Improvements to advance racecards in Smartform
By colin on Sunday, March 12th, 2023The daily_racecards and daily_runners tables have always provided racecards as early as they were available (usually two days ahead of the meetings, but for big races sometimes as many as five days ahead).
This provides benefits for users doing advance race analysis but presents some issues in ensuring that the most up-to-date cards are available – for example, reflecting latest non-runners, jockey changes, or race time changes – in daily cards
Improvements
To improve both use cases from now on, the daily_racecards and daily_runners tables (and their equivalent in the beta database) will provide new racecards only on the evening before the meetings, so they will always carry the final declarations.
To complement this and enable analysis more than 24 hours before racing, we have added new database feeds with equivalent tables to daily* for advance racecards for both the original and beta database products. These two feeds will provide the card on the first available day it is available to us, usually up to two days in advance, or more for big race meetings.
Making it all work for your subscription
daily* tables
There is nothing that you need to do in order to keep receiving daily updates, and in fact your database will now receive more up to date information (reflecting the final declarations) for the next day. However, these tables will no longer contain any data more than one day in advance of the race. If you want tomorrow’s cards earlier than 7.30 pm the day before the race, or the cards for racing the day after tomorrow, look to advance race cards, as below…
advance* tables
To receive the advance* data, you can jump straight to download details for the individual products at the following links:
Original database: https://www.betwise.co.uk/smartform/advance_racecards
Beta database: https://www.betwise.co.uk/smartform/advance_racecards_beta
So for the upcoming Cheltenham meeting, for example, you will soon see the earliest cards for advance analysis in the advance* tables, and the most up to date cards in the daily* tables the evening before racing.