "My" column on racecards — a single provisional figure before the off, and on a settled race both figures together (what the scale had the horse on going in, then what it earned), so the pre-race opinion is never mistaken for the hindsight one. Traditional versions of this calculation must be done by hand one race at a time; My Ratings applies one consistent anchoring rule so figures are comparable across courses, classes and seasons, on the same scale as the official BHA mark.

Each run carries two figures: the rating earned in the race (worked out from the result — useful for studying how a scale behaves, but hindsight) and the pre-race figure, the horse's best from its last three rated runs, which is what the racecard shows before the off. Both are available in the System Builder, and only the pre-race pair can honestly be back-tested as a selection method.

NHF (National Hunt Flat)

A flat race on a National Hunt card — for jumps-bred horses with no obstacles.

Race type 5 on RaceMetrics. Also called a "bumper". See Bumper.

Non-Runner (NR)

A horse that has been declared but withdrawn before the race.

RaceMetrics publishes a daily Non-Runners page grouped by course with real-time notifications. Common reasons: ground change (declared on Good, raced on Heavy), unsuitable conditions, vet's certificate.

Official Rating (OR)

The handicap rating assigned to each horse by the BHA handicapper.

The primary scale used to allocate weights in handicap races. A horse rated 80 carries 8lb more than a horse rated 72 in the same handicap. Ratings are reassessed after every race based on performance against expectations. RaceMetrics shows the current OR alongside its own H rating for direct comparison.

Overexposure % Premium

A horse's career run count compared with the average career runs of its rivals in today's race — 100 is exactly average, above 100 more exposed, below 100 relatively unexposed.

The quick way to find the unexposed, potentially progressive type in a field of veterans — or to flag that a well-rated horse has had far more chances to show its hand than today's rivals, so its figures are less likely to be concealing improvement.

Overround

The bookmaker's profit margin built into a market — the amount by which all implied probabilities sum to more than 100%.

A 110% market has 10% overround. Bigger fields and lower-grade races usually carry higher overrounds. RaceMetrics removes the overround when calculating HHI by normalising probabilities to sum to exactly 100%.

Owner

The registered owner of a racehorse.

Owners pay training fees, entry fees and other costs. RaceMetrics tracks owners as one of the seven connection types — top owners (Godolphin, Coolmore, JP McManus) tend to have strong rating profiles because of the quality of horses they buy.

Pace Curve Premium

A section-by-section plot of speed across the whole race — the full shape that single sectional numbers each summarise one feature of.

Where FSP%, MaxU and run-out speed compress the story into a figure, the curve shows the entire run in one image: an even gallop, a slow-fast sprint finish, a fast-slow fade, or anything between. Requires Proform Premium or RaceMetrics Pro with the Sectionals add-on.

Pace Forecast RaceMetrics

A pre-race prediction of how hotly a race will be run — Strong, Moderate or Slow — aggregated from every runner's predicted running style.

Strong favours closers as the leaders burn each other out; Slow favours a front-runner dictating an uncontested gallop. The professional read is never one horse's style in isolation but its style set against the whole field's forecast: a lone front-runner in a Slow-forecast race holds one of the most reliable pace advantages there is.

Pace (Running Style)

A horse's preferred running style — front-runner, prominent, stalker, mid-division, closer, or held-up.

RaceMetrics' Predicted Running Styles (Proform Premium) analyses up to 10 prior races with decay weighting to forecast how a horse will be ridden — showing predicted style, historical runs count, early position average and late position average.

Pattern RaceMetrics

A saved set of conditions (e.g. "Trainer X + Soft going + Class 4 handicaps") that triggers an alert when a runner matches.

Patterns are created from profile pages when you identify a profitable angle. Each pattern captures active filters: specific participant, course/type, distance range, class/type, going conditions, price range. Tier limits: Free 5, Basic 10, Standard 50, Expert 250, Enterprise 1,000.

Penalty

Extra weight added to a horse for recent eligible wins, on top of its handicap rating.

Usually 3lb-7lb in handicaps; common in conditions races (e.g. "5lb penalty for winners of a Group 3 in the last six months"). Shown on the racecard as a Penalty flag.

Place

A finishing position that pays out under each-way terms — typically 1st, 2nd or 3rd, expanding to 4th in large handicaps.

Contextual definition on RaceMetrics: top 2 for 5-7 runners, top 3 for 8-15, top 4 for 16+. Used as a Show Mode in Form Expert (Win, Win & Place, PRB).

Polytrack

A synthetic racing surface used at Kempton, Lingfield, Chelmsford City and Dundalk.

Wax-coated silica sand. Going is described as Standard or Slow. Distinct from Tapeta in how horses perform — many horses have a clear preference for one synthetic surface over the other.

PRB (Percentage of Rivals Beaten) RaceMetrics

The proportion of opponents a horse finishes ahead of, calculated as (field_size − finishing_position) / (field_size − 1) × 100.

A horse finishing 3rd of 10 has a PRB of (10−3)/9 = 77.8%. PRB is a more granular alternative to win/place strike rates: a horse that consistently runs in the top half of fields will show a high PRB even with few outright wins. Non-finishers (Fell, Pulled Up, etc.) score 0%. Used as a Show Mode in Form Expert.

PRC Average (Proform Race Class) Premium

A class rating measuring the calibre of races a horse has been competing in, averaged over its recent form.

The company kept, versus the Official Rating's weight assigned: two horses with identical marks can have earned them against very different standards of opposition, and PRC Average separates those cases.

Predicted Running Styles Premium

Every runner in an upcoming race classified Front Runner, Prominent, Mid-Division or Held Up from its sectional history.

Analyses up to the last 10 races with sectional data using decay weighting (recent runs count more), anchored strictly to races run before the race being viewed, with non-runners excluded. Shows the predicted style plus early and late position averages.

Price Ratio Premium

A runner's decimal odds divided by the race's field size — market confidence normalised across field sizes.

6/1 in a 6-runner race and 6/1 in a 20-runner field are very different statements; Price Ratio puts both on the same footing, making it a fairer basis than raw odds for finding genuinely well-backed runners in the System Builder.

Profit/Loss (P/L)

Theoretical profit or loss to £1 level stakes at Betfair Starting Price (BSP).

A standardised value measure that removes the subjectivity of which bookmaker price to use. RaceMetrics displays Win P/L, Place P/L, ROI and average Win BSP on every profile. The RaceMetrics Tips dashboard tracks six staking methods: BF Win, ISP, BF Place, Evening, Breakfast BOG and Morning BOG.

Proform Ratings (Power, Tissue, Pace, PFR) Premium

The legacy Proform rating family — four distinct reads on ability and likely run shape, each available in the System Builder with the Value / Rank / Clear-by trio.

Independent measures built on different logic from the RaceMetrics Rating engine, which is exactly their value: a horse rated highly on several of these and on Combined Score is convergent evidence across genuinely different methodologies. The Ratings Analysis tool exists to combine them properly.

RaceMetrics Rating RaceMetrics

A proprietary Elo-style performance rating updated after every race, tracking form over time for all seven connection types.

1500 is the average baseline; 1550+ indicates a consistent above-average performer; 1600+ is elite. Ratings are recalculated based on finishing position relative to expectations, quality of opposition, and race conditions. See how ratings work.

RaceMetrics Rankings RaceMetrics

The free public league tables of British and Irish racing — who is the highest-rated horse, trainer, jockey and sire right now.

Published at racemetrics.co.uk/rankings with no login required: the top 25 in each category by RaceMetrics Rating, plus the twelve biggest risers of the last seven days, updated daily from official results. Only active participants are ranked — at least three rated runs and a run within the last twelve months — so the tables describe racing as it is today rather than filling up with retired champions.

Ratings Analysis Premium

A tool that standardises up to twelve rating types onto a common z-score scale and combines them into one composite figure.

Raw ratings on different scales can't be averaged meaningfully; z-score normalisation converts each to standard-deviations-from-its-own-average first, which makes a fair composite possible. Snapshots are point-in-time from 2023, so back-tests use what was knowable before each race.

RMP (RaceMetrics Model Price) RaceMetrics

A fair price for every runner, struck by the RaceMetrics model each morning before the market moves, as a 100% book with no bookmaker margin.

Available to RM Pro and Proform Premium members on racecards, At-a-Glance, Form Expert, My Card and A-Z Runners, with a one-line RMP View from the model on each runner. After a non-runner the remaining prices are re-based so the book sums to 100% again and the rank adjusts; a display margin can be added in preferences. RMP is an opinion to test rather than a tip — in its forward test it predicts the closing market about as well as the evening show.

Random Win %

The probability of picking the winner by selecting one runner at random — simply 1 divided by field size.

Used as the baseline against which Combined Score and Impact Value are measured. A statement like "the highest Combined Score wins 2.15× random" means it wins 2.15 times more often than chance would predict given the field sizes.

RM7 (RaceMetrics 7) RaceMetrics

A free weekly skill-based competition where users pick seven participants within a 10,500-point budget.

Open to all registered users (no purchase or subscription required). Tuesday to Sunday. Cash prizes: 1st £25, 2nd £15, 3rd £10. Score = total rating change across the seven picks. Cross-contamination rule: cannot pick a horse and any of its direct connections (trainer, sire, dam, damsire, or owner) to prevent one runner counting multiple times.

RM Tip RaceMetrics

A daily horse selection from RaceMetrics' proprietary tipping model, published each morning around 7:45am.

Marked with an amber "RM Tip" badge on racecards. Available to Basic subscribers and above; free-tier users see the performance dashboard but the picks are blurred. Performance dashboard (visible to all users) tracks six staking methods including BF Win, ISP, BF Place, Evening, Breakfast BOG and Morning BOG.

Robustness / Holdout Testing Premium

Validation that checks whether an angle's performance holds up on data it wasn't built on — a time-based holdout and a random-split test run side by side.

Any search process given enough combinations will eventually find one that fits the past brilliantly; that is a near-certainty, not evidence of skill. The time split catches angles that stopped working as conditions changed; the random split catches sample-specific noise — and the two fail independently, which is why passing both matters. It belongs immediately after Goal Seek or Auto-build, every time.

ROI Sig (ROI Significance) Premium

A second, separate luck test — on the money rather than the win count Chi checks.

Profit bounces around far more than a win tally, because one big-priced winner moves it more than any loser can — so this test asks whether the observed ROI is large enough, given that variance, to be believed. "n.s." means it could easily be luck; 95%/99% mean probably real. A sound system should eventually clear both Chi and ROI Sig; which one fails is itself diagnostic.

ROS (Run-Out Speed) Premium

A horse's speed measured two seconds after crossing the finishing line, in mph.

A horse still travelling quickly after the line never emptied — the raw signal behind the Full of Running flag, and a pointer either to follow the horse next time or to try it over further. Requires Proform Premium or RaceMetrics Pro with the Sectionals add-on.

RPR (Racing Post Rating)

Racing Post's proprietary post-race performance figure.

Assigned to each runner after a race based on the result, the weight carried, the time relative to standard, the going, and the strength of the field. Top horses typically rate 130-180+ on RPR, versus 1600+ on RaceMetrics' 1500-anchored scale and 100-140+ on the BHA's Official Rating. Widely cited in UK form study but not numerically comparable to other rating systems — each uses a different scale and methodology.

Sectionals Premium

Split-time and positional data captured during a race, broken down by furlong.

Includes section times, finishing speed (FSP%), positions gained or lost, top speed (mph), stride length and frequency. Requires a Proform Premium subscription plus the TPD Sectionals Add-On. Available on RaceMetrics with 13 analysis tabs.

Sire

A horse's male parent (father).

The most-studied bloodline connection — sires shape stamina, surface preference, jumping aptitude and class ceiling. RaceMetrics rates sires by the cumulative performance of their progeny.

SP Rank, BSP Rank & Fav Status

A runner's position in the market ranked by price — 1st favourite, 2nd favourite and so on — and its category: Favourite, Joint Favourite, 2nd Favourite, Joint 2nd Favourite, or neither.

Post-race research fields, since SP isn't known before the off — the honest pre-race equivalents are the evening, breakfast and morning price ranks, which the System Builder carries live for qualifiers.

SP (Starting Price)

The official price of a horse at the moment the race begins.

Calculated from on-course bookmakers (ISP) or the Betfair exchange (BSP). The reference price for P/L calculations because it is the only universally-published, post-hoc verifiable price.

Speed Rating (SR)

A figure derived from a horse's time in a race relative to par, adjusted for conditions.

RaceMetrics surfaces Proform's Speed Rating in inline form lines and the At-a-Glance view (TS column shows the highest SR in the last year). Different from RaceMetrics' own form rating, which weights opposition and class rather than raw time.

Stall Impact Values Premium

A live, meeting-level view of how each stall has actually performed on the day — green at IV 1.30 or above, red at 0.70 or below, after a minimum of five qualifying races.

The real-time complement to historical Draw IV: rails move and ground changes within a single card, so the bias that held historically may not be the one playing out today. Treat a verdict built on exactly five races as provisional and firm up as the card unfolds.

Stats Rating Premium

A composite Proform rating with four components — trainer, jockey, trainer-jockey pairing and horse — each filterable independently.

Splitting the composite lets you diagnose why it is high or low: a figure driven by the trainer-jockey component says something different about the horse's own prospects than one driven by the horse component.

Stride Length & Cadence (ASL / ASF) Premium

Biomechanical measures from tracking data: average stride length in feet, and cadence — stride frequency in strides per second.

The two trade off against each other: a horse goes faster by lengthening its stride, quickening its cadence, or both. A long, ground-covering stride points to a horse suited by further; a high cadence marks the sprint profile. Coverage note: stride data ran on ARC courses only until May 2026, when RMG courses were added. Requires Proform Premium or RaceMetrics Pro with the Sectionals add-on.

Surface

The racing surface — Turf, Polytrack, Tapeta, or Laytown (beach sand).

Derived from race type and course on RaceMetrics. Surface preference is one of the strongest individual horse characteristics — many horses are clear specialists on one surface and underperform on others.

System Builder Premium

Betting-system back-tester rebuilt from Proform's professional desktop software.

Define a system from 90 filters — race conditions, horse attributes (including course/distance-winner and beaten-favourite career counts), ratings (by value or rank within the race), market, connections and last-time-out form — starting from 25 one-click template angles if you wish, with a live count of matching runs as you build. Back-tests cover every UK and Irish result since 2018 and return a full report in one pass: P/L and ROI at Industry SP and Betfair SP, Impact Value, A/E and chi-squared significance, an equity curve, longest winning/losing streaks with maximum drawdown, and 209 breakdown dimensions with CSV export. The Grid view breaks a system down by two dimensions at once — every trainer down the side against race class across the top, for instance — with the cell figure selectable and a minimum-runs floor so thin samples are greyed rather than read as results. A Holdout Check re-tests the final 12 months separately, and saved systems track their real record since the day they were saved. The Qualifiers view then applies the system's pre-race conditions to today's or tomorrow's declared runners. Requires a Proform Premium subscription.

Tapeta

A synthetic racing surface used at Newcastle, Southwell and Wolverhampton.

Sand-rubber-wax composite, distinct from Polytrack. Going described as Standard or Slow. Wolverhampton switched from Polytrack to Tapeta in 2014.

Topspeed (TS)

A horse's highest Proform speed rating recorded in the last 12 months.

Shown in the At-a-Glance view and inline form lines on RaceMetrics. A raw-time-based measure that complements the class-and-opposition-weighted RaceMetrics rating — the two tell different stories about a horse's form.

Trainer

The licensed individual responsible for preparing a horse to race.

One of the seven connection types tracked by RaceMetrics. Trainer form is highly cyclical — RaceMetrics' Biggest Movers leaderboards track 7-, 14-, 28-, 56- and 90-day form changes.

Trainer Form (Hot Trainer)

How well a trainer's yard is performing over a recent window — typically the last 14 days.

Stable form comes in waves, driven by yard health, seasonal targets and campaign planning, so a "hot trainer" — one winning well above their normal strike rate — is a widely used positive signal. RaceMetrics publishes a free daily Trainers in Form table (14-day and 7-day windows with strike rates, level-stakes P/L and today's runners), and the System Builder offers trainer 14-day and 28-day form filters for back-testing.

Trim Premium

System Builder tool that re-tests a system with each rule removed and says which rules to drop, loosen, keep or bin as redundant.

The mirror image of Goal Seek: instead of suggesting rules to add, Trim takes each rule already in the system, re-runs the back-test with that rule removed, and reports what it is really contributing. Four verdicts — Drop (the runners it excludes actually carry an edge, so removing it improves your target), Loosen (it barely moves the target, so it is a volume lever you can relax), Keep (load-bearing; removing it genuinely weakens the target), and Redundant (it excludes nothing your other rules do not already). Cutting a rule marked Drop and re-running often produces a leaner system that makes more from more bets, with a bigger sample behind every figure. Each suggestion carries a one-click robustness check against the last 12 months. Requires a Proform Premium subscription.

Trip Predictor & Best Fits RaceMetrics

Distance-suitability analysis producing a Bayesian-shrunk rating estimate per distance bucket, the projected rating change at that trip, and a Confidence grade.

A best figure from one or two runs at a trip is not fully trustworthy, so the estimate is shrunk back toward the horse's career average (a k=4 prior) — the Confidence grade says how much shrinkage was needed. A big projected gain on Low confidence is a hypothesis to watch; on High confidence it is accumulated evidence. Best Fits' Match Detail shows exactly which past runs drove a recommendation. Enterprise tier.

TTR (Time To Reach 5–30mph) Premium

The time from leaving the stalls to reaching each reference speed — 5, 10, 20, 25 and 30 mph — a fine-grained measure of gate speed.

Early speed wins track position, especially in sprints with a draw bias, where gate speed is the mechanism that converts a good stall into an actual advantage. The sectional counterpart to the Gate Speed Score. Requires Proform Premium or RaceMetrics Pro with the Sectionals add-on.

Turf

Natural grass — the surface of all UK Flat and National Hunt racing other than All-Weather.

Going scaled Hard to Heavy depending on rainfall and watering. Race types 1 (Flat), 3 (Chase), 4 (Hurdle) and 5 (NHF) all run on turf in RaceMetrics' classification.

VST (Value Stakes) Premium

A staking method sizing every bet so a winner returns exactly +1 point, rather than a flat point on every runner.

If level stakes profit and VST doesn't, a handful of big-priced winners are carrying the whole record — a fragility worth knowing before trusting the headline figure. Both profiting together is the more robust pattern.

WAX (Winners Above Expected) Premium

Actual winners minus the winners the market's prices implied — the absolute-count companion to A/E's ratio.

Where A/E gives the rate at which a sample beat the market, WAX gives the volume: a striking A/E with a tiny WAX is a warning that very few actual winners are behind the ratio. Shown in the System Builder summary alongside A/E and Chi.

What Wins (Pattern Discovery) RaceMetrics

Pattern discovery tool that finds profitable betting angles by analysing Impact Value across 11 filter combinations.

For any participant (horse, trainer, jockey, sire, dam, damsire, owner), it ranks combinations of Going, Class, Course, Distance and Field Size by IV. Click any pattern to apply it to Form Expert with the participant type and conditions auto-set. Available on Basic tier and above.

Win% / Place% RaceMetrics

RaceMetrics' own estimated win and place probability for each runner, derived from its Combined Score.

Win% maps the score through the platform's historical win-rate tiers; Place% uses a Harville approximation adjusted for each-way place terms, showing a dash where no place terms apply. The Excl toggle removes a doubtful runner and recalculates the whole field — the cleanest way to reassess a race after a suspected non-runner. Always weigh it against the market's own implied probability before treating it as an edge: a high Win% and a short price can both be true.