The week before last, I wrote a couple of blogs about my visit to Cheltenham racecourse for the first three days of the Cheltenham Festival (of racing). Those blogs were about birds and about people and this blog is about betting; next weekend I will post a blog about horse welfare.
Horse racing is about horses, ridden by small men and increasingly a larger number of women, running around in circles. Horses are good at running and the idea is to find out which horse runs fastest. Just like in human athletics some of the races are short sprints and others are long marathons, and some involve jumping over obstacles and some don’t. I’m really only interested in jump racing so I’ll concentrate on that here.
Part of the attraction of British (and Irish) horse racing is that every racetrack is different. This is in contrast to horse racing in the USA where the aim is that every horse track is very much the same. In the USA all races are run left-handed (ie anticlockwise or with the jockeys’ left hands, and the horses’ left legs, closer to the inside running rail than their rights) on flat racecourses. In Britain and Ireland the racecourses aren’t all the same shape, some are flat and some have hills, some are run left-handed but many are right-handed, and the races vary between about 2 miles (in jumps racing, Flat racing has races down to 5 furlongs ie 5/8 mile) to the Grand National’s four-and-a-half mile length. Added to which, these are subject to the vicissitudes of the weather and so the ground conditions can vary from course to course and from meeting to meeting at the same course. And the obstacles over which horses (usually with their jockeys) jump are of two main types (hurdles (small and relatively easy to jump) and fences (relatively big and requiring much better equine judgement) but their construction can differ from racecourse to racecourse too.
So, a two-mile hurdle race at Fakenham on a flattish left-handed course with tight bends on a late spring evening when the going is good is a very different kettle of fish to a three mile chase at Towcester (one of my local racetracks – now sadly departed) in the heavy clay of mid-winter where the track is right-handed and the finish is at the end of a long uphill climb.
The phrase ‘horses for courses’ is a recognition of the fact that all courses are different and all horses are a bit different too (I’m told as different as people are, but I don’t know any horses personally) and so the horse-course combination is an important determinant of racing success.
From a human point of view, particularly the owners, trainers, jockeys, raceourse management and the crowds at the course or watching on television or the internet, in betting shops, pubs or at home, the point of all this is to win the race and win some money – nobody ever says about horse racing that it is the taking part that matters, it is definitely the winning. Nobody really knows what the horses think about all this but that is straying into the subject of next weekend’s blog on horse welfare.
I’ve been betting on horse races, almost exclusively National Hunt racing (where the horses jump fences and/or hurdles) for about 35 years. For me it is an intellectual exercise – it’s nothing to do with my love of horses (because I don’t have a love of horses any more than I have a love of cats or dogs). The complexities of the events, as described above, coupled with the different options of betting attract me. One has to realise that in betting on the outcome of a race one isn’t competing with the bookmaker one is backing one’s judgement against everyone else betting on the race result. Bookmakers provide a means of me taking money off other people, and clearly the bookmaker (or online betting site) takes a cut of the turnover for providing us all with that opportunity.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I’d back my brain power against the field when it comes to analytical decision-making and betting, for example on horse racing, is the purest form of decision-making known to man.
How so? Well, the goal of betting is pretty clear – to win money. Well, it is for me, some would say that it is just for fun, but not for me, there is no fun in handing my money over to someone else and not getting it back after the race – I do give money to charity and bookmakers aren’t charities. And I could watch the race without having a bet so…it’s about winniing for me. But, honestly, don’t let me put you off betting for fun, after all, it’s your money, after the bookmaker’s cut, that I’m after so do go ahead! Bet large and bet foolishly as far as I am concerned. This is where I have to say that you should only bet money that you are willing to lose, so don’t bet with more money than you can afford.
Whereas with most decisions you make in life you never find out what would have happened if you had done one of the other options – married someone else, had more/fewer children, accepted/turned down different jobs – in betting on horses you do. In the long term my success at betting on horses is measured by whether I make a profit or not and there are no excuses. By the way, I do make a profit.
The greatest advantage that a punter has is that betting is optional. You don’t have to bet on every race. Indeed, if you even approached betting on every race, then your chances of winning are minute. Being selective is the key decision for betting on race outcomes. Much of my profit on betting is made up from the losing bets that I avoid having (and which would otherwise drag me down into overall loss) as well as the ones that win..
An individual race result might appear a matter of considerable chance but you win some and lose some and in the long run, the answer is in the profit and loss account. I don’t bet huge amounts of money, but over the years the comings and goings of my bets will almost certainly have amounted to hundreds of thousands of pounds but it’s a bit like the tides coming in and out – there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing but the change over a long period of time is a small proportion of the turnover.
So let’s take the three days I attended Cheltenham races and the fourth day when I watched the racing at home – I made a profit of just over £100 which will probably pay for fuel costs and some of the additional drinks bill. That was on a turnover of about £400 – a 25% return on turnover which is a phenomenal rate of return for me. I must have been doing something right.
My luckiest win was when I bet against the favourite, a horse called Goshen, in the Triumph Hurdle and it fell, when miles clear, at the very last hurdle. You might say, and I might concede, that I didn’t deserve to win that bet but I would counter by pointing out that I’ve won some and lost some races like that, and I don’t moan when I lose and I don’t gloat when I win, but at the end of the day I come out on top. There’s a long conversation to be had over the meaning of the word ‘deserve’ here.
My biggest win of this year’s Cheltenham was on the fact that Irish-trained horses would win more races than British-trained ones. This was a canny bet that was rarely in doubt, and when the odds went out after Day 1 I simply had some more bets, and netted more than half of my total winnings. Yes, in retrospect I wish I had bet more! Unfortunately, bookmakers are keen on you betting on future prospects not past ones.
And the most memorable win was quite a small one on a horse called Champ who won the RSA Chase on the Wednesday. I saw this horse win at Newbury in November and invested on him to win this race at Cheltenham. I rather lost faith in him after a poor performance en route to the festival and hedged my bets. On the day I invested a little more but with no feeling of certainty about the outcome. I made about £20 after all that but the reason that it will be the most memorable is the manner of the victory. You can watch the race here but since you now know who won it you might want to flick through to the last minute of the race – I’ve rarely seen such a finish to a race;
But I’m now sounding, just a little, as though I’m interested in the horses whereas this blog post is about betting not on horses as individuals. But, they are individual sentient beings, and I’ll write about the difficult subject of racehorse welfare next week.
If you were hoping for the Avery guide to how to make your fortune out of betting on horses than I’m afraid I haven’t given it to you – why on earth should I? But it would be a long, dull and complex exposition and you’d give up reading it long before the end because you aren’t really interested in putting in the effort, like I have done, over many decades. And my way of making a smallish but steady profit suits my peronality, your personality is different and your way of making money would be different from mine. There are many approaches to making money from betting, and different ones are suited to different outlooks on life. The thing is, the very very important thing is, there are far more ways of losing money than winning money. But at least I’ve spared you tales of triumph and disaster, of big wins and moderate losses, of great races and awful jockeys, of handfuls of bank notes and of almost winning days. Maybe another time…
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My mummy warned me about fraternising with problem gamblers.
David – very wise, very wise.
Would the Cheltenham Festival have gone ahead if Covid 19 was an equine disease?
De – it would depend what Dominic Cummings feels about horses, I guess.
Not sure about that. More likely the horse owners wouldn’t have risked it and it would have been cancelled. Race horses are a valuable commodity.
As a child I liked horses but not thoroughbreds, too flighty and wanting to kick or bite, my horses of choice were Cleveland Bays a local farm had several breeding mares and I think two stallions, beautiful things.
I’ve never been racing although as a teenager I worked weekends and school holidays for a roofer who did. He claimed he always won at horses then lost it in the week at the dogs. He eventually became a bookmaker.
Back in I think the 1880s the Kiowa Indians had a rather famous horse known as” the” Kiowa pony a pale horse with brown ears, a colour type much favoured in earlier years by Kiowa warriors. Said horse looked like a broken down nag and was taken to a number of Oklahoma and Texas fairs where the Kiowas would gamble on it and race against the finest horseflesh. The pony with a small indian boy aboard always won. Finally southern Plains Indians beating Texans, but then they always did in a fair fight!
Paul – good story, thanks.
Betting – it’s all so complicated. Horses, they live in another world. I like to ponder more mundane things like: would racing cars go even faster if their drivers drove with their buttocks sticking up in the air?
An excellent read and very interesting. My uncle, who used to take me racing in the 1960s, used to reckon that, over a season, his winnings paid for his hobby; and my aunt always made the sandwiches and often came too. Back then, not all jockeys were trying their best in every race, a poor performance thus lengthening the odds for the horse’s next race. Much closer scrutiny now obviously, but do you think that still goes on?
Bob – I’m sure it goes on in the less important races, with the poorer trainers and the struggling jockeys. Running a horse when unfit, or on the wrong ging or track will make it look like a less good horse, and, as you say, its handicp mark will fall and it will be more advantaged in the future – when the money is down and, perhaps, a top jockey engaged too.
I have seen plenty of things at a racecourse that might raise an eyebrow but it’s usually difficult to be sure. That air of skulduggery, and Damon Runyan or Dick Francis characters, help to make race going that bit more fun.
But only once have I seen something which looked amazingly dodgy – it was at Stratford many years ago in a hurdle race when a rank outsider which had been trailing the field passed every other horse in the race and won by a distance looking as though it could do it again with ease. The horse never ran again. I’ve always wondered what the story behind that was…
Many thanks for that, Mark. Made me smile. I hadn’t appreciated the possible subtleties! I have a good (related) racing story for you which I’ll tell you next time we meet – perhaps at the next RSPB AGM, all being well. It’s not really suitable for here I’m afraid, even though all the people involved are long gone.