Larry Voegele's Probability Handicapping

[saevena]

Has anyone tested Larry Voegele's Probability Handicapping? Any reports of results will be greatly appreciated.

[BIG HIT]

Frist book i ever bought for through breds.Don't know if the same all i remember is pic on front him sitting with smokeing jacket on with pipe,LOL
And the book was good but found you end up with the chalk to much.So i moved on not to mention took a while for me any way to do each race.Hope was some help
P.S Don't have it any more sorry would have gave it to you.Oh ya think it was brudda on this board talked about old claming system.

[Overlay]

Any handicapping approach that uses some form of statistics is preferable (in my opinion) to one that doesn't, but (if I recall Voegele's method correctly), although he incorporated numerical probabilities, he didn't use them to weight horses' chances, or to develop an odds line. Instead, if a horse wasn't on the "right" side of the probabilities for the factors he considered (like if it had more than his "cutoff" number for days since its last race, etc.), he would eliminate the horse entirely from further consideration, which eventually leads to betting only chalk that's obvious to everyone, with payoffs on the winners that aren't high enough to make up for the losing bets on the horses that don't finish first.

From a statistical / probability calculation standpoint, I think that impact values (like those used by Davis, Quirin, or Nunamaker) are preferable.

[GameTheory]

Originally Posted by BIG HIT

Frist book i ever bought for through breds.Don't know if the same all i remember is pic on front him sitting with smokeing jacket on with pipe,LOL
And the book was good but found you end up with the chalk to much.So i moved on not to mention took a while for me any way to do each race.Hope was some help
P.S Don't have it any more sorry would have gave it to you.Oh ya think it was brudda on this board talked about old claming system.

That's a different book by Larry -- "Professional Winner Selection" or something like that.

[Tom Barrister]

The book you recall (Voegele in a jacket and pipe, looking at a Racing Form) was "Professional Method of Winner Selection", which was published around 1974. It sold for $20 then. It was one of the first handicapping books I bought.

The book wasn't bad for its time, although it did tend to choose short-priced horses. The interesting thing is that most of the horses it chose did well; it rarely picked a total clunker. Of course, it didn't make me any money, but I did better with it than I'd done with anything else, so I stayed with it for quite a while.

[jonnielu]

Originally Posted by BIG HIT

Frist book i ever bought for through breds.Don't know if the same all i remember is pic on front him sitting with smokeing jacket on with pipe,LOL
And the book was good but found you end up with the chalk to much.So i moved on not to mention took a while for me any way to do each race.Hope was some help
P.S Don't have it any more sorry would have gave it to you.Oh ya think it was brudda on this board talked about old claming system.

"The Professional Method of Winner Selection" was Larry's first book, it may have outsold everything else, I recall Larry complaining that "Professional Method" sold over 500,000 copies and that the publisher made all of the money.

JDL

[rrbauer]

Originally Posted by jonnielu

"The Professional Method of Winner Selection" was Larry's first book, it may have outsold everything else, I recall Larry complaining that "Professional Method" sold over 500,000 copies and that the publisher made all of the money.

JDL

500,000 copies is such a sssstttttrrrrreeeettttcccchhhh.
Mitchell told me that the most number of copies that ANY of his books sold was 25,000!

[RaceBookJoe]

Voegele also had a thick book entitled "Payoff", which I have somewhere. Probably a culmination of his other stuff...narrowing contenders based on percentages etc. If i remember correctly, it went through a one week trial at 5 different tracks. I doubt I would read that one again, as I usually go through my old books every year or two....mainly ainslie ( to answer the other thread), brohamer,davidowitz,beyer. rbj

[saevena]

Thanks to all of you, but the book-booklet I'm referring to was called "Probability Handicapping" (1980), and was based upon impact values and creating an odds line. Voegele wrote three books: Professional Method of Winner Selection, Payoff, and Probability Handicapping. He also touted a due column system written by a Richard Miller. The figure for sales of Professional Method of Winner Selection was 40,000, as I recall, and was reputed to be largest selling handicapping book of all time, up to that time. It was peddled by the master marketer Joe Karbo, and was undoubtedly the inspiration (they saw how many copies it sold) for Beyer, Davis, Davidowitz, Selvidge, Jones, and all the rest who followed.

[Tom Barrister]

I bought a copy of the 1974 book off of Amazon. I'm going to reread it and possibly have the methodology converted into a program, mainly to satisfy my curiosity about how it would do today.

[jonnielu]

Originally Posted by saevena

Thanks to all of you, but the book-booklet I'm referring to was called "Probability Handicapping" (1980), and was based upon impact values and creating an odds line. Voegele wrote three books: Professional Method of Winner Selection, Payoff, and Probability Handicapping. He also touted a due column system written by a Richard Miller. The figure for sales of Professional Method of Winner Selection was 40,000, as I recall, and was reputed to be largest selling handicapping book of all time, up to that time. It was peddled by the master marketer Joe Karbo, and was undoubtedly the inspiration (they saw how many copies it sold) for Beyer, Davis, Davidowitz, Selvidge, Jones, and all the rest who followed.

The number I'm remembering is probably $500,000 dollars, I think the book was about $12 in the 70's, which would only be $279 in today's gas dollars.

jdl

[Tom Barrister]

Originally Posted by jonnielu

The number I'm remembering is probably $500,000 dollars, I think the book was about $12 in the 70's, which would only be $279 in today's gas dollars.

jdl

Actually, I clearly remember the book costing $20 when it first came out (around 1974 in Chicago), and if I remember correctly, the price was right on the front cover in conspicuous type. Since the usual specialty paperback would have sold for about $5 back then, this was apparently a marketing ploy to make the horseplayers believe that the book's hefty price implied that it had valuable secrets.

The book was first marketed in 1972 in Southern California, then moved to the rest of the country. I also remember large ads in the DRF and in the Chicago Tribune and Sun Times". Between the cost of printing the books, shipping, advertising (the biggest expense), distributor commission/fees, and Mr. Voegele's royalties, the total cost per book would have been in the neighborhood of $7-8, meaning that Financial Publishers netted a handsome profit on each book.

Financial Publishers was the brainchild of Joe Karbo, the copywriter-turned self-help direct-response publisher (and author of such books as "The Lazy Man's Way to Riches" 1973). Rather than use bookstores, Mr. Karbo used Direct Response (a sort of forerunner to Ronco, K-Tel, and "As Seen on TV") marketing and specialized in self-help (a.k.a. get-rich-quick) books. These books didn't appear in bookstores during Mr. Karbo's life (he died in 1980) and not thereafter until around 2000. Ads were placed for the books, and people who wanted them sent away to the company or to one of its distributors. "The Lazy Man's Way to Riches" was sold this way, and in fact it didn't appear in first-print bookstores until about 2002.

The full title of Voegele's book was "Professional Method of Winner Selection : The 'can't lose' method of Betting the Horses That Will Work for Professionals, Won't Work for Gamblers!" It was sold through direct response (people would view the ad, mail in a check, and receive the book by mail) from California and other distribution points. Karbo knew that horseplayers (and in fact most people who bought his get-rick-quick books) were instant-gratification types, so the ads usually included the address (and often the phone number) of the local distribution point. I know this because I didn't want to wait for my copy of the book: I went directly to the address and purchased one. The man took my money and pulled one out of the box they were shipped in. The book first came out in the Los Angeles area in 1972. It probably sold about 10,000 copies there and perhaps a third as many in Northern California. It was marketed directly in Chicago around 1974 (although anybody who saw the ads in the monthly turf magazines could have bought it before this), and it sold quite a few copies (of which one was to me). I would suspect that it was marketed locally to the east coast (particularly New York) shortly after being introduced in the L.A. area and well before it had a local Chicago mail-to PoD.

As for the 123-page book's contents, I remember that the ideas were fairly solid, but they did tend to choose short-priced horses. It was probably the first solid-foundation methodology available, and it might (at the time) have made a profit for its users, if only a few of them had a copy in each venue. As it was, with thousands of people running around playing it, $5.20 type mutuels were the rule of the day, and it's not likely that anybody made money with the book, except of course those who sold it.

[saevena]

The original paperback copy of Professional Method of Winner Selection sold for $10; I know because I purchased copies for myself and a friend. Karbo's secret was to advertise in every possible publication; I purchased it because of an ad in National Review, Buckley's publication. I can still remember a part of the ad, which read: "This is the ad the Racing Form refused to print."

[Tom Barrister]

It may have sold for $10 at first, but Mr. Karbo must have figured out that he could get more for it, because all of the photos I've seen of the book cover say $20, and I remember paying that much for my copy. It's no surprise that Karbo would raise the price if it was a hot seller for $10, nor do I blame the man for trying to get whatever people would pay for it.

[exiles]

I bought the book in 1974, after reading a full page ad in the daily News promising riches and retirment to Tahiti,(i fell for it i was only 15 at the time) as i recal it had a lot of rules like eliminate any horse that hasn't raced in the last 30 days, very elementary stuff. i understand the reason it was such a big seller was because of a nationwide adv. blitz. The price was $20 a lot of money at that time.