My form of cheating is not to bet on races or use ctrl+alt+del, but to use the races.
I look for races with 3 or fewer horses in high payouts and add mine to it.
I always win something and it has allowed me to build a nice stable slowly.
There are always a few every couple of months.

i love the 1 runner G1 races and i can mug some 2nd place prizemoney with a donkey then sell them for a fortune for coming 2nd in a G1

I had a mare who was on 129 and was about to be moved to the breeding barn but I was hoping to get her up to 130 before that so I won 2 x G3s with her but her rating stayed the same.

Eventually I found a 4 runner G1 where she had the highest rating, so I stuck her in as her final race, knowing if she finished in the first 3 she should go up to at least 130.

She finished 2nd beaten about half a length and when I went to check how much she had gone up, I got a bit of a shock to find she had been dropped 1lb to 128.

So 2 wins and a 2nd in group company and the horse went down in the ratings.

I first became aware of how strange the ratings system was here when I tried playing from scratch without any money and trying to improve horses to sell them on.

The program doesn't always compare the rating of the opposition to your horse, so even if you search the race program for an easy race for your improver, and even if you find a race where you have the best horse in the race, you might still be tailed off in that race with the "outclassed" comment.
The hardest part to take from this is that you could suddenly get dropped 7lbs after having to win 3 or 4 races to gain that 7lbs.

Real ratings work the opposite way where you can get raised between 3lbs and 7lbs for a win on the flat (more on the jumps) but you come down only a pound or two at a time after several losses.

I think it would probably be very difficult to transfer the real ratings system into a game, (and I have had a few disagreements with the BHA handicappers about ratings in the past as well) so I guess we just have to accept the current game system with all it's anomalies and get on with it.

I have played plenty racing games both from disc and in the online money games and this is still the best and most addictive horse racing sim around.