The following piece, written for publication elsewhere, may be of interest to prospective VDWers:
"The VDW material viewed as a research problem
The material itself
1. The material comprises three main sources: two booklets edited by Tony Peach reprinting letters and articles originally published in the Sporting Chronicle Handicap Book (SCHB), (The Golden Years of Van der Wheil (TGY) and The Ultimate Wheil of Fortune (UWF)), and VDW's own booklet Systematic Betting (SB). In addition there are some pieces in various of Peach's other booklets, most notably Betting the VDW Way (BW), Racing in my System (RS), Systems in My Racing (SR) and The Silver Lining (SL) and a very short piece in a booklet by a disciple of VDW's, Jock Bingham, entitled Be A Winner. All are essential.
2. From the research point of view, one cannot of course rely on the fact that the reprints of letters and articles as included in the various Peach booklets are accurate, but in my experience with one exception they are. That is the inclusion of an * in the the reprint of an analysis VDW made of the 1988 Mackeson Gold Cup, included in BW that was not in the original. Once one has sorted out the methodology it is quite clear that the original version, from yet another Peach publication, Make Racing Pay, is the correct one.
3. To make sense of the many examples given in the VDW material, the researcher also needs access to the SCHB (for which the only public source of which I am aware is the main British Library), the Sporting Life (available in the British Library Newspaper Library), the Daily Mail (widely available in university libraries, etc) and the official Form Books for the period.
The research task
4. VDW referred to his methods, plural: and he demonstrated or referred to various methods of race analysis and staking, and all are worthy of research. But my concern in this piece is what I think of (and refer to) as his main method of race analysis, the fullest description of which was given in a SCHB article published in March 1981 (and reprinted as item 30 of TGY). It is solely about the research task involved in establishing the methodology of this main method that what follows is concerned.
5. An immediate difficulty is to decide on the scope of the main method and thus the parts of the VDW material that are relevant to its study, and this is controversial. What assumptions can we reasonably make about both the earlier letters (1978-1980) and later material (especially SB) which do not refer to some elements discussed in the March 1981 article, and indeed include elements not mentioned explicitly in that article?
6. Some have argued that the early material is not necessarily related to the main method, and some think the SB material introduces a new method (which is sometimes referred to as the "Roushayd" method as distinct from the "consistency" method by which some refer to the March 1981 method).
7. There are several statements by VDW that in my view help with this issue. The most important is from a letter he wrote in February 1996 to Peach, formerly letters editor of the SCHB, and reprinted in SR:
"When I first began to wrote for Sports Forum [the readers' letters page of the SCHB] it was clear that to splash the whole lot in front of your readers would be a pointless exercise and only by adding bits as time went by could it be hoped a doubtful, critical and sometimes abrasive readership would eventually see the light.
I had intended to give away everything in due time, but you will recall telling me that you had decided to call a halt to discussions of my methods in your column. This was fine by me, but only a fraction had been revealed at that time.
Later I was asked to write "Systematic Betting" a title I didn't like, but never argued over ….
I took the cautious step of only advancing my methods slightly …"
This follows a comment VDW made in an article eleven years earlier (dated 13 April 1985) and included in UWF:
"When I first began to explain the way I do things, various aspects were singled out for readers to digest and on one occasion, because some were unable to grasp what I was saying, the following formula was presented. Consistent Form + Ability + Capability + Probability + Hard Work = Winners. After some time Tony Peach asked me to put everything together and this was done." [This last sentence is surely a reference to the March 1981 article.]
There is also a potentially relevant passage in the March 1981 article itself:
"Form, even though consistent, can mislead if taken alone when the horse is running against others with greater ability. Class, which in my view is a major factor, can throw you off course if the horse is out of form, so to establish a reliable measure a combination of elements must be used to achieve consistent results.
To find elements which can be combined and used methodically requires considerable thought and each must be logical. There are numerous ways to approach the problem of winner-finding methodically and the one I will demonstrate has proved highly successful and consistent for a considerable number of years. Each element was selected after a great deal of research and when used as intended, will place the odds strongly in the backers' favour."
8. Any researcher coming fresh to the VDW material will have to make up his or her mind, but the above quotes at the very least suggest that the material prior to 1981 was introducing readers to elements of the method described in the March 1981 article (and therefore no surprise that in that early material not all elements were mentioned), and that the subsequent material advanced things only slightly, ie was not some alternative or additional method. My own conclusion (and one I think shared by two of the most serious students of the VDW material who have posted on various forums under the usernames of Guest and Lee) is that all the VDW material up to and including his discussion of the 1990 Derby (in RS) relates to what I am referring to as the main method, with two very minor exceptions, specifically discussed in an article dated 18 January 1986 in UWF, relating to chases and handicap hurdles. An additional complication is that VDW referred to alternative ways of tackling elements of the method, for example instead of deriving what he termed the probables by the main way, taking the most selected horses from the old Sporting Chronicle selection boxes. But as an initial hypothesis it is worth considering all the material except in respect of those two NH methods referred to in the 18 January 1986 article as relating to the main method.
9. And there is something which amounts to a crosscheck for this hypothesis: once an hypothesis as to the content of the main method has been found, does it generate the 70+ examples VDW gave? If not, at least one of two hypotheses is false: either that relating to the content of the method or that relating to the proposition that all the VDW examples derive from that method (or of course both). If one can find the set of elements which, taken together, generates all the selections, then one would have strong grounds for supposing both hypotheses to hold.
10. Viewed from this perspective, the research task is to take all the material, with the limited exceptions noted above, and seek to identify the operational rules of each element of the method. And the process, as in many other areas of research, is trial and error: one forms a provisional hypothesis as to the operational rules of, for example, what VDW meant by a "form" horse" and checks that it correctly designates as a "form" horse every one VDW specifically named as such (and does not so designate those few horses he named as "not a form" horse). Only when one has a set of operational rules which correctly identifies relevant horses as either "form" horses or "not form horses" can one possibly be on the right track.
11. VDW himself offered a starting point for categorising the elements of his main method with his Consistent form + Ability + Capability + Probability formula but as always with taxonomies it is a matter of the level of abstraction. My advice to the new researcher is that each term of that formula should be viewed as an umbrella phrase: the research task is to identify the components of each and establish their operational rules. My own findings lead me to offer the following terms as a point of departure for sorting out the elements VDW used in his analyses:
Consistent form: consistent horse, probable, class, "form" horse;
Ability: main rating, supplementary time-based rating for use when assessing relatively unexposed Flat horses;
Capability: weight, going, distance, course type;
Probability: (NB quite different from the notion of probable under Consistent form") class/form horse, relative ability, "ultra consistency" (a term not, I think, used by VDW himself but a most useful one coined by Lee to cover a characteristic of all VDW's bets).
VDW's use of some of these terms, eg ability, is fully described in his texts but the boundaries of others can only be established by study of the examples in the context of the texts.
12. Initially the extent of the VDW material including examples and the number of elements may seem daunting, and VDW hints at this: "The whole concept may seem complex and beyond the capabilities of many". But he goes on to add that "in fact it is extremely simple and becomes quick and easy to perform, provided it is done methodically." Both are broadly true. Although many academics would probably dismiss the challenge of discovering the method as trivial, that would be because of its focus – race analysis for the purpose of betting. In research terms it is a complex project, which personally I found more taxing than completing my doctorate. It is not quite true to say that, once understood, the method is "quick and easy" to perform, but nearly so. In a Gummy post Lee once wrote that it took him about half an hour to establish whether there was a horse in a race potentially worth backing, and then a couple of hours of hard work to check the horse's chance thoroughly and reach a bet/no bet decision. With the aid of a certain amount of computer aided data assembly I now take slightly less than half an hour on the first stage – indeed if there is no potential bet this can be obvious in as little as five minutes – and quite a bit less with the second. But I suppose the average time spent on a race which results in a serious bet is well over an hour and often nearer two.
Is it worth it?
13. This needs to be considered at two levels. First, is one likely to enjoy the actual research: if one is unlikely to enjoy spend literally hundreds of hours assembling the material, studying it and testing hypotheses (with the inevitable frustrations) this is not a project to be tackled.
14. Second, if one's research is successful, does the method pay off? VDW himself claimed that the successful application of the method should achieve at least 80% winning selections, but as far as I am aware he did not provide proof that he achieved that degree of success and nor did he proof his selections before the races concerned. There may be more, but I know of only one follower of the VDW method who has publicly proofed a significant series of selections pre the races concerned and achieved something comparable to the level of success VDW claimed: Lee on the now defunct Gummy forum. So the public evidence that full or reasonably full knowledge of the method leads to the kind of strike rate VDW claimed is very thin. If one was contemplating undertaking serious research into the main method, one therefore needs to do so with the understanding that (as with any real research) one may not succeed and if one does one may find that the claims VDW made prove not to be replicable in practice."
