Barney

Library quality copies: alas some of mine are kept together with elastic bands!

Glad you got some. If you are looking for earlier years, the three sources apart from John Pickering I found most prolific were as below (I hope that Gummy's recent post re advertising permits this: if I'm transgressing, apologies):

Janet Carter - 01638 717619

Way - 01638 507217

Browzers - 0161 773 2327.

It took me nearly three months from scratch to get Flat and NH complete from 1976 to 1989, and I found it worth checking with the above sources about every three weeks. (They all offered to take details and get in touch when relevant copies came in, but that happened only once. However, usually when I rang again three to four weeks later I was lucky enough to fill one or two gaps.)

Incidentally, price varies with age and condition, of course, and I guess you had to pay more for the quality bindings you report. But ordinarily one should get copies for the years of most interest to those interested in working through VDW's examples for £10 or less a copy. I hope no one will be tempted into paying the £28 or £30 or more a copy that is sometimes asked for by non-specialist bookdealers on the net.

Any Thoughts on Java Sea in the 4.20 at Bangor.
Gets alot of plus points.2nd highest class lto,
2nd Top on Ability,most consistant.Not ran for
55 days but has ran well after a break before.
Only horse with a SF from a group A course.Hasn`t
won with this weight before but its not a high
class race so will the weight matter that much?
Has other positive factors also and the oposition
looks weak.I won`t be backing it because i`m
not betting a the moment and i will not be betting
till i`m confident that i understand the method.
I don`t like backing losers and wasting my hard
earned cash.

regards

Maggsy

Hi Maggsy,

Whilst it looked the likely winner today there were negatives against Java Sea, and weight, for me, was a big issue and in the end left us with questions unanswered.

hello everyone i thought the above horse,had a lot of things going for him today,but was his last run the main reasons he should,nt have been invested in.any comments would be greatly appreciated...regards investor

At first glance both of these had a fair amount going for them but as Lee pointed out, the weight issue on its own would have been enough to leave out Java Sea, especially at the price it went off at. No weight problems with Step on eyre and it had run well before pulling up last run but in both cases there was no "winner in the race". It really is a cryptic clue and "once you find it everything will be so clear you will wonder how on earth you could miss it" to coin a phrase.

regards

big race today lingfield

2 winners in a race one won

statajack.thanks for that just rechecked, and the penny,s well and truly dropped,..barney if i,ve interpretated statajack correctly,there was no"winner in the race" at lingfield either my friend,i may be wrong but i don,t think so,hopefully statajack will confirm it..investor

Investor,
Now the hard work really begins.

regards,

Dear all VDWers,

Ever since I first found Gummy’s site so many months ago I have been an avid reader of the VDW thread – I’d never heard of him before. However, having read EVERY entry at least a dozen times I am still no further forward in understanding what it’s all about – in fact my success rate has declined from its former moderate 20% to around 5%-10%. All this despite spending 1 to 2 hours minimum trying to weigh up each race I look at.

I admit that I start at a huge disadvantage in that I have no form books whatsoever, so I can’t examine his past examples to try and find why such and such a horse won a certain race. I did think though that I might at least glean a few clues from such obviously smart thinkers as Mtoto, Fulham, Swish, Guest etc. Also, my only source of information is the on-line RP, which at our slow download rates here takes an age to gather – at least 1 minute per page, sometimes up to 5 minutes. How I yearn for the days when the Sporting Life newspaper used to tell you how much money the horse had won!

Obviously I am wrong, but it seems to me that the only way to understand VDW is to buy all the old form-books, find all his examples, pore over them for countless hours in search of enlightenment and then – perhaps 20 years in the future if you’re lucky – the penny will drop as to why those particular horse won those particular races 20 years ago.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the basics as I understand it are that the best class horses win races where all the variables of weight, distance, going, course type are in their favour. This I can agree with. However, working out when all these variables are in their favour per VDW ideas seems to be way beyond my limited intellect. I can’t believe that randomly totting up the last three form figures or counting the days since the horse last ran is the way to go. For by this method, the winner of three sellers in the last three weeks would prove superior to a horse that was 5th btn 1l in a 120,000-pound hcap in its last run a month ago.

Where speed comes in I also don’t know, but while adding an extra weight burden will eventually force a horse up in class to run against horses it can’t beat, taking weight off cannot make a horse run faster than its best. This is why I question the Topspeed figures that are all adjusted for 12st (10st Flat). To my logic it is better to (un)-correct figures to speed rating ACTUALLY achieved and note the weight carried. How to make any use of these figures when there is a major change in weights is still a conundrum though.

As Internet and time limitations restrict my ability to tot up all winnings and divide by number of races won – even form printouts only record race values as 3K, 10K etc. – I can only estimate the ‘class’ of horse by the highest value race won. How dire this is I don’t know.

Where my major problems seem to lie however is deciding when recent form is relevant and when ‘old’ form is the deciding factor. It seems that if I pick the horse that won last time out then the horse with the better old form will win, while if I go with the better old form then the horse that won last time out (but in much lower class) wins yet again.

Obviously this is all so glaringly simple to you guys, but it is as clear as mud to the likes of me. Given my lifetime problems with learning other languages – 25 years in Indonesia and I still can’t speak the language – I suppose it’s understandable that I can’t make sense of the double-Dutch of VDW. On the other hand though, I have always been good at cryptic crosswords – usually solve the Daily Telegraph one in about 2 hours or so (see they’ve now decided to charge, so that’s another of life’s small pleasures gone!)

Maybe in another 25 years or so – though I doubt I’ll live that long! – the penny might eventually drop. In the meantime though trying to apply VDW methods is the quickest way to the poor-house – you’d be better off following a newspaper tipster’s naps. So all ye who enter here be warned, it’s a long, hard road where the light at the end of the tunnel is only ever seen by a few. I don’t know, but I doubt if one in a hundred ever understands enough to make VDW even remotely workable. Certainly after five months study or so I for one am far more confused than when I first started. It has also shattered my confidence of ever picking the winner of a handicap again – I discovered long ago that for me, betting in non-handicaps always brought losses as with the prices of my winners the inevitable loosing runs quickly wiped out any gains.

Still good luck to you ‘chosen few’ in that you understand the ‘message’. Feel pity for us morons though that haven’t a clue what your cryptic messages back and forth mean. We’re just the dumb punters the bookies love!!

Oldtimer

oldtimer,

do not give up,start at the begining

check off the first five in the betting
find the three most consistent from these
have a quick look at them to see if there is a standout horse,if not no bet today (that is the hard part).


good luck

morning statajack..i know i,ve got a long way to go,but with staying up all night back checking i,m totally convinced that i understand where the more versed(like yourself)in vdw are coming from, i also understand,why certain comments have been made i.e by yourself to guest on saturday,and why certain horses one of which was mentioned by yourself,were good things,so thanks again mate...investor

Oldtimer

Do you have a copy of the compilation of VDW's early letters and articles entitled "The Golden Years of Van der Wheil"? Because I think that anyone reading this thread without having read through that compilation rather carefully is bound to find quite a lot that is posted fairly incomprehensible.

If you haven't, the booklet is available from Browzers (who have a website) and its really very cheap - about £10 I think. Life is not exactly straightforward when you've read it, and I know what you mean about cryptic messages. But on the back of that booklet (and one of Jock Bingham's - "Four Ways to Win"), I've kept myself comfortably "in the black" for some years.

The reason some of us have gathered together collections of the old Form Books, and are burning the midnight oil on the examples VDW gave, is hope of IMPROVING on existing performances, towards the 80%+ strike rate VDW claimed and others seem to have achieved.

Whether for the likes of Mtoto, Barney and myself that kind of strike rate will be achieved will only become clear in time. But for those who haven't the opportunity or the inclination to research those old examples, I'd nevertheless be confident that with an outlay of about £20 on the two booklets I've referred to, and some careful study of them, they'd readily improve on their existing success rates, and be able to pick up a great deal more from this thread.

i owe you an apology,with regard intersky falcon,the penny dropped recently and i realize there was no winner in the race,so sorry again kind regards investor.

Barney

I'll soldier on I guess, though also keeping my old ideas going. The trouble is I can generally get it down to three or so. It's chosing between them that gives me the headache!

Fulham

Thanks for the advice on the books. I must get them when I can - no credit card I'm afraid, which make life difficult.

The only things I have read is here on Gummy's site - the most complete I can find on the web. Nowhere else tells me anything that's not already here. I had a feeling that I'd come in somewhere in the middle of a film, now I at least know I have.

Many thanks to you both for your words of encouragement, I'll soldier on somehow and maybe things will start clicking into place.

Oldtimer

oldtimer,

gummy has some of the vdw booklets and i think he accepts payment with the electronic cheque system,
if you mail him i am sure you 2 can work something out.

good luck!

I first looked at this site around Christmas and posed a couple of fairly naive questions. Since then I have got all the VDW booklets and most of the relevant form books. The work involved in analysing the races mentioned will obviously take some considerable time, but I have started with the "spells it all out letter" for the reason that I imagine that it contains the most detail.

I would like to go through my findings/research as it happens and post about once a week with these thoughts, questions or whatever. If you all think that's silly or pointless then let me know and I won't bother.

In the time that I have had, I've been reading carefully the articles of VDW and others, hopefully with an open and inquiring mind.

My first two submissions are thus:

1. The % game

VDW gives his %s for horses with certain form figures (eg 111 = 33% chance of winning next time out). Whether these figures still hold true is not relevant - the point is a horse that has 111 has more chance than 946. He went on to say that consistency figures 3-3-3 gave a 99% chance next time out. Now assuming the 3-3-3 relates to 3 horses with 111 form, this is patent nonsense. The chances of a horse winning are related to the quality of opposition. If a horse has 111 then ON AVERAGE it will win 33% next time out. But put it in a race with 2 others of similar consistency?

Put another way, if there were 4 such horses, would there be a 132% chance of one of them winning??

BUT (and this is my first real point) does the sum of the first three consistent horses figures reveal the races in which to bet??


2. Weight

Why is this not talked about more in the letters or articles?

That's it for now. Regrettably, and it seems to come to most of us, the decorating God has called me into his fold so time is limited on the research front.

All the best

AJ

AJ,

In ‘numbers game to form a picture’ VDW is merely confirming his view that consistent horses win a high percentage of races and goes on to give some figures from his survey. VDW also stated that these percentages were based purely on form figures and ALL other factors were disregarded. So in short, this part of the letter was only written to confirm his earlier suggestion that it is consistent horses that we should be looking for, with this particular method.

Many I have spoke to about VDW seem to get tied up with this letter which is in my opinion because of the reply that G Hall wrote in early 1979. He stated that after VDW elaborated following comments by the Methodmaker (numbers game to form a picture) he spotted the ‘key’. It is my view that the elaboration that G Hall spoke of came not in the form of his findings regarding percentage wins next time out, but in the form of the good things that VDW gave as examples in the same letter; namely, Celtic Pleasure, Little Nugget, Battlement, Strombolus etc.

Weight was certainly talked about by VDW on many occasions. Many subtle hints and nudges were given regarding horses that had a weight issue, Canny Danny is one, and of course Crown Matrimonial, Parkhouse, and Ascencia were others, but were given for a different reason.

It is all there, just not in textbook fashion. But this was how VDW intended it to be, in order that only those who are willing to put in the work would eventually realise the true worth of the methods that he was sharing.

Lee

I'm not at all sure that VDW saw Little Nugget as a good thing. I made what I now think of as the mistake of thinking that myself, but on re-reading the relevant section I suggest that it if far from clear that VDW was giving it as one of his selections.

Fulham,

You are right in what you say; it was the way I placed it alongside others in the text that was slightly wrong. VDW felt it necessary to bring our attention to this horse though for good reasons, and it's well worth looking in to if you haven't already.

hello everyone..i,ve been sat looking at the r.p for half an hour,trying to reassure myself i did right not backing EL BLADE all the research i,ve done over the last 4 months,tells me it had a lot going for it but a few factors against will someone please put me out of my misery please.also would vdw have classed the 5.05 at sandown as full of non discripts,i don,t think so..regards investor.