Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Jeff
Yes, I certainly do. I’ll dig out three or four from each, scan them and email you the file. Please message me an email address to which to send them.
Jeff
If you care to put up a list of races in the last couple of years that would meet your purpose, I’ll check what I have. Alternatively, if it doesn’t matter which races as long as you have three or four from named courses, I can easily meet that requirement – just post the names of the courses.
Do bear in mind, as in my previous post, that almost exclusively I have cards for handicaps, with very few non handicaps.
ps
I should have read your post more carefully. The copies I have all contain the Spotlight Verdict (though sometimes some of the commentary is chopped off at the righthand side – the actual selection and 90+% of the comment is always there). And the number of tips per horse are included in a column towards the righthand edge of the page. But the table I select to be printed underneath the actual card and Spotlight Verdict is the Postdata one (I use the ORs which are neatly listed and am interested in the draw appraisal where relevant). So although I know how many tipsters went for each horse, that is all I have in that vein: no info. on which tipster (apart of course from Spotlight) went for which horse, whether he napped it, etc. I hope this still means what I have is useful to you.
Jeff
You may want lots for testing a system, but if you just need a few and they happen to be for better class handicaps (class 2 and above and some but few class 3s and 4s) I’ve probably got them and could scan you copies. (Assuming they are from the last couple of years.)
Jeff
At the foot of the main page are several options. Click "shop". When the next page opens on the left you will see a menu. Select "PDF Zone". When that opens there will be another menu on the left with, among other items, "cards". If you click on cards you will have a choice of cards with colours or without. Once you’ve made your choice you’ll find you have a menu from which to select date and venue. The cards are 20p.
Unfortunately for my purposes, these are not the same as the individual race cards one gets before racing each day, with the betting forecast etc. But they may well meet your purposes. I know no way of getting the individual race cards for long after the race in question. If there is, I’d be very glad to know how.
I see on ceefax this morning that the man said to be the oldest in the world has died aged 116, and the same report mentions that the oldest person whose age has been definitely established is now 114. We may all need to live that long to get to the bottom of the VDW approach!
Goodlife
I am not suggesting VDW, if alive, is in his 90s: merely that these days surviving until one’s nineties is far from unknown. Your calculation makes sense on the material in Tony Peach’s booklets, but of course that begs the question of whether what Tony Peach was told was true.
Maggsy
"VDW must at least now be in his 90’s"
I don’t know why you think that, but even if he born before the First World War he could easily be alive. My mother-in-law was 96 on 10th December, and the father-in-law of a friend of my wife still teaches the piano, and drives a car, at 97.
Artemis
I’ve one addition to suggest, courtesy of "Marvex" in a booklet written more than fifty years ago: when a proven apprentice is booked to ride a horse from another stable in a decent race.
William Buick’s "outside" rides during the recent turf season have been classic illustrations of the idea.
FoF
If you enter Nicholls and select "trainer" in the search facility towards the top right of the main page of the Post website you’ll be able to see any of his which have had a run in the last couple of seasons (including this one). It won’t help if its an unraced horse you are looking for, though.
The main feature of this case is that it again highlights the weaknesses of the CPS. They are all right at sorting out charges against minor thieves and those who have infringed the motoring laws but out of their depth with cases like this.
The problem is that the CPS are reactive rather than pro active: they let the police investigate for ages and then present them with a bundle of evidence which they then examine and decide whether it contains enough to warrant prosecution. (So they, and not the racing authorities and police, are SOLELY responsible for that decision, and indeed for how the case was then conducted.)
What was needed here was the case to have been handed over early to the Serious Fraud Office, who work in a quite different way. They work actively with the police throughout, advising on the kind of of evidence that will be necesssary if the allegations being examined are to have any chance of leading to conviction – ie hard evidence of monetary links that seem, prima facie, to warrant concern. Without those, other evidence is flimsy in the extreme – was this horse pulled, or did it run out of steam/room? Most times there will be different views among observers and no chance whatsoever of proving pulling to the level required in criminal matters – these days the jury is asked "are you sure" the offence was committed, not even "are you convinced beyond reasonable doubt".
The SFO has had its share of disasters and, as we have seen with the investigation that was upsetting the Saudis and Tony Blair it, like the CPS, is susceptible to political intervention. But these days it is a great deal more competent than the CPS with cases like this and had it been brought it two years ago to work alongside the City of London police it is a safe bet that either there would have been no court case, or a far stronger one.
As has been said, the defendants are now cleared of the charges and it would invite legal action to suggest differently. But that does not mean that among the material (presented in court or not) there may not be good evidence of either other crimes or breaches of racing rules. Equally, of course, there may not be. But if there is, it will be for the CPS and racing authorities respectively to consider it, bearing in mind what has happened. In other words, and purely hypothetically, if there was evidence against anyone of a relatively minor breach of the rules of racing – the sort of thing that might lead to a short or medium term suspension – it would now be disproportionate to take it further.
Mtoto
"semi-literate"
Historically, a term often used by the semi-educated in an attempt to establish an aura of general superiority in respect of those who were usually inferior solely in respect of their command of grammar. (A typical 1950s white collar comment vis-a-vis blue collar workers.)
It is one of those phrases that always told one more about the user than the object of the comment. And of course it still does.
Mtoto
"… and have never done better than when pressing my advantage by being prepared to back/lay win/place every horse in a dozen or more races a day."
If you hadn’t taken your mother’s advice and eaten your greens as a child, that could be you.
Crouchingdragon
You wrote: "So either all those systems arrive at the same conclusions or some of them are flawed."
It is not a straight either/or. For any specific race different systems, methods (or top tipsters) may well offer different selections, and if they are all win only selections they can’t all be right. But that in itself doesn’t mean that any of them is flawed. No one (sane and honest) will claim to have a system which always finds the winner: rather, the issue is what system, method (or tipster) delivers a worthwhile profit over an extended period.
Your point about "no expense spared" is also relevant. If you mean that in a solely financial sense, you are looking for something to buy, or to subscribe. Others may have suggestions. The only system (or method, as the originator termed it) I know that generates substantial, reliable profits cannot be bought but has to be learnt, so is probably not relevant to you.
dave jay
The incidence of non completing horses in better class NH handicaps since March 2005 (the earliest records I keep) is 22.4% from a pool of nearly 6,100. And as you suggest the rates for subsets are very differential. For example, of the 2,400 hurdlers in the 6,100 just over 88% completed, while only 70% of the 3,700 chasers who set out finished.
Artemis
You wrote:
"Unless we have inside information, we have no way of knowing if (prior to the race) a trainer or jockey wants a horse to run to its best form or whether a horse was given every chance to do its best in the race."
I agree with that – we can’t know in the sense of being sure. But we can make reasonable deductions from the evidence, and a point made both by Marvex and VDW which in my experience is spot on is that in many races only a few are there to win. The majority are there as part of their preparation to win in the future. From that perspective race analysis can be seen as a two stage process: first to identify those horses which can reasonably be presumed to be there to win, and second to select from those the one which has the best credentials to do so.
Artemis is surely right here. We know that from time to time there will be incidents that effect the outcome of a race which we cannot specifically predict. The question is, do they happen sufficiently often to negate the forecasts one makes to oneself about the probable outcome when assessing the field.
If one backs on the NH, inevitably a proportion of one’s selections won’t finish, while on the Flat that is very rare. But under either code, the number of horses I back which fail because of specifically unforeseeable events like falls, brought downs, saddles slipping, suffering substantial interference etc is tiny.
I agree with Mtoto that, certainly with better class races, the outcomes are reliably predictable, even if not always predicted. Indeed, if this was not so, betting would be a daft thing to do. There is what to my mind is a pertinent quote in a booklet published in the late 1940s/early 1950s by an accountant who wrote under the pseudonym "Marvex":
"The form book is a record of the past and properly read is a guide to the future – very seldom does the result of a race so confound the form student that he tears his hair; he may be surprised by a result but he has only to get out his form books to find substantiation therein in 99 cases out of a 100."
Maggsy
Plausible, but I doubt it. PK ran against a much better horse (from a VDW perspective) than anything MK faced.
Garston
The evidence from the examples is that sometimes VDW used the Mail forecast and sometimes the Life. Why this variation seems to me anybody’s guess.
It is possible VDW bought the Life and/or Chronicle on the day in question, because the weather was breaking and there was hope that English racing would re-commence, at Chepstow and Lingfield. Indeed I can tell you from a copy of the front page I was sent that the Chronicle was bullish both about the English racing going ahead and the prospects for Beacon Light. But my guess is that you are probably right.
I also think you are probably right in suggesting that VDW built his form book up from the SCHB sections.
With regard to the issue of ratings, we know from the March 1981 examples that VDW generated his own, and one of them bears similarity to those in the Mail. (One of the sets of ratings for the Little Owl example is, for each horse, exactly 12 higher than the Mail ratings, and there are comparabilities, though by no means 100%, in the other three examples. May or may not be coincidence.) But in the Erin example, I think it highly probable VDW was referring to rating, not ratings, and he made it clear elsewhere that rating and ratings were two different things.
