Further to my post of 24 October in which I mentioned the impending retirement of Alan Seddon and the closure of Browzers, the text below is a summary of some email exchanges with Alan and has been agreed by him in terms:
"Over the years I've purchased items from Browzers Books and did so again last week, noting from their website when I did so that Alan Seddon, the proprietor, is retiring at the end of the year and that the business is to close.
I met Alan once when I visited Tony Peach's home, and he therefore knows of my interest in matters VDW. After my recent purchase he emailed me re the VDW aspect of his business - Browzers being far and away the main stockist of the various VDW booklets and other material published by Tony's company, Moss Publications. Alan is wondering whether any VDWer might be interested in taking on the VDW aspect of Browzer's business.
I asked Alan what that would mean in practice. Currently Browzers has upwards of 2000 VDW and related items (the various VDW booklets plus other Moss publications such as the Marvex and Streak pamphlets), though the stock of a couple (most notably "The Ultimate Wheil of Fortune" and "Silver Lining") are either exhausted or very low. In addition to the current stock, in association with Tony, Alan is able to offer the rights to reprint the various booklets and the originals from which reprinting would take place, currently held by the printer Tony uses. In short, what is potentially available is a small business with the rights to publish the various VDW booklets and the other Moss publications, the original copies from which further print runs could be undertaken, and Browzers remaining stock of such booklets. As far as I can see, this includes everything of any worth, VDW-wise, possibly even including the agreement of Raceform for the republishing of "Systematic Betting", but that is subject to confirmation.
Alan tells me that despite not having made any positive efforts to advertise the VDW material over the last couple of years, with Tony having retired, sales of the various booklets continue, and he would of course re-direct any orders/enquiries to anyone who took on the VDW aspect of his business.
The cost of taking on the VDW aspect of the business - stock, original copies of the booklets and republishing rights - is no doubt for negotiation, but Alan has indicated that he and Tony would be looking for around £3,000.
If any VDWer is interested in this opportunity, do contact Alan Seddon direct, at Browzers."
Monday, 29 October 2012
Friday, 26 October 2012
Class/ability 2
One can only get so far by looking at one race, but as expected the 3.15 Doncaster today proved interesting, with none of the top five as rated by VDW's basic ability rating making the frame and only one of the three other horses who had won races of at least the same class as today's doing so. In the event the race was won by the horse ranked 15th of 17 on ability, with the placed horses ranked 9th, 7= and 11th respectively.
VDW's ability rating has three virtues: it is undoubtedly a discriminating measure of ability (based on the simple hypothesis that a horse which on average wins races of class 100 is better than one which on average wins races of class 40); it is easy to calculate, and it can be applied as easily to handicaps and non handicaps. But for the Flat especially VDW was clear that it had its limitations, namely it does not enable one to "get a full measure" of the ability of younger horses.
In my view, for assessing Flat handicaps VDW's ability rating has three limitations:
1) as VDW himself stated, it does not always enable one to "get a full measure" of ability, not just with very young horses but also in my experience with horses as old as 5. For a common pattern is that decent handicappers improve not just from 2 to 3, but also from 3 to 4, and from 4 to 5, and indeed a not insignificant number improve furher from 5 to 6 and even from 6 to 7. This is partly a matter of date of birth, partly rate of maturation, and partly a question of experience. The winner today was the second most exposed horse in the race with 67 runs prior to today and only Advanced with 81 having had more. By contrast Head Of Steam, as a 5yo only a year younger than Thunderball, had had only 12. Plainly much more likely that the VDW ability rating will have the "full measure" of the likes of Advanced and Thunderball than of the likes of Head Of Steam and younger horses still such as Prodigality and Khubala;
2) the ability rating is career-encompassing and thus assumes, even for horses for which, arguably, it does give "a full measure", that the ability level doesn't drop. And indeed VDW does assume that: "Usually ability will remain static, fluctuate slightly, progress steadily upwards or rise sharply. Ability cannot eventually fade ..." That, of course, is nonsense. Both a horse's actual ability, and his ability rating, can and do fade: not infrequently we see horses able to contest and win decent class handicaps as 4 or 5yos running in claimers and sellers as 9yos and older, no longer able to contest decent handicaps and with every claimer they win seeing their ability ratings drop;
3) the ability rating does not lend itself to assessing the chance of a horse in a race being analysed. One can, of course, make the kind of comparison I made in my earlier post today - ie that seven out of the 17 runners had previously won races of at least the same class as today's, and the even stronger point that four of them won races of at least today's class on average when they won. But in addition to not taking account of good but not winning performances, the basic ability rating does not permit the dynamic factor of relative weight to be brought into the equation. For example, top weighted Secret Witness had won a higher class race than today's earlier this season - a class 129 on 16/05/12. So in theory today's class 104 was well within his competence. But he won that race, by 0.5l, off an Official Rating of 94. Today he was running off 105, 11lb higher in the relative weights. The Form Book records that 16/05/12 win as achieved "driven out", which hardly suggests he would have won the race had he been carrying an extra 11lb. Yet, apart from his far from unimportant weight mechanism illustrated with the likes of Stray Shot and Zamandra, VDW had no means of bringing that element into his calculations.
Not, of course, that it was easy to do so when VDW was writing his letters and articles, because only those with the indefatigability of Marvex addressed the issue, and by his own admission Marvex devoted "between 70 and 80 hours a week to the job" and "in addition I have a certain amount of assistance on the clerical side, say a total of 150 hours in all". With his full time jobs as first a radio mechanic and later in the Market Harborough hosiery trade, VDW did not have that amount of time available.
But we are more fortunate, for we have information about relative weights readily available, and that is why I reached the conclusion some while ago that using Official Ratings offered a better means of assessing the class of races, and the ability of horses, than VDW's ability rating, a means that enables each of the three limitations with the VDW ability rating to be addressed.
The method was first suggested to me by Guy Ward ("the Mathematician") and almost simultaneously demonstrated in action with considerable success by "John In Brasil" from the Gummy and other forums. The way I use it is simple: I merely sum the Official Ratings of the runners in a race, make some adjustment when there are horses running from outside the handicap, and divide by the number of runners. Thus today's 3.15 Doncaster is, for my purposes, a race of class 91.8.
One could use figures of that kind in a similar way to that in which VDW used win prize money: one could sum the average OR of each race a horse has won, divide by the number of wins, and use that for ranking the field and comparing to the class of the race being analysed. But that wouldn't deal with any of the three limitations referred to above.
But if one adds the OR the winner ran off to the class of the race won as measured by the average OR, one gets a different rating: in the case of the winner today the rating for the race would be 177.8. And one can adjust that for the winning margin, though obviously there is not much to be added for the neck by which Thunderball beat Ancient Cross.
With ratings of this kind one is in a position to take account of relative weight. To revert to Secret Witness's win on 16/05/12, that race was very similar to today's in terms of average ORs - 91.6. He won by 0.5l off 94, which gives a rating of around 186.0. We can then compare that rating to the task facing Secret Witness today - winning a class 91.8 off 105. That is, in the terms of this method of rating, to win today Secret Witness would have had to return a rating of at least 196.8 (91.8 + 105), ie a rating 10 above his last winning one.
Compare Secret Witness to the winner today. Thunderball's last winning run was on 11/05/12, a race of average OR 86.7, well below the class of today's race or that of Secret Witness's win on 16/05/12. No chance that Thunderball would beat Secret Witness, one would conclude. But the picture changes when one factors in relative weight. Because today Secret Witness was running in a race of almost the same class as on 16/05/12 off 11lb more in the relative weights. Thunderball was running in a race 5.1 higher in average OR but off 4lb less in the relative weights. Whereas to win Secret Witness had to record a rating about 10 higher than on 16/05/12, bearing in mind that Thunderball had won by a comfortable 1.25l on 11/05/12 he only had to return a similar rating. Or, put another way, one could argue that today Thunderball had an 10lb pull over Secret Witness based on their last winning runs, ie about 2.5l over 6f.
Obviously comparison based on last winning runs some five months ago offers no definitive answer to the question which of the two would beat the other - other highly relevant factors would be evidence of improved ability since May, an appraisal of the two horses' recent form, and the question of conditions (distance, going, course type, draw etc). But the approach outlined does offer an alternative means of assessing race class and horse ability which, when accompanied by a measure of realistic potential, addresses all three of the limitations of VDW's ability rating.
Least anyone should think I regarded Thunderball as the most likely winner today, not so. But in the field of 17, only Colonel Mak had put in a winning handicap run in 2012 which, when assessed in the way just demonstrated, made him a more likely winner than Thunderball.
VDW's ability rating has three virtues: it is undoubtedly a discriminating measure of ability (based on the simple hypothesis that a horse which on average wins races of class 100 is better than one which on average wins races of class 40); it is easy to calculate, and it can be applied as easily to handicaps and non handicaps. But for the Flat especially VDW was clear that it had its limitations, namely it does not enable one to "get a full measure" of the ability of younger horses.
In my view, for assessing Flat handicaps VDW's ability rating has three limitations:
1) as VDW himself stated, it does not always enable one to "get a full measure" of ability, not just with very young horses but also in my experience with horses as old as 5. For a common pattern is that decent handicappers improve not just from 2 to 3, but also from 3 to 4, and from 4 to 5, and indeed a not insignificant number improve furher from 5 to 6 and even from 6 to 7. This is partly a matter of date of birth, partly rate of maturation, and partly a question of experience. The winner today was the second most exposed horse in the race with 67 runs prior to today and only Advanced with 81 having had more. By contrast Head Of Steam, as a 5yo only a year younger than Thunderball, had had only 12. Plainly much more likely that the VDW ability rating will have the "full measure" of the likes of Advanced and Thunderball than of the likes of Head Of Steam and younger horses still such as Prodigality and Khubala;
2) the ability rating is career-encompassing and thus assumes, even for horses for which, arguably, it does give "a full measure", that the ability level doesn't drop. And indeed VDW does assume that: "Usually ability will remain static, fluctuate slightly, progress steadily upwards or rise sharply. Ability cannot eventually fade ..." That, of course, is nonsense. Both a horse's actual ability, and his ability rating, can and do fade: not infrequently we see horses able to contest and win decent class handicaps as 4 or 5yos running in claimers and sellers as 9yos and older, no longer able to contest decent handicaps and with every claimer they win seeing their ability ratings drop;
3) the ability rating does not lend itself to assessing the chance of a horse in a race being analysed. One can, of course, make the kind of comparison I made in my earlier post today - ie that seven out of the 17 runners had previously won races of at least the same class as today's, and the even stronger point that four of them won races of at least today's class on average when they won. But in addition to not taking account of good but not winning performances, the basic ability rating does not permit the dynamic factor of relative weight to be brought into the equation. For example, top weighted Secret Witness had won a higher class race than today's earlier this season - a class 129 on 16/05/12. So in theory today's class 104 was well within his competence. But he won that race, by 0.5l, off an Official Rating of 94. Today he was running off 105, 11lb higher in the relative weights. The Form Book records that 16/05/12 win as achieved "driven out", which hardly suggests he would have won the race had he been carrying an extra 11lb. Yet, apart from his far from unimportant weight mechanism illustrated with the likes of Stray Shot and Zamandra, VDW had no means of bringing that element into his calculations.
Not, of course, that it was easy to do so when VDW was writing his letters and articles, because only those with the indefatigability of Marvex addressed the issue, and by his own admission Marvex devoted "between 70 and 80 hours a week to the job" and "in addition I have a certain amount of assistance on the clerical side, say a total of 150 hours in all". With his full time jobs as first a radio mechanic and later in the Market Harborough hosiery trade, VDW did not have that amount of time available.
But we are more fortunate, for we have information about relative weights readily available, and that is why I reached the conclusion some while ago that using Official Ratings offered a better means of assessing the class of races, and the ability of horses, than VDW's ability rating, a means that enables each of the three limitations with the VDW ability rating to be addressed.
The method was first suggested to me by Guy Ward ("the Mathematician") and almost simultaneously demonstrated in action with considerable success by "John In Brasil" from the Gummy and other forums. The way I use it is simple: I merely sum the Official Ratings of the runners in a race, make some adjustment when there are horses running from outside the handicap, and divide by the number of runners. Thus today's 3.15 Doncaster is, for my purposes, a race of class 91.8.
One could use figures of that kind in a similar way to that in which VDW used win prize money: one could sum the average OR of each race a horse has won, divide by the number of wins, and use that for ranking the field and comparing to the class of the race being analysed. But that wouldn't deal with any of the three limitations referred to above.
But if one adds the OR the winner ran off to the class of the race won as measured by the average OR, one gets a different rating: in the case of the winner today the rating for the race would be 177.8. And one can adjust that for the winning margin, though obviously there is not much to be added for the neck by which Thunderball beat Ancient Cross.
With ratings of this kind one is in a position to take account of relative weight. To revert to Secret Witness's win on 16/05/12, that race was very similar to today's in terms of average ORs - 91.6. He won by 0.5l off 94, which gives a rating of around 186.0. We can then compare that rating to the task facing Secret Witness today - winning a class 91.8 off 105. That is, in the terms of this method of rating, to win today Secret Witness would have had to return a rating of at least 196.8 (91.8 + 105), ie a rating 10 above his last winning one.
Compare Secret Witness to the winner today. Thunderball's last winning run was on 11/05/12, a race of average OR 86.7, well below the class of today's race or that of Secret Witness's win on 16/05/12. No chance that Thunderball would beat Secret Witness, one would conclude. But the picture changes when one factors in relative weight. Because today Secret Witness was running in a race of almost the same class as on 16/05/12 off 11lb more in the relative weights. Thunderball was running in a race 5.1 higher in average OR but off 4lb less in the relative weights. Whereas to win Secret Witness had to record a rating about 10 higher than on 16/05/12, bearing in mind that Thunderball had won by a comfortable 1.25l on 11/05/12 he only had to return a similar rating. Or, put another way, one could argue that today Thunderball had an 10lb pull over Secret Witness based on their last winning runs, ie about 2.5l over 6f.
Obviously comparison based on last winning runs some five months ago offers no definitive answer to the question which of the two would beat the other - other highly relevant factors would be evidence of improved ability since May, an appraisal of the two horses' recent form, and the question of conditions (distance, going, course type, draw etc). But the approach outlined does offer an alternative means of assessing race class and horse ability which, when accompanied by a measure of realistic potential, addresses all three of the limitations of VDW's ability rating.
Least anyone should think I regarded Thunderball as the most likely winner today, not so. But in the field of 17, only Colonel Mak had put in a winning handicap run in 2012 which, when assessed in the way just demonstrated, made him a more likely winner than Thunderball.
Class (ability)
I think it quite likely that today's 3.15 Doncaster will prove useful as a focus for considering ability ratings.
If we take VDW's basic rating - total win prize money on flat or NH as appropriate, divided by races won - we get the following ratings for the 3.15:
343 - Advanced
136 - Head Of Steam
112 - Colonel Mak
106 - Cheveton
-------------------
090 - Nasri
086 - Grissom
072 - Jonny Mudball, Shropshire
068 - Ancient Cross
064 - Secret Witness
058 - Khubala
057 - Fitz Flyer, Prodigality
055 - Trade Secret
053 - Gatepost, West Leake Diman
045 - Thunderball
044 - Farlow
033 - Vito Volterra
The race itself is a class 104, so it follows that the top four are well able to win a race of today's class, as on average the class of the races they have each won is higher than 104.
In addition, several horses with ability ratings below 104 have won one or more races of class 104 or higher, namely:
Ancient Cross (highest class win a 130)
Grissom (218)
Nasri (125)
Secret Witness (130)
so it would have to be accepted that, on VDW's measure of class and ability, these four could also all in principle win today.
Given VDW's advice about ability ratings - "always mark off the four highest ability ratings", and his practice - not going below 5th highest with any of the winners he claimed, if one was assessing the 3.15 from a VDW main method perspective one wouldn't necessarily limit oneself to the top five from which to find the class/form horse, but if the class/form horse, once identified, was ranked 6th or lower on ability, he would be a selection but not a bet.
What to me is interesting about VDW's approach re ability is that it tends to leave out potential. For example, on the above reasoning from the evidence, VDW would not consider backing either Khubala or Prodigality, even if one of them turned out to be the VDW main method class/form horse. And indeed neither horse has won a race of today's class. But both are young (3 and 4 respectively) and have come very close to winning races of today's class - Khubala having won a class 100 and been a close second in a class 124, Prodigality having finished a close second in class 100 and 124 races. Irrespective of what happens in today's race, if they stay fit over the next year or two it is difficult not to see both horses winning races of over class 100.
We may well find in about forty minutes (I am typing this at about 2.40pm) that in this case VDW is proven correct, but I certainly won't be shocked if one of the younger, less exposed horses shows sufficient improvement to win. Over the season enough do so to make it necessary, in my view, to allow for realistic improvement when assessing ability.
If we take VDW's basic rating - total win prize money on flat or NH as appropriate, divided by races won - we get the following ratings for the 3.15:
343 - Advanced
136 - Head Of Steam
112 - Colonel Mak
106 - Cheveton
-------------------
090 - Nasri
086 - Grissom
072 - Jonny Mudball, Shropshire
068 - Ancient Cross
064 - Secret Witness
058 - Khubala
057 - Fitz Flyer, Prodigality
055 - Trade Secret
053 - Gatepost, West Leake Diman
045 - Thunderball
044 - Farlow
033 - Vito Volterra
The race itself is a class 104, so it follows that the top four are well able to win a race of today's class, as on average the class of the races they have each won is higher than 104.
In addition, several horses with ability ratings below 104 have won one or more races of class 104 or higher, namely:
Ancient Cross (highest class win a 130)
Grissom (218)
Nasri (125)
Secret Witness (130)
so it would have to be accepted that, on VDW's measure of class and ability, these four could also all in principle win today.
Given VDW's advice about ability ratings - "always mark off the four highest ability ratings", and his practice - not going below 5th highest with any of the winners he claimed, if one was assessing the 3.15 from a VDW main method perspective one wouldn't necessarily limit oneself to the top five from which to find the class/form horse, but if the class/form horse, once identified, was ranked 6th or lower on ability, he would be a selection but not a bet.
What to me is interesting about VDW's approach re ability is that it tends to leave out potential. For example, on the above reasoning from the evidence, VDW would not consider backing either Khubala or Prodigality, even if one of them turned out to be the VDW main method class/form horse. And indeed neither horse has won a race of today's class. But both are young (3 and 4 respectively) and have come very close to winning races of today's class - Khubala having won a class 100 and been a close second in a class 124, Prodigality having finished a close second in class 100 and 124 races. Irrespective of what happens in today's race, if they stay fit over the next year or two it is difficult not to see both horses winning races of over class 100.
We may well find in about forty minutes (I am typing this at about 2.40pm) that in this case VDW is proven correct, but I certainly won't be shocked if one of the younger, less exposed horses shows sufficient improvement to win. Over the season enough do so to make it necessary, in my view, to allow for realistic improvement when assessing ability.
Wednesday, 24 October 2012
Nearly a year
I'm amazed to find it is getting on for a year since I last added to this blog, and when I did I see I was pre-occupied with speeding up data downloading and had recently gone back to the redoubtable Peter Clayton.
In the event Peter was unable to help me so I struggled on for a while before casting around for someone else who might, and I struck absolute gold in finding an expert in Indonesia, Daniel. A more patient and competent Excel expert I doubt exists, and over the last ten months or so he has taken my Excel applications to new and previously unimagined levels.
I now have two main race analysis applications. The first is for downloading data, which was the bugbear of my life in peak season, when on a busy Saturday there could be up to twenty races I wanted to add to my database, which took care of most of Sunday morning. With Daniel's help I can now download all the data I want for a race in, literally, a minute. I open the Post's website, open the race details, select the complete data and paste it into the application. All I then have to do is click on a "post data" button and the data I want is added to an Excel sheet in exactly the same format as my database, unless there is a horse in the race running from outside the handicap, in which case another screen appears and I have to type in a number (depending on how much allowance I want to make for the outside of the handicap runners). Either way the whole process takes no more than a minute.
As a direct consequence, what used to take as much as two hours before now takes no more than 15-20 minutes, and most days about five, so no longer a grinding chore. But it has also opened up hitherto impracticable options:
1) in December 2011 I took the decision to stop collecting data for my handicap hurdle database so that I could add class 5 handicap data to my flat database (the class 5 data being essential for the analysis of class 4 handicaps, very often the best class races available on the AW from November to March). By about May 2012 I found I could easily collect data for all Flat handicaps and indeed decent non handicaps, not just run within the UK but also Ireland (as there is often one or more runners with Irish form in the better UK handicaps), so now my Flat database comprises every UK race except maidens, seller, claimers and very low class classifieds, and the better Irish handicaps and non handicaps;
2) because of the ease of adding data I spent some hours going back to 2011 to add the same data for that year, so now my four year database contains two years (2009 and 2010) of class 4 handicap data and two years (2011 and 2012) of much fuller data, with the result that nowadays only very rarely do I have to add any data manually to the results of running my analysis application;
3) also because of the ease of adding data I have added new elements to the database, with another three items per run for each horse;
4) finally, I have restarted collecting handicap hurdles data and gone back to include all handicaps and non handicaps except maidens and sellers for the 2010/11 and current seasons.
The second application, comprising my database and the various means I use to analyse races, has undergone similar development with Daniel's help. As a result, to analyse a race I merely have to open the card for the race on the Post site, select the contents, copy and past it to the application, press a "post it" button, shift to another page in the application, press a "select horses" button and then a "proceed" button, and within seconds are created summaries of what I regard as the key statistical data for the race - 26 cells per horse - as per those I post on the Mathematician's website, a second analysis sheet setting out the material needed to appraise the "form" horses as per VDW, and a career sheet for each horse with the relevant data for every run in the database. Not only that, but after data has been added to the database I can print out the same material, with the data for the recent race and results added, which is perfect for study purposes.
In short, the last ten months have seen the solution to the problem of the daily grind to update the database, a massive expansion of the database and the development of a parallel one for handicap hurdles, and a substantial improvement in the application for generating the material needed to analyse a race. For every three hours I have to spare for racing matters, nowadays only about 15-20 minutes is spent on data processing/manipulation, leaving a very much higher percentage of time available for the real work, analysing what the data tells us and identifying sound betting opportunities.
In parallel, Daniel has created two other applications for me. The first a means of interrogating my databases to get resolved all those VDW-related questions one tried to get Racing System Builder to answer but failed because that otherwise excellent application doesn't allow class to be handled the VDW way (or through what I regard as a better alternative). The second a means for me to explore whether or not there is anything in Kevin Booth's contention - in "ISIRIS Unveiled" - that one can learn a great deal through careful reading of bookmakers' early prices, to which end I've added two seasons' worth of Flat race early prices from the Pricewise columns and am looking forward to analysing it once the current turf season ends. (My current and very provisional view is that there is a lot less in it than Booth asserts, but more thorough exploration may lead me to modify this view.)
Anyway, now with what are the perfect tools for the job, I continue to analyse races most days using my development of VDW's main method, content that both Marvex and VDW were essentially right in their approaches to the problem of race analysis. Judging by activity levels on the forums of which I am a member, interest in matters VDW seems very low, which is both unsurprising (the fifth term of VDW's equation finding most wanting) and in some ways very welcome (otherwise good bets from a VDW perspective would all be short priced).
More concerning is that, because of the retirement of Tony Peach, and the impending retirement of Alan Seddon, proprietor of Browzers Books, future would-be analysts may find it more difficult to get copies of the VDW booklets. Already, for example, Alan tells me he has no stock of "The Ultimate Wheil of Fortune". Tony in particular has come in for stick from some posters on VDW threads - quite unjustifiably in my view. Without his efforts, those of us who read the VDW articles years ago would still be leafing through ever more dog-eared cuttings from the Sporting Chronicle Handicap Book or the reprints the SCHB made available at one point. As it is we have everything of value in half a dozen booklets and "Systematic Betting". But more on this another day.
In the event Peter was unable to help me so I struggled on for a while before casting around for someone else who might, and I struck absolute gold in finding an expert in Indonesia, Daniel. A more patient and competent Excel expert I doubt exists, and over the last ten months or so he has taken my Excel applications to new and previously unimagined levels.
I now have two main race analysis applications. The first is for downloading data, which was the bugbear of my life in peak season, when on a busy Saturday there could be up to twenty races I wanted to add to my database, which took care of most of Sunday morning. With Daniel's help I can now download all the data I want for a race in, literally, a minute. I open the Post's website, open the race details, select the complete data and paste it into the application. All I then have to do is click on a "post data" button and the data I want is added to an Excel sheet in exactly the same format as my database, unless there is a horse in the race running from outside the handicap, in which case another screen appears and I have to type in a number (depending on how much allowance I want to make for the outside of the handicap runners). Either way the whole process takes no more than a minute.
As a direct consequence, what used to take as much as two hours before now takes no more than 15-20 minutes, and most days about five, so no longer a grinding chore. But it has also opened up hitherto impracticable options:
1) in December 2011 I took the decision to stop collecting data for my handicap hurdle database so that I could add class 5 handicap data to my flat database (the class 5 data being essential for the analysis of class 4 handicaps, very often the best class races available on the AW from November to March). By about May 2012 I found I could easily collect data for all Flat handicaps and indeed decent non handicaps, not just run within the UK but also Ireland (as there is often one or more runners with Irish form in the better UK handicaps), so now my Flat database comprises every UK race except maidens, seller, claimers and very low class classifieds, and the better Irish handicaps and non handicaps;
2) because of the ease of adding data I spent some hours going back to 2011 to add the same data for that year, so now my four year database contains two years (2009 and 2010) of class 4 handicap data and two years (2011 and 2012) of much fuller data, with the result that nowadays only very rarely do I have to add any data manually to the results of running my analysis application;
3) also because of the ease of adding data I have added new elements to the database, with another three items per run for each horse;
4) finally, I have restarted collecting handicap hurdles data and gone back to include all handicaps and non handicaps except maidens and sellers for the 2010/11 and current seasons.
The second application, comprising my database and the various means I use to analyse races, has undergone similar development with Daniel's help. As a result, to analyse a race I merely have to open the card for the race on the Post site, select the contents, copy and past it to the application, press a "post it" button, shift to another page in the application, press a "select horses" button and then a "proceed" button, and within seconds are created summaries of what I regard as the key statistical data for the race - 26 cells per horse - as per those I post on the Mathematician's website, a second analysis sheet setting out the material needed to appraise the "form" horses as per VDW, and a career sheet for each horse with the relevant data for every run in the database. Not only that, but after data has been added to the database I can print out the same material, with the data for the recent race and results added, which is perfect for study purposes.
In short, the last ten months have seen the solution to the problem of the daily grind to update the database, a massive expansion of the database and the development of a parallel one for handicap hurdles, and a substantial improvement in the application for generating the material needed to analyse a race. For every three hours I have to spare for racing matters, nowadays only about 15-20 minutes is spent on data processing/manipulation, leaving a very much higher percentage of time available for the real work, analysing what the data tells us and identifying sound betting opportunities.
In parallel, Daniel has created two other applications for me. The first a means of interrogating my databases to get resolved all those VDW-related questions one tried to get Racing System Builder to answer but failed because that otherwise excellent application doesn't allow class to be handled the VDW way (or through what I regard as a better alternative). The second a means for me to explore whether or not there is anything in Kevin Booth's contention - in "ISIRIS Unveiled" - that one can learn a great deal through careful reading of bookmakers' early prices, to which end I've added two seasons' worth of Flat race early prices from the Pricewise columns and am looking forward to analysing it once the current turf season ends. (My current and very provisional view is that there is a lot less in it than Booth asserts, but more thorough exploration may lead me to modify this view.)
Anyway, now with what are the perfect tools for the job, I continue to analyse races most days using my development of VDW's main method, content that both Marvex and VDW were essentially right in their approaches to the problem of race analysis. Judging by activity levels on the forums of which I am a member, interest in matters VDW seems very low, which is both unsurprising (the fifth term of VDW's equation finding most wanting) and in some ways very welcome (otherwise good bets from a VDW perspective would all be short priced).
More concerning is that, because of the retirement of Tony Peach, and the impending retirement of Alan Seddon, proprietor of Browzers Books, future would-be analysts may find it more difficult to get copies of the VDW booklets. Already, for example, Alan tells me he has no stock of "The Ultimate Wheil of Fortune". Tony in particular has come in for stick from some posters on VDW threads - quite unjustifiably in my view. Without his efforts, those of us who read the VDW articles years ago would still be leafing through ever more dog-eared cuttings from the Sporting Chronicle Handicap Book or the reprints the SCHB made available at one point. As it is we have everything of value in half a dozen booklets and "Systematic Betting". But more on this another day.
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
Roll on April
After an excellent turf season it seems clear that this AW season is taking the same shape as last year's - very few better class handicaps - so that for those like me who focus solely on the Flat, it is largely a question of waiting 'til April.
The silver lining to an otherwise quiet period is that one has time to review and make such modifications to one's approach as may seem necessary. My main priority has been further to speed up the bringing together of the data I need for each race. Some Saturdays in the peak of the last turf season there were six, eight or more races I'd ideally have liked to analyse, far too many for the time available. So some speeding up of data processing has been instituted and hopefully a final programming task submitted to Peter Clayton. IF he is able to do what I hope then, fingers crossed, next Summer I should be able to get out the data for up to a dozen races in not much over an hour.
On the methodology front, several of the obiter dicta within the VDW body of work have been, or are being, explored, my current interest being a point VDW raised very tentatively - the issue of dead weight. Those familiar with his work will recall VDW wrote (item 49 of "The Golden Years"):
"Weight is a great leveller, but my personal view is that there is a distinction between dead and live weight. Although I do not wish to press the issue, I feel excess lead in the saddle is more of a brake than a heavier jockey".
A selection by a colleague of mine on a private forum interested me in this regard - he excluded Qianshan Leader as a possible winner of the 3.20 Doncaster on Saturday on the ground that the 24f of the race was the wrong trip. (The horse had run twice over the trip and failed to be competitive on either occasion.) In the event QL won, so despite not analysing NH races I had a look at its career via the Racing Post website. What was helpful was that the same jockey had ridden the horse on all three 24f runs, so in all probability the "live" weight was much the same on each occasion. On the two down-the-field runs, QL had carried 11.12, on Saturday 10.02. Thus on the previous two occasions in all probability 24lb more dead weight than on Saturday.
VDW also commented (also in item 49) that "... the majority of horses falter when shouldering above a certain weight even though it may be in direct handicap proportion". QL had won with 11.12 over a shorter trip, so the weight per se seems unlikely to have been the problem, and I am wondering whether there is something in this dead weight issue.
My colleague, being a resourceful chap, emailed the trainer, Emma Lavelle, and received a helpful reply from her website manager, suggesting that Ms Lavelle saw three factors as relevant - the fact that QL had had a couple of runs, the weight and the going. He further consulted a former apprentice jockey, who was inclined to dismiss the idea that dead weight had any more significance than live weight, though he added that one or two of the trainers he had ridden for thought it had and on occasion sought to engage a heavier jockey rather than a lighter one who would have to carry more dead weight. Difficult to see how to reach a firm view on the issue, but it could help explain a turf result that interests me from last Spring, Doctor Parkes' win at Chester on 4 May.
Interest in matters VDW on the public forums I visit continues in a fairly spasmodic way, though sadly the Yuku-based one I used to administer has been closed down by its current proprietor, not for lack of contributors but because he felt uncomfortable about some of the posts. Things came to a head when a chap posted an obscene tirade in my direction - not the sort of thing one expects on a public forum. This, I guess, is what happens when someone of clearly limited vocabulary is unable to deal with the frustration we probably all find in trying to get to grips with VDW's work, and with the envy that develops when he observes others who have made more progress than himself. A sort of web forum equivalent of a yob keying someone's better car. Sad, but water under the bridge.
The silver lining to an otherwise quiet period is that one has time to review and make such modifications to one's approach as may seem necessary. My main priority has been further to speed up the bringing together of the data I need for each race. Some Saturdays in the peak of the last turf season there were six, eight or more races I'd ideally have liked to analyse, far too many for the time available. So some speeding up of data processing has been instituted and hopefully a final programming task submitted to Peter Clayton. IF he is able to do what I hope then, fingers crossed, next Summer I should be able to get out the data for up to a dozen races in not much over an hour.
On the methodology front, several of the obiter dicta within the VDW body of work have been, or are being, explored, my current interest being a point VDW raised very tentatively - the issue of dead weight. Those familiar with his work will recall VDW wrote (item 49 of "The Golden Years"):
"Weight is a great leveller, but my personal view is that there is a distinction between dead and live weight. Although I do not wish to press the issue, I feel excess lead in the saddle is more of a brake than a heavier jockey".
A selection by a colleague of mine on a private forum interested me in this regard - he excluded Qianshan Leader as a possible winner of the 3.20 Doncaster on Saturday on the ground that the 24f of the race was the wrong trip. (The horse had run twice over the trip and failed to be competitive on either occasion.) In the event QL won, so despite not analysing NH races I had a look at its career via the Racing Post website. What was helpful was that the same jockey had ridden the horse on all three 24f runs, so in all probability the "live" weight was much the same on each occasion. On the two down-the-field runs, QL had carried 11.12, on Saturday 10.02. Thus on the previous two occasions in all probability 24lb more dead weight than on Saturday.
VDW also commented (also in item 49) that "... the majority of horses falter when shouldering above a certain weight even though it may be in direct handicap proportion". QL had won with 11.12 over a shorter trip, so the weight per se seems unlikely to have been the problem, and I am wondering whether there is something in this dead weight issue.
My colleague, being a resourceful chap, emailed the trainer, Emma Lavelle, and received a helpful reply from her website manager, suggesting that Ms Lavelle saw three factors as relevant - the fact that QL had had a couple of runs, the weight and the going. He further consulted a former apprentice jockey, who was inclined to dismiss the idea that dead weight had any more significance than live weight, though he added that one or two of the trainers he had ridden for thought it had and on occasion sought to engage a heavier jockey rather than a lighter one who would have to carry more dead weight. Difficult to see how to reach a firm view on the issue, but it could help explain a turf result that interests me from last Spring, Doctor Parkes' win at Chester on 4 May.
Interest in matters VDW on the public forums I visit continues in a fairly spasmodic way, though sadly the Yuku-based one I used to administer has been closed down by its current proprietor, not for lack of contributors but because he felt uncomfortable about some of the posts. Things came to a head when a chap posted an obscene tirade in my direction - not the sort of thing one expects on a public forum. This, I guess, is what happens when someone of clearly limited vocabulary is unable to deal with the frustration we probably all find in trying to get to grips with VDW's work, and with the envy that develops when he observes others who have made more progress than himself. A sort of web forum equivalent of a yob keying someone's better car. Sad, but water under the bridge.
Wednesday, 29 June 2011
Class
With the lull in decent handicaps yesterday and today I thought it would be worth posting here on an issue which has been concerning me and others over the last few months, namely the assessment of class.
VDW wrote in one of his early letters that "readers who fully understood my previous letters will know it is the balance between class, form and the other factors which show the good things" (17/01/81, reprinted in "The Golden Years" as item 36), and he emphasised this again in chapter 5 of "Systematic Betting":
"Logically, the relative merit of form must be equated to the quality (class) in which it was achived. This means there has to be at least two elements to jointly equate (sic) when judging the relative merits of one performance against another, FORM and CLASS. Form is what they did and class is the level at which it was achieved. Therefore, when looking at the relative merits of one horse against another, these two elements class and form must be equated along with the other aspects such as distance, going, track etc."
VDW then suggested that a method of assessing the class element which he found "most satisfactory" was to take the win prize money value of races (divided by 100) as a rating, and he illustrated this with reference to Roushayd and the 1988 Old Newton Cup:
the three races Roushayd contested prior to the £17,064 ONC (a class 170 race) had prize money of £5,080, £7,752 and £22,710 respectively, ie were rated 50, 77 and 227, and thus Roushayd was "raised in class in his second and third outings and then dropped fourth time".
However, VDW was writing in inflationary times for race prizes, and generally speaking we are now in deflationary times. Some 2011 races retain their 2010 prize levels, eg the Royal Hunt Cup, but the large majority have lower prizes on offer, sometimes dramatically so:
the Lincoln this year was a class 623 race, compared to 779 in 2010
the Northumberland Plate was a class 925 this year, compared to 1079 in 2010
the Totesport Handicap, run at Windsor on Plate day, was a 187 race this year compared to 280 in 2011.
An important question for the race analyst is what to make of this. Can we, for example, assume that the 2011 renewals of the three races for which I have given figures were all significantly inferior to their 2010 counterparts? Not in my view.
And the matter becomes particularly critical when trying to assess the recent form of horses in current races. To give two examples from winners last Saturday:
in the Totesport Handicap at Windsor, Norville's last three races and the Totesport had the following class ratings: 62, 130, 74 and 187, so it would seem as though Norville was raised in class for his second run, then dropped in class before being raised to what was, on this means of rating, by far the highest class race of the four.
An hour earlier Edinburgh Knight had won a similar 6f handicap at Newcastle. The class ratings for his three previous races and the Newcastle race were 93, 84, 130 and 125. This would suggest he had been dropped in class on the second run, then raised in class and finally dropped slightly in class.
However, if some courses, for some races, are maintaining race prize levels, while in general levels are falling, (a) can we be sure that the ratings can be interpreted as straightforwardly as VDW assumed with his comments about Roushayd's races and (b) how can we compare current race class with what the horses we are assessing have achieved in previous seasons?
Of course VDW was not solely concerned with class in terms of the value of the race, but also with the strength of the opposition, ie the class of the field as well as the class of the race. For some years I have felt that using horses' Official Ratings in handicaps offered a better method of rating the class of a field than VDW's means. There are differences in view about how to use ORs, but my conclusion is that a straightforward average of the runners' actual ORs gives as good a picture as any (though I do leave out from my calculations the ORs of the occasional horse running from more than 7lb out of the handicap).
And for probably three years now I have been using VDW's penalty value rating as the primary measure of class and the average OR as the secondary one, thus covering both race class and field class.
This season, however, I have concluded that it is safer to reverse the priority, ie use the average OR, or measure of field class, as the primary measure and the penalty value rating as the secondary one.
To illustrate, Norville's four races, in average OR terms, were 83.2, 96.9, 89.6 and 94.6, which suggest that, although he was up in class for the Windsor race, it was not the considerable rise in class over the three previous races that the penalty value ratings suggested. Indeed, arguably the second race (21 May, Chester) was the highest class of the four and that compared to that he was actually dropping slightly in class on Saturday.
The figures for Edinburgh Knight were 91.7, 90.1, 95.7 and 88.1, which suggest that far from being dropped in class very slightly on Saturday he was in fact facing by some way the weakest field he had met over the four race series.
I do not suggest abandoning the penalty value rating altogether. I include it in the summary sheets for each race I analyse because I believe that a race with a rating of, say, 280 would be different from one with a rating of 150, even if the fields (and thus the average ORs) were identical. And that is because in handicaps connections are principally running for the money, and a horse may well be targeted to win the class 280, while if the race was only a class 150 it might merely be a prep. race prior to a later, more valuable, prize. But to revert to Edinburgh Knight, I doubt connections saw any real distinction between the £12,952 on offer at York on 13 May and the £12,462 on offer on Saturday. But from the perspective of the horse's chance - assuming it was there to win on both occasions - there can be little doubt that Saturday offered the better prospect, as the competition were, on average, markedly inferior than at York.
In sum, I certainly haven't abandoned VDW's use of the penalty values of races as a measure of class, but this season I have found using the average OR as the primary measure has given me a different perspective and, frankly, better results.
VDW wrote in one of his early letters that "readers who fully understood my previous letters will know it is the balance between class, form and the other factors which show the good things" (17/01/81, reprinted in "The Golden Years" as item 36), and he emphasised this again in chapter 5 of "Systematic Betting":
"Logically, the relative merit of form must be equated to the quality (class) in which it was achived. This means there has to be at least two elements to jointly equate (sic) when judging the relative merits of one performance against another, FORM and CLASS. Form is what they did and class is the level at which it was achieved. Therefore, when looking at the relative merits of one horse against another, these two elements class and form must be equated along with the other aspects such as distance, going, track etc."
VDW then suggested that a method of assessing the class element which he found "most satisfactory" was to take the win prize money value of races (divided by 100) as a rating, and he illustrated this with reference to Roushayd and the 1988 Old Newton Cup:
the three races Roushayd contested prior to the £17,064 ONC (a class 170 race) had prize money of £5,080, £7,752 and £22,710 respectively, ie were rated 50, 77 and 227, and thus Roushayd was "raised in class in his second and third outings and then dropped fourth time".
However, VDW was writing in inflationary times for race prizes, and generally speaking we are now in deflationary times. Some 2011 races retain their 2010 prize levels, eg the Royal Hunt Cup, but the large majority have lower prizes on offer, sometimes dramatically so:
the Lincoln this year was a class 623 race, compared to 779 in 2010
the Northumberland Plate was a class 925 this year, compared to 1079 in 2010
the Totesport Handicap, run at Windsor on Plate day, was a 187 race this year compared to 280 in 2011.
An important question for the race analyst is what to make of this. Can we, for example, assume that the 2011 renewals of the three races for which I have given figures were all significantly inferior to their 2010 counterparts? Not in my view.
And the matter becomes particularly critical when trying to assess the recent form of horses in current races. To give two examples from winners last Saturday:
in the Totesport Handicap at Windsor, Norville's last three races and the Totesport had the following class ratings: 62, 130, 74 and 187, so it would seem as though Norville was raised in class for his second run, then dropped in class before being raised to what was, on this means of rating, by far the highest class race of the four.
An hour earlier Edinburgh Knight had won a similar 6f handicap at Newcastle. The class ratings for his three previous races and the Newcastle race were 93, 84, 130 and 125. This would suggest he had been dropped in class on the second run, then raised in class and finally dropped slightly in class.
However, if some courses, for some races, are maintaining race prize levels, while in general levels are falling, (a) can we be sure that the ratings can be interpreted as straightforwardly as VDW assumed with his comments about Roushayd's races and (b) how can we compare current race class with what the horses we are assessing have achieved in previous seasons?
Of course VDW was not solely concerned with class in terms of the value of the race, but also with the strength of the opposition, ie the class of the field as well as the class of the race. For some years I have felt that using horses' Official Ratings in handicaps offered a better method of rating the class of a field than VDW's means. There are differences in view about how to use ORs, but my conclusion is that a straightforward average of the runners' actual ORs gives as good a picture as any (though I do leave out from my calculations the ORs of the occasional horse running from more than 7lb out of the handicap).
And for probably three years now I have been using VDW's penalty value rating as the primary measure of class and the average OR as the secondary one, thus covering both race class and field class.
This season, however, I have concluded that it is safer to reverse the priority, ie use the average OR, or measure of field class, as the primary measure and the penalty value rating as the secondary one.
To illustrate, Norville's four races, in average OR terms, were 83.2, 96.9, 89.6 and 94.6, which suggest that, although he was up in class for the Windsor race, it was not the considerable rise in class over the three previous races that the penalty value ratings suggested. Indeed, arguably the second race (21 May, Chester) was the highest class of the four and that compared to that he was actually dropping slightly in class on Saturday.
The figures for Edinburgh Knight were 91.7, 90.1, 95.7 and 88.1, which suggest that far from being dropped in class very slightly on Saturday he was in fact facing by some way the weakest field he had met over the four race series.
I do not suggest abandoning the penalty value rating altogether. I include it in the summary sheets for each race I analyse because I believe that a race with a rating of, say, 280 would be different from one with a rating of 150, even if the fields (and thus the average ORs) were identical. And that is because in handicaps connections are principally running for the money, and a horse may well be targeted to win the class 280, while if the race was only a class 150 it might merely be a prep. race prior to a later, more valuable, prize. But to revert to Edinburgh Knight, I doubt connections saw any real distinction between the £12,952 on offer at York on 13 May and the £12,462 on offer on Saturday. But from the perspective of the horse's chance - assuming it was there to win on both occasions - there can be little doubt that Saturday offered the better prospect, as the competition were, on average, markedly inferior than at York.
In sum, I certainly haven't abandoned VDW's use of the penalty values of races as a measure of class, but this season I have found using the average OR as the primary measure has given me a different perspective and, frankly, better results.
Sunday, 10 April 2011
In abeyance
With the turf season getting into full swing I'm going to need the time I have available for racing for the analysis of worthwhile current races and the daily updating of the databases I maintain, so I won't be adding to this blog much over the next six months.
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