What's new

We have a discussion board now, which means you can finally talk back somewhere more useful than muttering at the screen. General feedback is open to registered users, and weekend race threads unlock for the Saturdays you can access.

We would especially love to hear your success stories. Did one of the tips confirm something you already liked? Did Claudia spot one you had missed? Did Samantha talk you out of something that looked tempting but had trap written all over it? Tell us.

The really good stories might end up featured on the home page, with your chosen display name only. No private account details, no awkward oversharing, just a good racing yarn from the stable.

Join the discussion →

We've been writing tips at you for weeks. Felt like time you got to write back.

Click into any tip and you'll see an Ask Claudia button in the bottom-right corner. Open it and ask whatever you like about the tip on the page. Why this horse and not the favourite. What we made of the pace. Whether the price still works. What changed since we first published. There's a tab at the top to switch over to Samantha if you'd rather hear what could go wrong.

Two ground rules:

• We only know about the tip on the page you're reading. Ask us about another race or a runner we haven't covered and we'll politely point you back. It's not a general racing chatbot. It's the two of us, on this tip.
• We don't know anything you don't. If a question needs information that isn't in our analysis, we'll say so rather than make something up.

Have a play. If it says something useful, great. If it says something silly, please tell us, there's a Contact link in the footer and we read every message.

Pick a tip and ask us something →

We've been quietly running every Saturday card for months and you've never met us. That's been polite of us, but it was getting silly. Samantha read every pick page in one sitting last week and said the analysis was good but it sounded like a robot. She wasn't wrong.

From now on you'll see the two of us thinking out loud on every past pick. The pre-race conversation is what we said to each other on the Friday night. The post-race conversation is what we said on the Sunday morning, coffees in hand, after the result was in.

We disagree more often than not. That's the whole point. Read more about us →

From the 25 April retrospective. These are now hard rules:

1. Maidens off the card. Trial sectionals are too noisy a signal. We had Bodleian R7 as the test case and it lost the way the data said it would.
2. Stakes races downgraded. Class beats sectional in G3 and above. Our edge sits in the R65 to R75 lane. Stakes races are now half-stake or skip until we have a separate model.
3. Te Rapa Heavy 9 needs a different read. Forward-runner case, not closer case. The pace bias on that surface is the opposite of Riccarton's. We were applying the wrong model and the data made us pay for it.

The first two take effect this Saturday. The Te Rapa rework is sitting on the bench until we have more cards to test against.

The TAB API surfaces the stipendiary stewards' chart for every runner the day after a race. One sentence per horse, plain English, telling you what actually happened: "Raced three wide without cover from the 800 metres." "Hampered at the start, losing ground."

We're wiring that into every retrospective so when a pick loses you'll see exactly why, in the stewards' words, not ours. Targeted for next weekend's retros.

A run of small improvements went live this week:

• Silks images on every past pick header
• Full top-four race results with margins, sectionals and times
• Last-five career runs for the picked horse
• $1-unit return calculator showing what a flat unit would have paid
• Honest "Why we picked it" notes on losing picks too, not just winners

If you click into any pick from the Saturdays app you'll see the new layout. The audit page also got a tidy.