Racing Post website and newspaper

Double J said:
For the next NH season ill be purchasing a far better laptop and keeping spreadsheets to try and help me determine were im going right and wrong in terms of what im betting on. Im certainly not losing much, im just looking at different angles that may help me along the way. Keeping my own figures where I can and even looking at timings of races is something ill be doing myself rather than relying on other people on Twitter or on here to post such stuff.

I see Racing post gives you literally everything you need to know etc with racing replays. Its £30 a month. Is it worth it? Anyone have it? Been mulling over it for a while now, somethings just putting me off it though.
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Personally, i'd say you're better off buying an iPad and using that. Equally, if you set up a google drive account, you can use google sheets and then you don't have to pay for a Microsoft package. Google sheets, you can also use on the iPad, your phone etc.
 
wilsonl said:
The short answer:- is it worth it?, I'd say yes - just about - at a £1 a day but it depends on what £30 a month means to each I guess.
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I think that sounds okay if you're heavily into the sport and want to access stuff every day but it's not for someone like me. Apart from site itself being a dogs dinner.

The search facility hasn't improved. Get a name slightly wrong and you've no chance of finding what you're looking for.

There was a time I'd have said I would buy the RP daily if it cost only 50p or so. I wouldn't pay even that now for it.

Having said that, I would go back to subscribing to the RP site if they went back to the original price and site rather than the Beta format which just doesn't work for my purposes.
 
What's funny? Those that don't like stats will use the pages, whereas the rest of us need the Andrex anyway. :whistle:
 
Double J said:
For the next NH season ill be purchasing a far better laptop and keeping spreadsheets to try and help me determine were im going right and wrong in terms of what im betting on. Im certainly not losing much, im just looking at different angles that may help me along the way. Keeping my own figures where I can and even looking at timings of races is something ill be doing myself rather than relying on other people on Twitter or on here to post such stuff.

I see Racing post gives you literally everything you need to know etc with racing replays. Its £30 a month. Is it worth it? Anyone have it? Been mulling over it for a while now, somethings just putting me off it though.
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FYI this is going up from £29.99 to £34.99 from mid Feb. That's a c. 17% increase, way above inflation
 
Just in time for a full month to capture the Festival. I think my views on the shower that run the Post have been pretty frank in the past, and everything they do serves to reinforce my view.

They provide absolutely flat zero that isn't free elsewhere. The standard of journalism has dropped significantly, and continues to. The database is slow and not good to use on mobile devices. It's impossible to extract information from it to work on in a database for proper form study. The overall product has gone markedly backwards over the last three or four years at the same time as charging. Mistakes and errors are abundant. And after all that they want to increase the price for something that is essentially worthless.

This shower of sh*t don't deserve a single penny from anyone. They don't give a damn about their customers.
 
I'm not usually a critic of the paper, being fairly ambivalent in my thoughts towards it, but the headline piece today (and presumably in tomorrow's paper) is as lazy journalism as you're likely to see.

"Cheltenham Countdown, five of the biggest opening day shocks"

But the oldest of those five is in 2010 when Menorah won the Supreme at 12/1.

And yet there's no mention of 50/1 Champion Hurdle winner Beech Road :confused:
 
Was only thinking to myself yesterday that the RP usually goes up each year pre The Festival, sure enough it does by 10% to £3.20 a day as of Monday.
 
... which means the Weekender will go up to £3.50 or £3.60 this week too.

I've been engaged in ongoing email conversation with the RP people this week (re the Weekender) and surprisingly enough there's been no mention of a forthcoming rise.

If there are Weekender readers out there who keep the form pullouts I can tell you that they have made a deliberate decision NOT to publish the occasional season-to-date indexes, claiming it costs £1000 a time to print them and they claim there is no demand for them. So perhaps if you're used to using the indexes you could let them know how useful they are.

The tone of the conversation leads me to believe that they will stop producing the form pullouts in due course.

If they do that they can stop publishing the form altogether, which will render the RP meaningless and I can't see people continuing to buy it as a result.

The ordinary punter trying to get by on, say, £20kpa wages cannot afford Raceform Interactive or Timeform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EH1G4EwljM
 
They've kept the Weekender at £3.40 so expect a rise at either the Grand National week or Royal Ascot.

But another gripe rears its head.

The advance cards do not contain the official ratings for the Irish runners.

Part of the ongoing email 'conversation' touches on how people responsible for editorial decision-making at both the RP and Weekender appear to have little appreciation of what punters need most from the two papers.

They won't print a 10-page season-to-date index because it costs a grand to do so yet today's Weekender has 40 - I sh1t you not, FORTY - pages of form for next Tuesday and Wednesday, and all of that will be duplicated in their Cheltenham 'Special' edition.

Maybe I'm wrong but surely anyone who relies on the RP for its form layout will buy the RP?
 
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Oh, and the published ORs are out of date too. Al Dancer is showing OR 141 as opposed to his current (and has been since the Betfair a month ago) 152.
 
Surpassed themselves with today's ad on ITV. Something along these lines:
"Did you know which horse running today has won it's last 17 races"?

Who writes such bilge, that they think they can pass it off as racing knowledge?
 
I heard that from inside the next room. I presumed I must have missed something else in the advert.

Either that or they're trying to appeal to the non-racing person to buy the paper just for the rest of this week. Considering how much the advert costs I reckon they'll have lost on the deal (unless it's something they can claim back in tax or something like that).
 
Aye; has all the signs of penned by some spotty school-leaver who has just learned the rudiments of basic form study, yet presented as 'insider information'.:rolleyes:
Speaks volumes about the cheapskate rag's editorial policy as a whole, let alone those who employed him and trained him.
 
reet hard said:
Aye; has all the signs of penned by some spotty school-leaver who has just learned the rudiments of basic form study, yet presented as 'insider information'.:rolleyes:
Speaks volumes about the cheapskate rag's editorial policy as a whole, let alone those who employed him and trained him.
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I've been telling them as much in my email correspondence with them.

I've told them it's obvious to genuine enthusiasts that the editorial staff have no insight into what real racing people actually want/need form the service.

Which they deny, obviously.

I recently pointed out (not for the fist time) an anomaly in race reference numbers. Fair play, they actually went and investigated it for once and replied to say they were dumbfounded that it had been going on for years. They've taken steps to correct it.

On the RP site, they promised two years ago to sort the search facility. It's still shite.

For example, try searching for Killultagh Vic. You'll get tons of answers starting with KV himself but if you miss out an 'l' you've no chance of finding the horse. I find examples every day. (I type fast so make wee mistakes like that due to a light touch on the keyboard.)
 
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