The Triple Crown races get exponentially more eyeballs and wagers than any other Horse draw of the year. For most of the novices, gaining insight beyond the betting favorite (Forte, 5-2) or a prior winner (like this year’s Preakness champion, National Treasure) is challenging. 

To lower the barrier of entry, Equibase — the industry standard horse racing database — has partnered with Pramana Labs, which uses natural language processing and proprietary database query logic to automatically generate betting tips and trends for any race on the continent. It’s all done at scale without human input. 

“It will scan the database, and it will look for combinations of hidden events occurring in every race, every track, every day, everywhere in North America, so that if you’re a horse player at Finger Lakes, versus a horse player at Churchill, you still get these statistical pieces of information,” said Pramana CEO Corey Patton. 

For the Belmont, Pramana shared 13 such pieces of analysis in standard prose, such as Arcangelo’s undefeated record at the New York track (2 for 2), Angel of Empire’s highly rated speed figure from the Kentucky Derby, a recent hot streak of Forte jockey Irad Ortiz Jr. and the strong exacta track record of Tapit Trice trainer Todd Pletcher.  

Equibase and Pranama began collaborating early in 2022 and quietly launched a beta version of these auto-generated statlines prior to the Kentucky Derby before making the full unveil before Belmont. Pramana’s AI enables the identification of trends through the extensive Equibase dataset, and writing it in sentence form makes the information more accessible — rather than a individual handicapper scouring through what Patton called the “hieroglyphics of past performances for horse racing.” 

“One of the things that motivates us to work with Pramana and do this is to create content that’s attractive to a non-horse racing person or somebody new to this sport,” said Chris Dawahare, Equibase’s vice president, data operations and digital services. “Because we look at, over the next 10 years, for us to grow, we have to capture that sports betting market and to be prevalent next to FanDuel and DraftKings — putting horse racing next to their sports betting product. So we have to have content that is easy to digest and can help facilitate wagering.” 

The data will only grow richer as the collection of GPS tracking from horses becomes more prevalent. Equibase already gets that data from more than 20 tracks and makes it available for broadcasters but hasn’t yet settled on the best distribution for downstream consumers. 

The Pramana statlines are freely available on the Equibase website, with monetization likely to come from advertising and sponsorship. An additional Pramana Labs tool called Shift — which allows users to type prose questions and receive results from SQL queries — might be integrated as a subscription product. 

The key differentiator between Pramana and ChatGPT is that the former is grounded in information culled from a database whereas the latter does its best to answer questions from any publicly available info. But there are ways they can work together, which they’ve recently begun doing. 

“There’s an optional ChatGPT integration that allows businesses to help set up the system so that natural language answers are always accurate and verified, and there’s no guesswork,” Patton said. “The other part is the narratives that will be created out of all of these in the statlines will be even more robust because we will use ChatGPT to actually create full prose out of the results that are accurate and deterministic from running a SQL query.”