There are 3 small badges that can appear immediately to the right of a horse’s name on our racecards. They are easy to scroll straight past, and every one of them opens a full card when you hover it.
They are the 3 places where we put analysis where the horse is, rather than in a column somewhere off to the right. Here is what each one is, and what is underneath it.
1. Headgear: the letters, and who it actually works for
A short code sits after the name for whatever the horse is wearing. t is a tongue strap, p cheek pieces, b blinkers, h a hood, v a visor, and they combine, so tp is a tongue strap and cheek pieces together.
The important part is the little number after the code. A superscript 1 means first time in that gear, 2 means second time. When you see one of those, hover it.
You get 3 records: the trainer, the jockey and the sire, each with that exact combination at that exact point in the sequence, and each measured against their own strike rate over all their runs. That last column is the one that matters, because it tells you whether the gear is adding anything or whether you are just looking at a good yard being good.
In that example the trainer is slightly below his own baseline and the jockey slightly above, which is noise. The sire, Muhaarar, is 9 from 28 first time in that combination against 11.9% over all his runners. That is a 20 point swing, and it is the sort of thing you would never find by eye.
The sire row is the one we think is genuinely new. Headgear gets fitted to fix a problem, and a lot of those problems are inherited: if a stallion throws stock that do not fill their lungs, a tongue strap will keep working on them. We wrote about that at length in our piece on the headgear numbers, including the finding that first time headgear is a mildly negative signal on average, which is the opposite of the received wisdom.
2. Your previous pick: how your own picks run next time out
If you have played our NAP Competition and you picked this horse before, a small NAP, NB or 3B badge appears next to its name so you know you have been here before.
The hover does 2 things. The header reminds you what the pick was and how it finished, with the date. Then it shows you something about yourself: how your own picks of that type perform on their next run, split by whether the pick won or lost on the day.
That split is the useful bit. It answers a question most punters never get to ask: when one of my selections gets beaten, is it worth following it next time, or am I chasing? The figures are a strike rate over every qualifying run and a profit or loss to level stakes at Exchange SP, and the horse you are looking at is tagged so you can see which half of your own book it sits in.
Each badge shows only its own type. A NAP badge shows your NAP record, an NB badge your NB record, and so on.
3. BF: beaten favourite last time out
A BF badge means the horse was sent off favourite on its last start and did not win. Fallers and pulled-up count, and the card tells you that is what happened rather than showing a blank.
Plenty of racecards will show you the flag. On its own it is close to useless, because 2 horses can carry the same badge for opposite reasons: one was hampered and stayed on, the other travelled like a winner and found nothing.
So the hover gives you 3 things instead. What price it was, where and when, and how it actually finished. Then the trainer’s record next time out after a beaten favourite, measured against 2 baselines: their own all-runs rate, and the figure every yard manages at this angle, which is 17.7%. That population number is the honest yardstick, because nearly every trainer beats their own baseline here for the simple reason that the horse was favourite for a reason.
Underneath that sit the money columns: profit or loss to level stakes at Exchange SP, and A/E, which measures actual winners against the winners the prices implied. Across the whole population A/E comes out at 1.00, so as a blanket angle the flag is priced almost exactly right. All the value is in working out which yards beat it. We went through that in full in our piece on beaten favourite records.
Why these are hovers and not columns
Every one of these could have been another column. We did not do that on purpose. A racecard is already dense, and most of this detail matters for 2 or 3 horses in a race rather than all of them. Putting a badge where your eye already is, and the argument one hover away, means you get the depth without paying for it in width every single race.
The same thinking is behind the other hovers on the card: the Run Details card on any R figure, the stats breakdown behind every strike rate, the gelded and trainer switch lamps, and the weight carried record.
Go and try them
All 3 are on the racecard right now. The first race of every day is free to everybody, logged out included, so you can open today’s card and hover them without an account.
The previous-pick badge is the one exception, for the obvious reason that it needs picks to work from. Enter the NAP Competition, which is free on every membership, and it starts building your own book from your first entry.