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VDW wrote extremely helpfully about how to analyse a race, but his progressive staking plan, as described in "Systematic Betting", is dangerous.
Stuart Holland tested umpteen staking plans and wrote them up in "Successful Staking Strategies". The VDW system is described and evaluated on pages 21/2 and Stuart’s "verdict" was:
"Very poor! Your bank will be lucky to survive this system unless your strike rate is very high.
VDW allegedly had a strike rate of 80%-90% and pretty good prices too. He also suggested betting 10% of the losing bank as well as the [progressive] system.
He would have been much better staking a strightforward 10% of his betting bank."
Not one I could have found, but not a total shock: he was 4th best on the ratings I use, and in the event 5= in the returned betting.
Shabbs
I sympathise with your situation, and years ago spent many an hour with the Form Book trying to work out which horse should win the race I was seeking to analyse, with much the same result as that you describe.
What I now recognise I needed was some help in learning HOW to read the Form Book, ie guidance as to what I should be looking for in its terse and rather daunting pages. And that help for me came initially when I read the following phrase: "it is the balance between class, form and the other factors which shows the good things". (By "other factors" the writer showed he meant the circumstances of the race such as track, distance, going and where relevant draw.)
That led me to think about what "class" and "form" meant, and how they could be best judged, and over the years I’ve explored a number of ways of defining them and thus being able to read the Form Book more purposefully. In getting started, I found the work of two authors particularly helpful, one long dead and the other, as far as I know, hasn’t written on the subject for nearly 20 years. First, Paul Selby, who wrote (and ran a ratings service) under the pseudonym "Marvex" in the late 1940s and 1950s, and second "Che Van der Wheil" (another pseudonym) who wrote from the late 1970s through ’til the mid 1990s.
I am NOT suggesting that either author will provide you with answers. Merely that both view the Form Book as central, discuss the issues of how to judge class and form in interesting ways, and offer concrete suggestions that can be explored. Their suggestions enabled me to begin to read the Form Book more purposefully than previously and have formed a basis for developing the tools for judging class and form that I now use.
Mr Forecast
I know enough about Excel to handle much of what I need, but have had to commission some macros whose complexity has exceeded my ability. Fortunately there are numerous Excel consultants out there – finadable via Google or freelancer websites – and fees for this kind of work are not high. (I’ve had macros built for less than £20.)
What I have not seen offered is bespoke back content, ie the data to put into one’s database, once created. The problem is that collecting data, especially retrospectively, is time-consuming. For example, I collect data for, on average, about half a dozen relevant races a day, taking me perhaps half an hour, so probably between 150 and 200 hours a year. When analysing races I work with three to four years data (my main current database starts from 01/01/08) so a base representing at least 500 hours work. And to collect the same data for all Flat and NH races would obviously take proportionately longer. This suggests to me that anyone in the business of supplying such data, in bespoke form, would have trouble finding customers as the charge he or she would have to make would be fairly high.
G
I am not someone who wants to put an end to NH racing, or the National in particular. But I found Saturday’s events unacceptable and I want the racing authorities to take the problems of last Saturday seriously and I am not yet convinced that they are.
For example, I take the view that the winner should have been disqualified because of the actions of the jockey. As things are, the message the sport gives is that we have rules for the protection of horses but we aren’t serious about enforcing them. Only when connections know that if their jockeys break the whip rules their horse will be disqualified will jockeys be under suitable pressure to conduct themselves properly.
It is a case of attending effectively to the substance of the areas of concern or one day finding there is no National or jump racing.
G
The object of an activity is not the important issue. What matters, from an historical perspective, is what activities become unacceptable to sufficient of the public that politicians act. Surely no one can believe that any of the connections of the horses who ran in the National wanted their horses to suffer, but some most certainly did. If that happens often enough, jump racing will go the same way as cock fighting etc, irrespective of the object of the participants.
I read somewhere that jump racing has been made unlawful in ? at least part of Australia. If that is right, it is worth thinking about, as Australia is hardly a country full of left wing or religious extremists – an essentially secular, liberal democracy, just like the UK.
Flashharry
I think you have it exactly right.
History is full of examples of how what was viewed as entirely normal and acceptable treatment of people or animals came to be seen as unacceptable. And often those who first called such things into question were small groups of folk regarded as way out extremists by the majority. But who, in the UK in 2012, would argue in favour of slavery, formal discrimination against coloured people, the disenfrachisement of women, or employing children in dangerous trades? And it is much the same with animals: who, in the UK in 2012, would argue in favour of bear baiting, dog fighting or cock fighting?
This this year’s National looked like an accident waiting to happen, with the prevailing going and the very warm day. The racing authorities specifically mentioned the latter in their statement, but where is the action line: will the National be postponed next time the day turns out to be "unseasonably" warm?
Accidents will always happen, but once whipping is banned few I suspect would view Flat racing as exposing horses to cruelty. But the sight of the remaining horses running around dead or dying horses and then clearly finishing in a near to exhausted state in this year’s National was a spectacle that, as evidenced by this thread, even racing enthusiasts find unacceptable. If it happens again next year it can safely be anticipated that the outrage will be even greater, and the pressure on government to "do something" will grow. And all too often when government "does something", it does so in an excessive and ill thought-through way. So let’s hope the racing authorities do seriously reflect on the situation, and consider such matters as the timing of the National, whether whenever it is scheduled to take place it can be allowed to go ahead when there is little or no give in the ground, the number of runners allowed, and whether potential runners should have to have proved themselves reliable jumpers.
Its possible from both the Post and the Sporting Life, but via the Life is much easier.
All you have to do is click on "data", then "get external data", then "new web query". A box will open entitled "New web query". Click on "advanced" at the bottom and another small box will open entitled "Advanced web query options". Check the "disable date recognition" option and press OK. That will close the small box, leaving you with the "New web query" box.
You now have two options. The one I take is to set my browzer home page as the Sporting Life’s results page. If you do that before you start to download results, and then click on the "browze web" button, another window will open which, when maximised, will be the Sporting Life results page. Click on the race the details of which you want to download and the details will appear. Finally, click on the Microsoft Excel icon at the bottom of the screen and a new Excel book will open with the data from the race in the first page. (The second option is to type the Sporting Life results page url into the address line of the "New web query" box each time, but unless you only want to do the odd race every so often it is much the less efficient.)
It is then a matter of finding the easiest way to transfer the data you want into your database. I do it by cutting the data I want, as a block, from the first page of the Excel book, pasting it into the second page, from which that part of the block that I want to include in my database is copied by formulae to the third page of the Excel book, in the right columns as far as my database is concerned. Then the final step is simply cutting and pasting the data from the third page into the database.
The above will almost certainly sound complicated and longwinded, but in reality it isn’t. It took me an hour or so to sort out the formulas for copying the data from page two of the Excel book to page 3, but having got a standard download book ready, using it to download the data for a race takes less than five minutes once one has done it a few times. I only collect data for certain types of race, anything up to twenty on some Summer Saturdays. On average, I suppose I download six races a day and it takes less than half an hour. (And that includes adding manually the one piece of data the Sporting Life results lack, each horse’s Official Rating, which is important to me.) Doing it every night requires discipline, and can be wearisome, but the result is a bespoke database with exactly the data I use to analyse a race in a form which can be loaded into a race analysis Excel book in minutes.
The above is written for downloading from Internet Explorer to Excel 2000. Much the same applies to the next couple of versions of Excel but I am not sure that it applies to the very latest. I’ve tried several versions of Excel and 2000 is, for this exercise, much the most user friendly.
"it was a measure of racing’s desperation to retain its place in our sporting culture that Fallon has been welcomed back, by many Flat racing professionals, as the one household name capable of catching the outside world’s attention…"
I think "stupidity" would have been more apt than "desperation to retain its place in our sporting culture".
Other sports have had their "bad boys" – Rio Ferdinand in football, Flintoff in cricket, for example, whose falls from grace have rightly been seen as the excesses of youth and forgiven. But other situations have not been forgiven – Chambers in athletics a case in point, and one can be confident that Richards in rugby union will be another – because, I think, the issues in their cases are seen as subverting the very essence of their sports. Fallon will in my view fall into this second category and his return will prove a negative for the sport.
Yet another Post website problem last night:
"Thank you for your email reporting issues of difficulty logging on to the Racing Post website.
Between 2:30am and 3:30am Sunday morning, the Manchester data centre, where our website is hosted, suffered a power failure resulting in our website being taken off-line.
The service returned at 3:30am but some users were unable to logon until after 9am because a secure firewall came back online with a corrupt configuration meaning that username and password details were unrecognised.
This appears to have affected you and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.
We are investigating why our alert monitoring system did not pick up this log-in issue, in the same way that it did all other system failures, and will take steps to ensure that there is no repeat of this unfortunate incident."
I bet they have had quite a lot of experience of investigating "all other system failures".
Goodlife
I very much agree, and hence the words "… and capability" in my comment on Mr Kildare’s interesting post.
The material Tony Peach has published includes some letters thanking VDW for his efforts, but not many. I can’t help feeling that when VDW wrote vis-a-vis his Old Newton Cup evaluation that "It would seem that the object of the exercise was lost, which is a pity and a waste of my efforts – because had it been understood it would have carried readers a long way" he could equally accurately have used those words to refer to many readers’ inability to understand his work at all.
Equitrack
I think you are spot on. The Post has made a huge blunder in tossing aside an excellent website and installing the abomination we now have, which in my own experience, plus that of several colleagues and numerous posters on this forum, has too many glitches.
Like the average politician, though, the Post won’t have the guts to admit they’ve made a mistake and to go back to the previous excellent site, with a properly thought out charging policy.
As a consequence, the Post is set fair to be yet another example of the old dictum that it takes a long time to build a good reputation but no time at all to lose one.
Monster
If permissible by forum rules I’d be interested in a link to George Johns’ view on the D/AS race, as having checked my own records I am in agreement with Fulham’s view – I too had D as the class/form horse.
AS had a nice profile from the VDW perspective, and the better lto form of the two horses, which is always a consideration in deciding whether to back a c/f opposed by such a horse if also a probable with form. But on the rule that runs through the relevant VDW examples I can’t at present see a reason why AS would take the c/f status from D. Maybe George Johns’ post will enlighten me.
Nagwa
No matter at what point one first reads something by VDW, if it arouses interest one is almost bound to start asking questions such as "do all his selections come from the first 5/6 in the betting forecast" or "do they have one of the three lowest consistency aggregates within the first 5/6 in the forecast", etc etc. From a research point of view these are hypotheses and can only be tested by checking them out against all the relevant examples. (I add "relevant" because as VDW made clear not all the examples he gave related to the same method. The main method, as outlined in the well known March 1981 article, cannot, for example, necessarily be expected to find the six selections claimed for the "handicap hurdles" method he touched on later.)
Mr Kildare
Interesting post, and a very nice memory to have.
Actually Prominent King was not a strong selection by VDW (too far down the ability rating ranking for that), merely a "good prospect" in a race with no strong VDW bet (strong here meaning a bet having an 80+% chance of winning). He (PK) just edged out your father’s horse in the analysis, so perhaps due to the mischance of a split shoe, VDW got the first two in the correct order. As Actuary says, VDW didn’t post that, or any other selection, prior to the races concerned but as the selection method is objective and anyone who fully understands it will arrive at the same horses, whether they look at the relevant facts before or after the race, that is of no significance.
VDW (who is still alive and most certainly not Tony Peach) generated a method which still regularly "delivers the goods". But he was not so obliging as to spell it all out and left much to be worked out by those interested. And that takes a great deal of trouble and no little expense (assembling the necessary material for the literally dozens of selections he gave over a period of more than 10 years), time (exploring that material and testing the numerous hypotheses that emerge), and capability. As Actuary has found, putting in time alone gives no guarantee of success in working it all out, but some have.
