Paul is this the sort of thing your after? these are current pars for the class.

RACEFORM SPEED FIGURE PARS

G1 112
G2 111
G3 108
LST 107
C2 108
C3 105
C4 103
C5 100
C6 99
C7 96

RACEFORM RATING & RPR`S PARS

G1 122
G2 118
G3 113
LST 108
C2 102
C3 95
C4 86
C5 75
C6 64
C7 54

BHB PARS

G1 113
G2 108
G3 106
LST 100
C2 91
C3 85
C4 76
C5 67
C6 57
C7 46

TOPSPEED PARS

G1 117
G2 109
G3 102
LST 98
C2 94
C3 85
C4 79
C5 65
C6 62
C7 52

is vdw saying when he can discount some horses that they are not fast enough at best and not far enough along the road to reach there not good enough speed figure

Les

Van der Wheil strikes me as equivocal on sfs on the NH at least. He certainly used them in "Systematic Betting" to help explain when Desert Orchid should be backed or left, but item 47 of "The Golden Years" hardly suggests they were central.

well george am going to have a wee go at topspeeds when latest and best are top rated with good ability and consistency rating i,ll let you know what they are if i,ve time and we can see what there like

I dont have the form books les so cant comment but i know that Beacon Light had had a busy campaign up to the Irish race was btn fav lto at Sandown (had been fancied in market in previous runs and had won) in a lower class race and had had a hard race in that race. So in hindsight it would seem as if BL had been campaigned with earlier prizes in mind - form cycles again perhaps one (PK) on the up the other (BL) goosed for the season?.
Either that or you could take the alternative view that even if BL had been at peak he would still not have been good enough to win the Erin?.

was beacon lights speed figure going down if he had one at that time

Think mtoto said once that BL s/f from Sandown was pretty good?.

was it going up or down?

Does it matter?.

If there was a pace on id imagine it would be ok.

Suppose what we need to know les is if there is a pace on then the horse in question needs to be in form or good enough anyway to compete.One way or the other Beacon Light was an empty box as far as mr vdw`s 2 rating`s were concerned.

dont know where i read this but did vdw not hint that he only backed when there was an improved speed figure

I would say the one common factor between the 9 methods I mentioned previously is that they all produce or trap a good percentage of winners. Horses from a list are not backed automatically so evaluation of the race they are competing in must take place. Whether we are looking at 3 from a narrowing of the field or 1 from a list the method of evaluation should be along similar lines and this is represented by VDW's formula.
We should be looking to see if any of the horses we are interested in represents a good betting proposition. This is not the same as looking to see if they are going to win. Thought then should be given to which set of ratings to choose as a guide to these good propositions. Any ratings based on a single factor such as time or form can be misleading if the top rates are in a situation where certain factors are against the horse. Ratings such as Speed Plus could be a better option for what we are looking for. Although they are initially based on speed figures, other factors are added in, such as trainer form. They are just the opinion of 2 or 3 tipsters working together and the ratings themselves are just notional with the top rate always being 100. What they are trying to show are the horses with the best chances taking into account as many factors as possible. I believe VDW's ratings are based on similar lines.
I apologise if any of the above sounds condescending in any way or as if it has come straight out of the literature and I am certainly not advertising Speed Plus. Now, on to VDW's formula.
The 4 factors of the formula are consistent form, ability, capability and probability. We won't count the hard work because that goes without saying.
As I see it, there are 3 ways that the formula can be interpreted.
Firstly, as a complete set of ratings; consistency rating, ability rating, capability rating and probability rating. I did toy with this idea at one time but it is highly unlikely it was used this way.
Secondly, consistency rating, ability rating and capability in its true sense i.e whether the horse is capable of performing in the present class, on the course, at the distance and on the going. The combination of these first 3 factors then shows if the horse is a probable winner or not.
Either of these first 2 options could tie in quite easily with the illustrations in Spells it all Out.
Thirdly, performance (form), level of that performance (class) and capability as shown in option 2. Again the combination of these 3 factors shows if the horse is a probable winner or not. This third option ties in with the illustrations in Systematic Betting.
I'm sure there are other interpretations out there.

Paul
Method 9 was from Ultimate Wheil of Fortune p28 para 8.

Garston

quote:

We should be looking to see if any of the horses we are interested in represents a good betting proposition. This is not the same as looking to see if they are going to win.

Are you aware of Van der Wheil's letter to Mr Spiers reproduced in "Silver Lining", which seems to take the opposite view, ie it winners we want, not what these days are sometimes called "value bets".

WALTER
Thanks for the speed figure's.

What i was looking for was somthing that proved that the figure was a genuine figure, as you can see depending on what figure's are used a horse can fall into different categories.

[QUOTE]les henderson

dont know where i read this but did vdw not hint that he only backed when there was an improved speed figure

.............................................................

Les an extreme example - when Coe and Ovett were dominating the middle distance scene the other athletes tried every tactic in the book to beat them. Slowed the pace to a crawl / run the legs of them / box them in / boot them of the track in the end.
As a consequence not every performance registered at the track would result in a personal best or improved time - having said that you would`nt bet against them winning?.

LES
If i remember correctly, the year(can not remember which) when there was a very large amount of fav's won at the cheltenham festival you will find loads of winning horses that were top 4 ability and 3 most consistent, plus they had recorded s/f when the latest s/f was better than it's previous best. After that meeting for me anyway it went pear shaped . However if there was a way of confirming the s/f was genuine then maybe we can move forward with this method.

Walter
Again i can not remember the year but i seem to remember coe being fav for 800m and ovett winning , and ovett being fav for 1500m and coe winning or was it the other way around.So even the humans get the wrong distance from time to time. I'm confused so i'm going to have a lye down now .

When discussing the two, Van der Wheil writes "Prominent King had the edge by one method and was level using the other", making Prominent King the best of the five on the two rating methods, a bit better than Mr Kildare.

George,

While I agree the above is correct, nowhere does it say MK was the horse that was level or just behind PK. While some look in amazement at PK being the top rated in front of BL, I can see no way MK could also be in front of him. So how about and I'm not saying this is defiantly how it worked, the horse that was just pipped on the ratings was Monksfield, but as he wasn't consistent he was eliminated. BL was the 3rd best in but well held. Leaving MK with a couple of big question marks as his flat class makes it impossible to ignore. I can make this work using a rating I think VDW used, and it also doesn't add words and read as VDW said.

******************

quote:

was beacon lights speed figure going down if he had one at that time

Les,

The answer to your question is yes it was lower than his last figure. They read (last first) 106, 109, 103,

However this isn't an answer one way or the other as two horses that were selections Celtic pleasure, last three figures read (again last first) 50, 82, 76. and Baronet who's figures were 54, 89, 84.

So the fact the last s/f was lower than the one before doesn't prove a lot.

Be Lucky

Mtoto

quote:

So how about and I'm not saying this is defiantly how it worked, the horse that was just pipped on the ratings was Monksfield,

Surely that suggestion founders on the first sentence of the fourth last paragraph:

"Using two methods of rating all five horses [Decent Fellow, Beacon Light, Monksfield, Prominent King, Mr Kildare] I found that the three starred horses [Beacon Light, Prominent King, Mr Kildare] came out best."

Thinking further about these two methods of rating, I wonder if one could be related to a point you highlighted a couple of days ago, improvement. Using Van der Wheil's class measure as the basis, and focusing on each horse's last race in relation to its penultimate one:

Decent Fellow: 3rd class 22, having previously won a class 117.
Beacon Light: 2nd class 39, having previously won a class 44.
Monksfield: bad 6th class 14, having previously been 3rd, class 10.
Prominent King: 2nd class 6, having previously been 2nd class 14.
Mr Kildare: won class 14, having previously won class 7.

On the face of it, only Mr Kildare clearly showed improvement. But as I see it Prominent King as a selection only makes sense if Van der Wheil saw his 2nd to Drumgora, giving all that weight away, when Drumgora had previously come 3rd in a class 117, as a marked improvement, ie the class 117 "rubs off" from Drumgora to Prominent King to some degree. On that basis he, too, was improving.

Decent Fellow was clearly not improving, and nor was Beacon Light, though relatively speaking his performance was the better as he came a close 2nd only dropped a little in class whereas Decent Fellow came a poor third when dropped a mile. Monksfield is the difficult one. He was raised in class a touch last time out, but was well beaten (13+l, probably quite a lot more than 13+l as he came 6th and the 4th was beaten 12.75l) and previously he had only been beaten 6.75l in the class 10. Not hard to see Van der Wheil regarding that later run as not an improvement.

I can't at the moment see how Van der Wheil might have combined class change, position change and performance (perhaps distance beaten taking weight into account) to give a numerical or category rating, but I can see an outcome in which Mr Kildare and Prominent King were viewed as improving, the other three as deteriorating but Beacon Light deteriorating significantly the least of the three. That could fit the description in the 4th and 3rd last paragraphs of the Erin letter.