My "Substack" ratings page
I've long liked using ratings. I like a benchmark from which to judge performance. I find some ratings builders unnecessarily confusing. Endless numbers, endless formula, all designed to create a confusing final number without any sense of how it's been built. What I've tried to produce here are ratings which are easier to read, more user-friendly and which still reflect the nuance of a race rather than just a simple ranking. Below is what each column does. The Rating column provides a basic assessment of a horse's recent best performance(s). This is the performance I estimate a horse could run to if everything goes well. Not everything will go well. So the next columns try to give a sense of whether everything might go well today . The Going/Distance/Course columns then tell you whether the horse has performed up to that level of performance in today's conditions. If it has, a Positive is put in the column. If it hasn't, a Negative is put in the column. If ...