mtoto,

BL was well out of it because he was not in form the other two were.

what is the use of doing cross checks on a horse that cant win?

Any weight based handicap rating (i.e. all of them) will show a horse that is well in at the weights. Their accuracy for betting purposes depends on how well theyve been compiled and whether the horses that are well in or top rated are in form. I cant see PK after the 12-7 run having much problem there. You have to give the compilers some credit, they may be constrained by the way their ratings operate and may not follow or have even heard of vdw but they are certainly not stupid. They too analyse who beat who and hold the brief that the class against which a horse runs is not the same as the class of race in which they compete.
regards,

today

essato, according to VDW, class/form-form- penalty

VDW says "if these dont win somebody up there doesn't like you"

I shall put it to the test.

[This message was edited by Barney on August 28, 2002 at 07:48 AM.]

esatto..not really a good example to use,may well win but do you honestly think vdw would evaluate this race,bloody donkey derby.

I would like to ask everyone a general question. People who have investigated a 1978 race such as PK's Erin using the Raceform formbooks will have a rough idea. How long did it take you to view the race, investigate the formlines and come to whatever conclusions you made?
regards,

Mtoto/Statajack - I don't know for a fact because i haven't seen any newspaper for the day in question, but given it was a high class race and Beacon Light was even money, it is a fair bet that ratings had something to do with his popularity. In short in the equivalent today he would have been top rated on postmark and perhaps topspeed too. VDW did say that he didn't wish to imply that ratings, which are the result of compilation, didn't have any value, but they had to be balanced with class and form and used as a an extra guide. For instance the class/form horse Canny Danny who was also consistent was shown to be badly in at the weights giving weight away all round and over a much further distance of ground. I would be surprised if any equivalent handicap rating at the time would have had Beacon Light badly in or well out of it. It was the question of form that put him out of the race in VDWs method.

Tillerman won a minor race first time out before taking a big step up into group 2 company against proven performers. Despite his jockeys celebrations the photo revealed he hadn't quite got their, but no one could deny he hadn't stepped up considerably with that effort. A quick reappearance in a lesser race at odds on and he never got into it in a slow race, but the winner (behind at Ascot) was no mug and as a winner had to be considered in some form. The 2nd horse had won the Craven before out of his depth in the 2000 Guineas.Tillerman was then sent for a race he had won and narrowly failed in before but with plenty of weight and again he never got serious in the race at all. The winner was hardly a surprise given his class and previous run in the Wokingham. After all this the evaluater has to ask, has this horse shown a capability to win at this level. Do the 2 runs since his excellent effort mean he has lost his form or just been up against difficult tasks in the wrong circumstances? Had he been over raced and gone off the boil ?

Statajack - re time, it is a very good point and one very often overlooked. The truth will put most punters off I think.

Guest

I'm sure you are right re Beacon Light and ratings. Its difficult to be absolutely certain, for reasons with which you will be familiar, but my researches suggest that, on ORs, Beacon Light was about 8lb better off with most of the competition when compared with the weights that would have been carried had the race been a handicap. With that kind of margin, and his recent sfs, its unlikely that proprietory ratings, whatever their bases, would have put Beacon Light clearly out of contention.


Statajack

The answer in my case is many hours, and although that is necessarily different to the time one spends on current races (at least, before they are run!), the point I think you are making is valid. I would guess that that point was one (though of course by no means the only one) of the reasons that led VDW to include race selection among the areas on which he gave advice.

Regarding the ratings issue, I wonder just what ratings PK was top and joint top of then, as it certainly wasnt the ability rating.

Fulham, Guest,
Given the time taken to analyse one race without the aid of RP or RU lifetime form at a mouse click, how did vdw (and G.Hall for that matter) manage to come up with those four good things Baronet, Buckskin, Swiss Maid and My Therape?

Guest,
Most punters were betting shop punters in those days so I would hazard a guess that they did not look too hard at the ratings as if I recall correctly they were always on a seperate page of the Sporting Life. I think they'd just look at at the betting forecast and read "Man on the Spot", then assume BL was home and hosed. Only one meeting on and people who wanted a bet that day, whatever or wherever the meeting.

Re Tillerman, I agree with the case that can be made for him but there were a couple of others in the race with good chances too. As I saw it there was conflict. In the end I think Tillerman could be considered a lucky winner.
regards,

Hi Statajack,

You ask an interesting question regarding the time spent analysing a race such as the Erin.

For my own part, I have certainly spent well in excess of 100 hours on this one race alone. Compiling not only the detailed form of all the runners but of the horses that they had previously competed against.

However, a far more pertinent question (IMO) is how many people after devoting much time to the race, can say hand on heart, that given the same circumstances today that they would bet Prominent King.

Don't misunderstand me, I have absoloutely no problem with PK being the selection by VDW's methods but I honestly think that given that race to analyse without knowing VDW's views then although a selection, it would be one to let run for me.

Cheers

just because posters put up what they consider good bets after the race,does,nt mean time and effort in the first place,a lot of the time recent form is good enough,posters can also make there own conclsions wether they would have considered (after ter the event)these horses worthy of support,i personally believe it leads to a better understanding,if you look in the right places

Crock,
An interesting point, especially given the amount of space the Erin has taken up on this thread. If as I now believe, the PK example was just his most recent winner at the time he was writing in, how did he come to his conclusion so quickly?
Similarly, how did vdw and G. Hall come up with those four good things in one day? wouldnt it have taken a good few hours to arrive at those choices, especially in the case of G. Hall?
It bears thinking about.
regards,

Statajack

You rightly say that Prominent King was not top of the ability ratings. But he was top of the ability ratings of those horses which were "in form". Maybe - and this is mere conjecture - one of VDW's ratings was just that: a table of ability ratings, with those of the "in form" horses in descending order above those (also in descending order) of the "out of form" horses (also in rank order). The results of producing such a table seem to me to square with VDW's comments in the fifth and sixth paras. of his "Narrow the Field" article.

As to Mr Hall's four on 7/10/78, we don't know that he found them using VDW's methodology as we now (think) we understand it: he may simply have applied the two basic factors from the "Narrow the Field" article, which wouldn't have taken half an hour in total, and then isolated his winners by conventional form analysis.

As to VDW himself, several times in his writings he refers to having analysed five or more races in a day. But he also made clear that he kept records and had a thorough knowledge of the Form Book, which meant he wasn't starting from scratch when he got his morning paper.


Investor

Inevitably one has less time before the "off" than afterwards. Looking back historically, one can put in whatever time one feels to be justified, ie Crock's 100+ hours on the Erin. That is simply not possible for current races pre the "off", however assiduously one applies oneself.


Crock

I think the way VDW described Prominent King is interesting: "a good proposition", rather than, for example, an "outstanding bet", a term he used in relation to some other selections. This may indicate that, to VDW, he was not such a strong bet as, say, Rifle Brigade, Orchestra and Derrylin.

Statajack said

4 good things in one day
I would add
6 from 12 if I remember correctly on a bank holiday
I can assure you it is not unusual says VDW
Has anybody here had that amount in one day
So back to the Key/Missing link
And
“Once you find it you will have the same horses as myself”
“you will see everything is true once you find that missing link”
VDW’s words
But a bit of a contradiction re temperament

All,

Some very good postings, I don't know quite where to start. I didn't have the form books for the Erin so a lot of the work was done for me. That is not to say I didn't spend many hours looking at the race, and trying to make sense of it. As I have already said I started back to front, having studied Roushayd first.

It wasn't until I applied my understanding of that (right or wrong) that I started to make sense of the consistency method. For me the main difference is the change in the main filters. Improving, and a drop in class, is replaced by consistency and the betting forecast. The other elements still apply, the main one, is has the horse EVER shown it has the class to win this race.

Crock asks after all this work would I still be happy to except PK as the selection and the bet. The answer to that is a resounding yes. Caprichio on Saturday followed the same profile to a tee.

Satatajack asks how did vdw have the time to find so many selections on the same day. I think he had a set profile to find the class/form horse, after finding it the time was then spent on analysing THAT horse. Mr Hall used the same papers as vdw, and I thought for a long time the speed + feature in the Sporting Chronicle tied in somewhere. I have since been informed there was no speed + figures for the Erin. So it wasn't that, but as speed is a big part of 2 of his methods. I'm sure it plays a part in this one. Why did he keep saying speed by it's self is not enough, why is it mentioned when he talked about ability (before the actual ability rating was mentioned) I can't believe vdw assesed the Erin without looking at ability, but as Satatajack says the method he used was not the one he later explained. PK could not have been top or joint of that.

Guest.

I don't have BL failing on form, for me he fails on CLASS. Also you say speed isn't the key, because many of the Irish horses didn't have a s/f. Why is that important when you only use winning form for the ability rating? Why is it ok to ignore some form but then worry because a horse hasn't got a s/f?

Be Lucky

Mtoto

I'm really puzzled by your point re class.

I'd have thought that Prominent King's classiest run prior to the 1978 Erin was when a close 3rd in the 1976 Triumph Hurdle.

But that year, and in 1977, Night Nurse won the Champion Hurdle, which I take it everyone would agree is classier than the Triumph. Beacon Light, who was the Champion Novice Hurdler in 1976, came 6th in the 1977 Champion Hurdle, and then went on to beat Night Nurse and the third in the race, Dramatist, in the 1977 Kempton Christmas Hurdle, in a fast run race.

It is the case that BL had never actually won a race of class 90: just one of class 85 (and, of course, nor had Prominent King). But in terms of their ability (and, without any doubt, their ORs) Beacon Light had beaten horses every bit as classy as any in the Erin.

On what are you basing your argument that BL fell short in terms of class? It can't, surely, be sfs. As Night Nurse demonstrated in 1976 and 1977, the classiest hurdle race of all can be won in sfs as disparate as 101 and 128: the former a slightly lower sf than BL achieved when beating NN in the Christmas Hurdle.

Fulham

There are a quite a few pieces of the VDW methodology that seem quite illogical to me
One is the closeness of the class ratings as used in some of VDW’s examples
I am not trying to be smart or demean anybody least of all yourself as your eloquent posts I would never be able to match.

You say BL had never won a race of class 90 and state only won one at 85
Do you think that 9% difference in class of race as determined by value in this case is strong enough to use as a guide or as part of a filter.
By todays terms its Like saying £20,000 against £21,800
I would just like hear your view on this seeing as nobody would comment when I raised the same issue before

Nice one Barney
A lousy price but Donkey Derbys dont take much winning

Boozer

No, I don't think that there is any material difference between a class 90 and a class 85 race: hence (in part) my view that Beacon Light was far from out-faced tackling a race of the class of the Erin. But I also take the view that the class of a race can, in isolation, be misleading. Also relevant is the class of the horses contesting it. But on this score, also, my conclusion is that - solely on class terms - BL was quite up to winning the Erin.

Similarly, I don't think marginal differences in ability ratings are very significant. When he introduced his ability rating method, VDW was very modest about it: "... not foolproof, but ... usually it is unwise to stray from the top few ... a guide and should be used in conjunction with other factors". And that is how, in my view, it should be used.

If one takes the first twenty examples VDW gave (leaving out ones like Little Nugget and Uther Pendragon where is it far from clear, to me at least, in the text that they were bets), by my reckoning only four were top rated on ability (within the first five or six in the betting, as appropriate). But, as with the Erin race, in other cases plenty of the higher ability-rated horses were not "in form", or by-passed for other reasons.

Fulham,
If it was a rating of "in form ability horses" this could only have been discovered by checking the form first. It seems quite clear to me that this was not the case,
"using 2 methods of rating.....both methods showed beacon light well out of it and his last race had been a hard one etc". He goes on:- "PK had the edge by one method and was level using the other. Upon checking the form..." This tells me that the ratings came first. I wonder, could you tell me BL's Raceform handicap ratings for each of his last 3 runs before the Erin? Im not saying they were one of the two sets of ratings but the result may tell us something interesting....

Boozer,
Off the top of my head I think the 6 in one day were examples and not actually bets. What page/book are you referring to?

Mtooto,
I your see dyslexia has back come. Is everything KO?
"Satatajack asks how did vdw have the time to find so many selections on the same day. I think he had a set profile to find the class/form horse" So do I!