Grouped going

Question

Is there a way to get 'grouped going' for a race running today?  For example, the 'advanced_going' for Lingfield today is 'Soft-heavy in places; aw: standard to slow'. I cannot reconcile this string with the going recorded in the 'historic_races' table.

Answer 1

The going descriptions in advance can indeed be highly nuanced as you point  as you point out - we try normalise these (at the risk of oversimplification) in the table daily_runners_insights which corresponds to the going descriptions in historic_runners_inisights.

These tables are available to all subscribers, see:

https://www.betwise.co.uk/smartform/historic_runners_insights

See the fields, "grouped_going" and "simplified_going" with corresponding descriptions.

These fields broadly match the fields in daily_runners_insights by pattern matching these long strings to simpler categories in terms of a description, so at least there is always a directly corresponding category for system building and modelling so should address the issue you have raised.  However, since going may change right up to the race off time, there is always the issue that the going description may not match what is returned after the race in historic races.

To complicate matters further, there is the possibility that the going description - which is always the responsibility of the Clerk of the course - is inaccurate and was never reflective of the actual state of the ground, either before or after the race.   The only way to ascertain this is with a detailed analysis of winning times and consistent performers in races in order to spot anomalies.

Comments

Maybe I will have to run a routine on the 'advanced_going' field to parse them into standard goings for the races on any given day, unless there is another way you can think of.

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Ref the answer above, you can join the field grouped_going from daily_runner_insights to any of the daily tables as a substitute or complement to advanced_going.