RaceWatch beginners guide: your first day in the app

What does RaceWatch cover?

RaceWatch covers the day's meetings, with a racecard for each race, a profile for each horse and connection, and member tools such as the RWS Hub, FormLines+, Speed+ and Tracker+.

Everything starts from the day's meetings. Each race has a full racecard, each runner has a horse profile, and each trainer, jockey, owner, sire, dam and course has a profile of its own. Around that sit tools that work across the whole day: the RWS Hub for scores, Angles for daily patterns, Marks+ for handicap marks and the Telegram alert channels.

The Home screen pulls the day together. It opens with Master Search for horses, trainers, jockeys, owners and courses, a Quick Access rail to the tools you use most, For You recommendations, a Winners Wire of results and your Watch Slip, a shortlist of runners you want to study.

How do I get from the meeting list to a full racecard?

Start from the day's meetings, pick a course, then open a race. The racecard lists every declared runner with silk, jockey, trainer, official rating, form figures, RWS score badge and live best odds.

The runner row is the summary. Before opening any tab you can see who rides, who trains, the horse's official rating, its recent form figures, its RaceWatch Score and the best price on offer across the bookmakers. That is enough to decide which runners deserve a closer look.

From the racecard you can work through the tabs one at a time or open a runner's full horse profile, which holds its career, race history and breeding. Keep the race conditions in mind as you go, because the class, distance and going shape how every tab should be read.

Which racecard tabs should a new member open first?

Start with Form, Odds, Draw, Connections and FormLines+. Between them they cover recent runs, the market, stall position, trainer and jockey records and how the horse's last race has worked out.

Form shows the horse's recent runs in full. Odds lines up the prices at 20+ bookmakers with the best highlighted and the opening price beside the current one. Draw sets the stall against a draw bias heatmap. FormLines+ shows how the beaten horses from its last race have run since.

Once those feel familiar, the other tabs add depth: Last Race, Travel, OR Timeline, Weight, Verdicts, Trainer Patterns, Breeding, Compare and, for tracked British runs, Speed+. A good habit on your first few days is to read one race fully, tab by tab, then watch it, so you can see which tabs pointed to what happened and which did not.

• Form: the recent record
• Odds: prices across 20+ bookmakers
• Draw: stall and draw bias heatmap
• FormLines+: how the last race has worked out

How do I follow a horse and get an alert when it runs?

Add the horse to Tracker+. When anything you follow is declared to run, Tracker+ sends you a notification, so you do not have to check each day's cards by hand.

Tracker+ follows horses, trainers and jockeys, and owners and sires as well. You can keep more than one list and add conditions to what you follow, a STABLE view brings your followed names together, and an AVOID list keeps horses you have ruled out in one place.

The alert channels work alongside it. You join C, G and F channels in the app and their alerts are sent to Telegram, while My Alerts in the app keeps a feed of alerts from the channels you follow, with results and profit and loss.

Which RaceWatch pages can I use without a membership?

The Free Data pages are open to anyone. They cover favourites, draw and pace bias, returners, yard files, leaderboards and more, and they are updated after every racing day.

Free Data is a good way to learn how RaceWatch thinks about racing before joining.

Full racecards, RWS scores, FormLines+, Speed+, Tracker+, Angles and the alert channels sit inside the membership, which is what the free trial opens up. The member tools apply the same methods to today's runners: the free pages show a pattern across past results, and the app shows which horses on today's cards fit it.

How do the RaceWatch free trial and billing work?

The first 30 days cost nothing. Card details are entered on step two of sign up, and £24.99 a month is charged from day 31 unless the subscription is cancelled first.

Nothing is charged on the day you join. The trial opens the member app for 30 days and the first payment of £24.99 is taken on day 31, so there is time to try the racecards, the RWS Hub and the alert channels on real race days before paying anything.

RaceWatch is a research tool, so the membership pays for data and analysis rather than selections, and nothing in the app promises winners or profit. Use the trial to decide whether the tools suit the way you like to study a race.

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