Ratings & Rankings

Every horse on ROX carries a public rating — a single number measuring how good a horse has shown itself to be. Ratings decide which classes a horse may enter, seed the rankings on every leaderboard, and are the number a stud fee or an auction price gets argued from.

How a rating moves

A rating moves by a zero-sum points table multiplied by the weight of the class the race was run in. Zero-sum means the points a field hands out and the points it takes back cancel exactly, whatever the field size — so the board as a whole cannot inflate, and a horse only climbs by taking rating off the horses it beat.

A horse starts with a rating set by its bloodline and its DNA tier together. The bloodline gives the band — Hyperion 185–280, Starfire 90–160, Neutron 30–70, Cosmo 0–20 — and the DNA tier decides where in that band the horse begins, with a hidden per-horse deviation on top. The tiers deliberately overlap: a lucky DN5 can start above an unlucky DN4, which is what makes ability something racing reveals rather than something the certificate already told you. What a horse does on the track is what moves it from there.

A rating measures a horse; it does not change one. How fast a horse runs is fixed when it is minted and never moves — racing does not make a horse quicker, and no amount of it will. What racing does is find out where the horse belongs: the rating converges on the ability it already had, and that is what decides the classes it can enter and the company it keeps. Read it as a handicap mark rather than a score.

What climbing buys, and what it does not

A horse's chance in a race comes from where it sits in that field, not from its rating on its own. The advantage a mark earns is measured against the lowest and the highest mark in the race actually being run — so the best-rated horse in a Class VII field and the best-rated horse in a G1 field stand in the same place relative to their rivals. A 580 among other 580s and a 0 among other 0s have the same chance of winning, and in a field where every runner carries the same mark the advantage is nothing at all. The arithmetic is published in full on Technology & Fair Play.

So climbing buys bigger races, not better odds. A higher class means a larger purse, a record worth more and company worth beating. It does not mean a horse wins more often.

It is worth being blunt about the shape of that. The advantage a mark can earn has a ceiling — 0.55 in the formula — and the upper classes already sit close to it: the best-rated horse in a typical G2 field holds about 0.49 of that 0.55, against about 0.19 in Class VII. Entry fees keep rising and the advantage on offer cannot, so the higher rungs charge more per unit of advantage and pay it back in prize money and standing instead. That is what the top of the ladder is for. A horse that cannot yet win at the bottom does not improve its chances by paying to race further up.

Points move by a weighted rule: the base change for a result, multiplied by the weight of the class it was won in — ×1 at Class VII rising to ×12 at G1. The full table lives on Race Classes & Entry Fees.

Rankings

Where a horse's standing shows today, all read from the same stored results that power every race page:

• Road to the Crown on Tournaments — this month's ROX Monthly qualifying order: wins, then places, then points gained, in paid races only.
• The Roster — every racehorse, sortable by rating and by wins in paid races.
• A horse's own page — its paid record, its class ladder and a separate Maiden line.

Maiden races are training: they never count towards a ranking, a record or a win rate.

Rankings are recomputed from stored results — the same race records anyone can recompute from the published seed — so a horse's place on the board follows from the races that put it there, and cannot be adjusted without changing those races.

That is the same claim Technology & Fair Play makes, and it carries the same limit: a finish provably follows from its seed, but ROX draws the seed. We do not claim more for the rankings than we claim for the races.

Course records are published on each racecourse's own page: the fastest winning time ever run there. A settled race stores every runner's finishing time alongside its position, so a record follows from the same stored results as everything else on this page. A Maiden never sets one — a free training race ranks nobody.