Punters draw first blood in war with the old enemy
Early run of winning favourites leaves band of grim-faced layers licking their wounds
If you had a quid for every press release about how bookies are facing annihilation should suchand-such a combination of favourites come in, you would be as rich as… well, you would be as rich as a bookie. The first day of Cheltenham began with the now-traditional sounds of the men and women with the satchels declaring that they were a couple of Ruby Walsh fist-pumps away from putting their grandmother out on the streets but, while reports of their imminent demise were exaggerated, this was nevertheless a day to forget for the old enemy.
By the end of the fourth race, the sun was shining but there was not much in the way of sunny disposition among the bookies down by the Guinness tent. This is the land of tenners and twenties, and three out of the first four races had been won by the favourite. Small-time turf accountants from around the land forked over a couple of notes a time to queues of already-glowing patrons from the cheaper bars.
Durham bookie Alan Dobbin (a human, not a horse) focused on the sole positive: they had not taken all that many bets in the first place. His neighbour on the Cairn Bet pitch had an even longer face than poor Dobbin: “It has been nothing short of a disaster. If you hang around the bookmakers’ car park at the end of the day, you might pick yourself up a bargain,” he said.
The good people of Ricky Racing, meanwhile, could muster no more than a shell-shocked mutter of “bad, bad day”. Fellow bookie Dave Spice – no relation to Posh Spice – had himself a worryingly well-populated queue of punters to pay. Not nice.
At the other end of the market, Star Sports (“the Gentleman Bookmakers”) were taking bets to the tune of, for instance, £15,000 on Coo Star Sivola to win £75,000, and were thus presumably not among those charmed by Lizzie Kelly’s tears and roar of celebration as she entered the winner’s enclosure aboard that horse. So, how do the layers deal with these sometimes wild swings of fortune?
Ben Keith, owner of Star Sports, said: “For me, it is a game of maths, a game of positions. I think I am a good judge of people: you have to be able to judge whether you are smarter than them when you are taking their bet. I don’t find it scary, it is a way of life.”
How should punters, as a collective, ensure a few more days like yesterday? “Like anything, you don’t want to be backing the obvious and the fashionable, it’s like buying shares in Apple or Vodafone, it’s after the Lord Mayor’s show, there is no value in that,” Keith said. “Manchester United are probably going to beat
Bolton Wanderers, but everybody is going to think the same thing, so there is no value, is there?
“You’re looking for something that the market has underrated, and most people don’t do that.”
If you have the smarts and discipline to play the numbers, and long game, human weakness is still the business to be in. “I am not a risk-taker. Although I do have a risky approach to extra helpings of pudding.”
Julie Williams grew up steeped in bookmaking: her father was “Fearless” Freddie Williams, whose duels with JP Mcmanus are the stuff of Cheltenham legend.
“Way back when, a bad day here could break your year,” she said. “You’d be laying £6,000 on a horse, well, you could buy a house with that then.” Her father famously lost £925,000 to Mcmanus in one day and he and Julie were robbed on the way home to the tune of another £70,000. That is a difficult day at the office in anyone’s language.
While the big players can absorb a Mullins-walsh hotpot or three and still enjoy dinner, for the smaller bookies, there will always be trips into hell in the Cotswolds.
Still, money does tend to go to money. The much-fancied Apple’s Jade failed to win the OLBG Mares’ Hurdle and, hey presto, saved Ladbrokes £4 million. By the close of play, there were the familiar proclamations of doom and destruction in the betting ring, but today is another day, and punters have to savour the triumphs while they can.