Bank of screens in a betting shop showing animated race cards between the races

The news desk

Virtual racing news

16 stories, newest first: what the circuit ran, what the industry shipped, and what this desk got wrong.

16Stories
6Categories
18 OctLatest
1Corrections

The feed

as at 25 October 2026

News 18 Oct 2026

Ten features in four days, one from every venue

Thirteen cards are published ahead and ten of them are features. The largest block in the whole programme runs at 8.06pm.

Wren Tabakoff · 2 min

News 18 Oct 2026

The demo opens at Kurrajong

A free play-credit harness simulator now runs at play/. It takes no money, holds no account and awards nothing at the end of a race.

Ilsa Brandt · 3 min

News 17 Oct 2026

Marnie Kessel on the second line

Five drives on the published programme, all five from barrier three, and the one position she has never been given is the one that decided her win.

Mo Farrelly · 3 min

News 17 Oct 2026

The Jacaranda Cup weighting looks wrong. It is not.

A horse with three career wins holds 281 numbers. A horse with thirteen holds 44. Several readers have asked whether the card is broken.

Wren Tabakoff · 3 min

News 17 Oct 2026

The circuit in a spreadsheet

Every result on the circuit now downloads as CSV and JSON, weights and seeds included. No commercial virtual product publishes any of it.

Wren Tabakoff · 4 min

News 16 Oct 2026

Stockyard Gate wins a third from five, this time off 20 numbers

Two runners held identical 20-number blocks at $40.78. One won and one was beaten 27 lengths.

Wren Tabakoff · 3 min

Explainer 16 Oct 2026

Reading a weighting table

Three sums turn a block of numbers into a published price. Worked all the way through on a real card, runner by runner.

Wren Tabakoff · 4 min

News 15 Oct 2026

Eight cards in: Faisal Karim leads on three wins from eight

Three of the eight winners so far are the same horse, and the strike-rate column is still a count with a percent sign after it.

Mo Farrelly · 2 min

Culture 15 Oct 2026

Eight liveries, one screen

Eight runners, one dark twilight render and three coats that are the same shade of brown. The caps are doing more work than they look like doing.

Ilsa Brandt · 4 min

Games 15 Oct 2026

What the simulators do differently

Photo Finish LIVE, ZED RUN, Rival Stars and the rest resolve a race by modelling a horse. A shop-screen draw models nothing at all.

Ilsa Brandt · 5 min

Explainer 14 Oct 2026

A glossary for a game with no glossary

Eighty-nine definitions, because the words were in use everywhere and written down nowhere. Some are borrowed, some are refused and a few had to be made.

Wren Tabakoff · 4 min

Correction 13 Oct 2026

Correction: The Global Draw went to Scientific Games, not Inspired

A column of 29 September said Inspired inherited The Global Draw. It did not, and the only real link is one person's biography.

Gus Abernethy · 2 min

Prices on this page are the draw weighting in another notation. They are reference figures published with the card, not odds available anywhere, and not a betting recommendation.

What the desk covers

Two beats. The industry: RNG racing on shop and online screens, the televised one-offs, and the simulators people play. And this paper's own circuit — 10 venues, 21 published cards, and the weighting table every result was drawn from. Industry figures carry their source and date in the sentence.

Start with the method

Reading a weighting table16 Oct 2026

A weighted draw has no form to read. How a virtual race is decided works through the arithmetic.

The latest correction

Correction: The Global Draw went to Scientific Games, not Inspired13 Oct 2026

Corrections run in the first line of the column, never at the foot of it.

Next on the circuit

Circuit clock, 25 October 2026.

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