New Gold Features: Open to all, Limited Time

It was my ‘bad’, as the kids say. I wrote the specification for Phase 7 of the Gold project, the latest upgrade of racecard features and reports. But I forgot to specify which levels of access should apply, and to whom.

In other words, I neglected to tell my techie chap to protect some of the content for Gold subscribers only. My techie chap is now working on his own project, and won’t be able to correct this until middle of next week. So, in the meantime, free registered users will have a couple of extra bits to play with. 🙂

What extra bits?

Well, the new parts largely split into three areas: a vastly improved results service, a meeting going override, and a form barometer called ‘Then What?’

Let’s have a look at each of them…

Meeting Going Override

It’s been hot. Really hot. Good to firm ground abounds. Then the skies open and a biblical thunderstorm soddens the turf. It happens, right? In fact, it happened last night in Hackney. There isn’t a racecourse in Hackney, however.

In Newmarket, where there are two (three if you include the Town Plate course – we won’t), there was some rain, but not enough to change the going. Let’s imagine it did.

Suppose that the going was advertised as ‘Good’, but that a huge cloudburst rendered it ‘Soft’. All that form study washed away. Well, not any more. Now, simply by changing the going dropdown on the main cards menu, a user will amend the going throughout the form tools to their revised selection. Let’s change Newmarket’s going from ‘Good’ to ‘Soft’.

As simple as that. Now, all other tools will display the results for soft ground form when looking at the going. So, the Instant Expert tab (formerly ‘Race Analysis) defaults to soft now. Selecting the ‘Going’ filter in Full Form Filters shows a horse’s performance on soft ground.

What this enables you to do is basically ‘cram’ your form study into a few minutes with the revised going information. Pretty cool, huh? (We think so!)

Improved Results Service

The results offering on geegeez.co.uk has historically been pretty rubbish, if truth be told. It was squirreled away with no link from the main menu and the content was basic for those with enough patience to look for it.

But we’ve changed that, dramatically. We now have a three part results service, consisting of today’s results summary, recent results, and a results search tool. And results are now linked to with a menu item, and a red button top right on the race cards pages.

The page defaults to today’s results and, when results have been received, they are published below the heading buttons.

But now you can look quickly at results for any day since January 1st, 2009, the first day of results in our database. For a result in the past fortnight, just click the ‘Recent Results’ button, and you’ll be greeted with a date list for the past fortnight.

Let’s say I wanted to look for a result last Saturday. I click on Saturday’s date, and hey presto! there they are. All of ’em in easy to read format, and each clickable to the full result.

Finally, if you’re interested in a result for a previous day, you can choose it from our calendar picker option. Just click ‘Results Search’ from the menu, and choose your date. In this example, I’ve chosen Grand National day, 2012, which was April 14th.

So far so good. We’ve got nice easy to access results going back as far as the start of 2009. But what if you want the full result detail? No problem. In fact, our full results now have ‘Then What?’, the second major new feature built in to them! As segues go, that’s not a bad one, so allow me to introduce you to ‘Then What?’

‘Then What?’ Form Barometer

You’re looking at the form of a maiden race, and there are three horses that all finished second in maidens last time out. How do you know which has the best form? Well, one way to establish whether that last race was any good, is ‘Then What?’

Here’s an example race from tonight, where I’ve used the ‘x’ icon to shortlist the race to the three horses mentioned above.

The right hand side of the recent form column is given over to showcasing how the horses from each form line have subsequently performed. Hence the name, ‘Then What?’.

We can see in this example that the two runners from Dreaming Beauty’s race were both unplaced; that just one of fifteen runners from Fallen In Love’s race won subsequently; and, that four of the twenty runs from Soviet Courage’s race were winning runs.

That is a little bit one dimensional, but it does offer a flavour of the relative merits of the various races. To get a better feel, we can click on the form line to see the full result. This has the same function as clicking a fast result from the results images in the first section above: both bring up a full result screen for the race in question.

Let’s take a look at Soviet Courage’s last run:

As well as the ‘normal’ full result detail, we can see at the end of each horse entry how they’ve fared in subsequent runs. So, in this example, the winner, My Target, has run twice since this race, placing once. Third placed Dance Of Heroes won his only subsequent start; and so on.

Also notice at the bottom of the result a summary box outlining the overall race performance – as per the ‘Then What?’ summary in the inline form, but with profit and loss for win and each way purposes appended.

The third and final manifestation of the ‘Then What?’ data is in a new report, called ‘Hot Form’. This is accessible from the sidebar menu throughout the site, and also from the report dropdown for Gold subscribers. Until we fix the ‘permissions’ issue, all registered subscribers – free or Gold – will be able to see this. So you’ve a few days to play around with it if you’re not a member!

It looks like this:

A couple of things to note…

The win and each way Profit/Loss will be added in the next couple of days and, as you can see, the columns are blank at the moment.

I’ve sorted the report by 30 days, to get a recent view of the form, and by number of runs (just click on a header to sort by that column). I’m then looking for the races with the best win percentage subsequently. The circled horses might be of mild interest (blue) and some interest (green), all other things (going, class, distance) being equal.

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So those are the main new elements. We’ve also made some tweaks, such as adding ‘equipment’ (blinkers, tongue tie, etc) to the cards.

But don’t forget about other aspects of geegeez, which are overlooked by many. We have two tipping services, one free to registered members, and one for Gold subscribers only.

The free one, Double Dutch, has had its ups and downs – like every other tipping service ever! – but is in a very healthy position overall. Indeed, Chris – who makes most of the selections – sent me this email yesterday:

I took a break from DD a month ago, after run of 1-2’s that were beginning to do my head in!

You stepped in and hit 7/12 doubles, I then came back and despite a loss yesterday, I’m 10/14 since coming back.

So, in the last month, WE have achieved the following:

37 winners from 98 runners = 37.76% SR
37 winners from 52 races = 71.15% SR
17 winning days from 26 = 65.38% SR
51.65pts profit at an ROI of 99.33%

A quite amazing run. And, naturally, we don’t believe we can replicate it. But we do expect to continue to deliver solid long-term profits for followers of this very smart free service.

Then there’s the Stat of the Day service. Again, Chris is usually the man here, and this service goes from strength to strength. If you’re not the sort to get too involved with the form book, but are interested in tipping services, this is comfortably worth the Geegeez Gold subscription fee on its own.

Another winner yesterday (advised 13/2, returned 9/2) makes Stat of the Day up over 215 points since November 2011, when we started. That’s over two grand for £10 stakes. From one bet a day!

If your paid for service can’t match those figures, you need to be on Gold. You can get a ten day free trial here.

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And finally, the highly respected independent member service, Secret Betting Club, are the first to complete a review of Geegeez Gold. They’re renowned for being hard to please, so much so that members pay £80 a year to receive their unbiased opinions on products, services, and tools.

What did they make of Geegeez Gold? Here’s their ‘spoiler alert’ front page leader from the latest members’ newsletter:

The review went on to say, amongst many other things, in an eight page review:

Geegeez race cards offer a new perspective on horse racing and have clearly been designed with ease of use in mind.

Being a rigorous tester, and also somewhat of a fellow with an eye for detail, I studied a number of race cards and the details to check for inaccuracies in the data, comparing to Racing Post and Sporting Life databases. Everything checked out, including the silks (which I had expected to be my best chance of finding a glitch).

Having used the cards, and designed a regular pattern of queries and views I look for when reading form I can say that they were always fast, very fast in fact to load and there was never an occasion where access was a problem.

As you delve and play with the tool more and more, you become more tuned to what works for you and where to go. It doesn’t take long to become au fait with the race cards, and an afternoon’s play should do the trick.

The race cards compare very favourably with others produced by the likes of the Racing Post, Sporting Life & gg.com and it’s a very good piece of kit for the beginner through to moderate form enthusiast.

Best of all, GeeGeez gold membership comes with a free, ten-day trial, on the site – so you can check the race cards out and see if they work for you. I have a suspicion that they will. The interactive race cards certainly do have legs. I give them a sound 9 out of 10.

Knowing how hard these guys are to please, we’re quite happy with that (though, of course, we think they’re worth 10 out of 10, especially when Stat of the Day is factored in!).

There are a couple of other independent reviews in the pipeline, but the best way to judge Gold is to try it for yourself. You can, as mentioned, do this free for ten days. So why not join the growing band of beginners, enthusiasts, and professionals (including some who work for VERY well known media companies with their own racecard offerings!!!) who use Gold as their first – and in many cases, only – port of call for finding winners?

Start your free trial here.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a preview of the big Saturday races, including the Irish Oaks, the Weatherbys Super Sprint, and a cracking card at Market Rasen topped off by the Summer Plate. Of course, if you’re a Gold subscriber, you can just kick on and take a look for yourself. 😉

Matt