With the new academic year nearly upon us and a book (not about racing) to finish by this time next year I'll not be posting as frequently over the next few months as I have over the Summer.
In the posts thus far I have tried to illustrate the basic method (that outlined in the March 1981 article), and hopefully have pinpointed the steps anyone needs to take to understand it fully. Briefly to summarise:
1) learn from the examples how to identify the "discretionary" consistent horses such as Prominent King, Love from Verona, Son of Love, Righthand Man and Roushayd. It takes time, but the rules are there to be found;
2) work out how to identify the probables when there are more than three consistent horses by finding a rating method which generates the numbers in the Prominent King example AND which when applied to all the other VDW examples does not exclude any of his selections. The former takes imagination, the latter, if one has the details of the races to hand as one needs for (1) above, takes a day or so, tops;
3) understand what VDW meant by a "form" horse, and here he gave plenty of examples, starting with Righthand Man and others in his race, and especially the 20 form horse winners from 24 races on Boxing Day 1986 as per the "Introduction to VDW Update" in "Betting the VDW Way";
4) work out from the selections which VDW specifically stated were bets for him, or which he described as "certainties" or "oustanding bets", how VDW identified the class/form horse on "the balance between class, form and the other factors". Again the rules are there to be found;
5) by studying the same examples as under (4) (though personally I'd dump Ascenia and Park Express as unhelpful for this stage) work out the characteristics which separate the "winner in the race" horses from the large majority of class/form horses which have insufficient probability to be backed. And here take into account Lee's most usefully descriptive phrase "ultra consistency" and consider VDW selections rising in class separately from those being dropped in class;
6) if interested in going beyond the basic method and working out what in the Conclusion of "Systematic Betting" VDW described as "the easy cracking of the handicap", and in finding seemingly non consistent winners (like Hitchens today), study Roushayd and Lee's example of Top Dirham, working on the basis that neither of them was a consistent horse as per the basic method. (That is in my view a false basis, though Lee would not agree, but it is a helpful one to adopt in order to work out why the two were winners.) Then as well as the rock solid main method class/form "winner in the race" types like Sunset Cristo, you'll be able to find the less obviously consistent winners. And as someone who almost exclusively analyses all age or 4yo upwards Flat handicaps, I find ten like those two for every Flat Sunset Cristo that comes along.
Good luck to anyone who is seriously trying to work it all out - it requires a major investment of time and effort which, fortunately, few are able or prepared to put in. If you get stuck you are welcome to PM me via either of the two public forums of which I am a member, and I'll try to help.
