Create Your Own Horse Racing Competition: How It Works

You can run your own competition on RatingTheRaces. Your rules, your players, your leaderboard, scored off our data every day without you having to touch a spreadsheet.

It takes about a minute to set up and it is open to everyone, Free members included. This is how it works, and at the bottom there is something we would genuinely like you to do if the rules you want are not there yet.

Where to find it

Go to the Leaderboards and open the Member Comps tab. The button is right there.

Choose how picks work

This is the decision that shapes everything else. There are 3 formats.

1. Use our NAP Competition picks. Your players carry on entering the main NAP Competition as normal, and their NAP, Next Best and 3rd Best score in your league too. Nobody has to do anything twice. Worth knowing: scoring is per pick, so if your league is Goodwood only, only the picks made at Goodwood count, and a player can have 1 of their 3 selections score.
2. Own picks. Players make selections just for your competition, separate from the main one, under rules you set.
3. Meeting or festival points. Players pick in every race at the meeting and score points for a winner or a placed horse. This is the one for Cheltenham, Aintree, Royal Ascot or a single Saturday card.

Own picks: the rules you control

Pick this format and the form opens up. Every one of these is yours to set.

• Picks per day: 1, 2 or 3. A day's picks are all submitted together.
• Stakes: a stake per selection. A winner scores its stake times its price, a loser loses its stake, so a 3/1 winner staked at 20 scores +60. Leave them all at 1 for level stakes.
• Play days: tick the days that count. Saturdays only, or midweek only, or leave it blank for every day.
• Price: Industry SP, Exchange SP, the exchange price at the moment the pick is made, or the player's choice of the exchange price or XSP.
• Price cap: the most a winner can score. Put 20 for a 20/1 cap, or leave it empty for none.
• Picks close: before each selection's own race, or before the first race of the day.
• Non-runner: replaced by the favourite of the last race, replaced by the favourite of the non-runner's own race, void and scores 0, or counts as a loser.
• No pick made: given the favourite of the last race, given the favourite of the highest prize money race, scores 0, or counts as a loser. You can cap what a given favourite can score.
• Can players see each other's picks: only after they have submitted their own, or at any time.
• Notes: free text shown under the rules, which is where most people put the prize.

Meeting points: a festival league

The points format is simpler and suits a meeting. Players make 1 pick in every race, and you set what each finishing position is worth as a multiplier of the odds.

Winner times 10 means a 5/1 winner scores 50. Second times 3 means a 5/1 second scores 15. You can set a 4th place multiplier or leave it empty, cap the odds that count, and choose what happens to a non-runner.

Open or private, and the one thing you need

Open means we post it to your X account with the invite link, so people can find it and join, and players who join post the link too. Private means the link is never posted anywhere. We post that you have set up a league and ask people to DM you, and you send the link to whoever you want.

One thing to be clear about, because people get this the wrong way round. To run a competition you need a linked X account, because we announce it from your account rather than ours. Your players do not. Anyone with a free RatingTheRaces account can join, open or private. If your X account is not linked yet, we walk you through it when you submit.

You can be in 5 active competitions at once, whether you created them or joined them.

Prizes are yours, not ours

We should say this plainly. Member competitions are run by members. Any prize is arranged and paid by whoever created the competition. We provide the leaderboard and the scoring, and we are not responsible for prizes. Most people either play for nothing or sort a pot between themselves.

If the rule you want is not there, tell us

This is the part we actually want you to read.

Everything above exists because someone asked. The own picks format, the stakes, the play days, the non-runner and no-pick rules, the choice over who can see whose picks: none of that was in the first version. A member came to us wanting a Saturday-only league, 1 pick a day, level stakes at Industry SP, no cap, and a specific rule for what happens when someone forgets to pick. We did not have any of it. We built it, and now everybody has it.

So if you have a competition in your head that our settings cannot quite do, let us know. Tell us the rule, not the feature: what should score, what should happen on a non-runner, what a missing pick is worth, which days count. If it is sensible and we can score it from our data, there is a good chance we will build it and it will turn up as an option for everyone.

That is how the last 4 rounds of this feature happened.

Set one up

Open the Leaderboards, go to Member Comps and press Create A Competition. If you get stuck, the help centre is there, and you can always ask us.