I've been going to the Cheltenham Festival every March for thirty years. Like most people there, I stood in front of the bookies' boards with a racecard, a pint and a hunch, and handed over money on a name I liked. Some years were good. Most weren't. I never really knew whether I was a decent judge or just lucky, because nobody keeps score.
OddsLens started as a way to teach myself racing properly. I'm a software engineer, so I did it the only way I know: build something, feed it every result I could get hold of, and see whether it could tell a fair price from a bad one. The goal for this year's Festival was modest. Walk up to the boards knowing a bit more than the person taking my money.
Somewhere along the way it turned into a product. OddsLens compares the prices of twenty-plus bookmakers on every UK and Irish race, puts a win chance on every runner, and writes a short brief for each race. None of that is new. What is unusual is that every call it makes is written down before the race and kept afterwards, wins and losses alike, where anyone can read it. That record is the whole point. A tipster shows you his winners. OddsLens shows you everything.
Racecards, results and prices come from a licensed racing data feed. The win chances come only from the model, trained on hundreds of thousands of runners' results, and never from the AI that writes the race briefs. Every call on the record is logged with the price at that moment and settled from the official result. When something goes wrong, it is fixed from that day forward. The past is never edited.
Two things to know before you trust any number here: the prices on the record are the ones available when the call was logged, not what you will get later in the day, and the model's win chances are estimates, not promises. The record page explains exactly how the tally is worked out.
Richard Allen
Builds and runs OddsLens
Software engineer and technology leader. OddsLens is a personal project, built and run in my own time, and is not connected to my employer. LinkedIn
Found a wrong number, a broken page or a call that made no sense? Write to support@oddslens.ai. I would rather hear about it than not.