Summarising this conversation...

This Aeliana prep is eerily similar to a movie we have seen before. $13+ around for the Melbourne Cup is very generous IMO and she should be the favourite

One of the great feelings in racing is owning a limited horse that tries it's guts out but you are patient through bad luck, injuries and setbacks and it finally wins. Inject it into my veins

This is a very widely held criticism of the current state of play but as is par for the course, the replies flood in from those immediately defending the most powerful interests in the game. It's bizarre to see punters and form analysts do this as it makes you look like you have Stockholm Syndrome. #1 priority should be horse and jockey welfare. #2 protecting the interests of punters, owners and trainers. Current situation looks after SOME owners and SOME trainers. The interests of punters and turnover? yeah no-one gives a flying fuck even tho the industry doesn't exist without us. But by all means, keep defending the most powerful interests in the game against reasonable criticisms. I hope you are looking forward to betting on races where there are only 2 trainers and every horse is dual and triple nommed during the carnivals.

About a year ago, I began the process of building and testing a model to price races - mainly in Brisbane. I did this primarily as I wanted to have much more robust processes to assess past performances against one another. Dave was an invaluable asset to me early, giving me frequent data dumps so I could test and build out the features of my model and validate after meetings. I've started sharing some of that and while it is still early days, the results are promising. Nonetheless, for each meeting I was running the model, it was taking me around 4 hours to prepare preliminary data for the meeting - mainly on a CSV - cleaning data from various sources including from Racing Australia. With the API live, I have been able to automate this entire process. What was previously 4 hours for a Saturday meeting now takes less than a minute! It isn't just the Form King product that is awesome - although it is - it's Dave's genuine commitment to helping everyone who is signed up to Form King. The API is going to be a game-changer for those interested in model building and using data to better understand the chaos that is thoroughbred racing. @davepband