Every horse has six hidden ratings: top speed, acceleration, stamina, consistency, late finish, and quick start. When you press race, a small physics-style simulation runs behind the scenes. Each horse gets a performance score built from its ratings, plus a random draw of luck, and the fastest finishing time wins.
The winner is decided by that simulation the instant you press the button. The horses on screen are just replaying a result that already happened, so nothing in the animation changes the outcome.
For each horse the engine does this:
Because the luck term is real but bounded, the best horse does not always win. Over many races the strong horses win more often, but any single race can go to an outsider. That is the point.
Distance changes the weights. In a sprint, speed and acceleration dominate and stamina barely counts. In a marathon, stamina and a strong late finish matter far more. So a horse that is unbeatable over a sprint can fade over a longer trip. Switching distance genuinely reshuffles the favourite.
The odds beside each horse are not made up. Before every race the engine secretly runs the same simulation 3,000 times and counts how often each horse wins. That win frequency is the horse's true chance. The payout shown is the fair payout for that chance, then trimmed by a house edge (see the next tab).
Each lane on the track shows the horse's name, its live odds, and its form arrow (Up, Even, or Down). Form is a small hidden value that drifts over time, like a real animal having a good or bad patch, and it nudges the rating. Use all three to place a smarter bet.
Yes, and here is exactly how. The randomness comes from a seeded pseudo-random generator. Each race is seeded from the clock and the race count, so every race gets a fresh, unpredictable draw. The same maths runs for every horse, including the one you backed. The engine never looks at your bet before deciding the result.
Real betting is not a fair coin flip, and this game copies that honestly instead of hiding it. If a horse truly wins one race in four, a fair payout would be four times your stake. This game pays a little less than that. The shortfall is the house edge.
A 10% edge means that, on average, every 100 coins you stake is worth about 90 back over the long run. You can absolutely win, and win big, in the short run. But the longer you play, the more the edge grinds your balance down. That is not a bug. It is the single most important lesson the game is built to teach.
The bars below compare each horse's true win chance from the simulation with the chance implied by its displayed odds for the current distance. The red mark sits at the true chance; the green bar shows what the odds imply. The odds always imply a slightly higher chance than reality, and that consistent gap is the house edge working as designed.
Green bar = chance implied by the payout on offer. Red mark = the horse's real chance from 3,000 simulations. The gap is the edge.
Skill helps. Reading form, matching horses to the right distance, and betting the value can stretch your coins much further than betting blindly. But you cannot erase the edge. The most reliable way to keep your coins is the one real books hope you never learn: bet small, and know when to walk away.
Raman Horse is a solo final-year research project by Raman. It does two jobs at once: it is software built from scratch, and it is a controlled experiment in how people handle risk. The game is the laboratory; every tap is a data point.
When people can see the odds in front of them, do they still make the classic mistakes decades of research predict? The environment here is unusually honest: probabilities are shown, form is visible, the maths is fair within a fixed edge. If people played like calculators, they would bet small, back value, and quit while ahead. The study looks at how far real behaviour drifts from that, and what pulls it away.
Nothing is decorative. The visible odds and form let the study separate genuine skill from pure luck, so a careful player really can do better. The photo finish exists to create near misses, because a near miss changes behaviour more than a clean loss. And the permanent game over after an all-in loss is not cruelty: it turns the classic gambler's-ruin problem into something you can feel, one irreversible decision with no reset, exactly as it works with money you cannot get back.
Grounded in Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory (1979), Thaler and Johnson on the house-money effect (1990), and later work on near-miss effects and dynamic risk-taking.
If you gave consent, only anonymous traces from this browser session (which horses you backed, bet sizes relative to your balance, your streaks, and how each game ended) may later be aggregated for analysis. The software collects no names, emails, location, or device identifiers. This is educational research by one student. It is not a commercial product and involves no real money.
Close this and keep playing at any time. The study exists to understand how people choose. The game exists so those choices feel real enough to be worth studying.
Betting is now locked. This is only a game, but the same rule matters with real money: never chase your losses. If gambling ever stops feeling like fun, help is there for you.
Gambling SupportPlease gamble responsibly. In-game coins have no real value.