The Perfect Punter - Week 20: Sometimes a short price is a good price

The Perfect Punter / Perfect Punter / 16 December 2009 / Leave a Comment

Ringside view: The Perfect Punter at the Klitschko v Johnson fight in Berlin.

“what do you mean you can’t have value at 1-10? If a racehorse was running against a donkey and I offered you 1-10 about the racehorse, would you turn me down?”

The Perfect Punter travels to similarly cold destinations in the form of Cheltenham and Berlin this week for horseracing and boxing action respectively, whilst considering the age-old question of whether heavy odds-on shots can be perceived as betting value...

As well as talking about himself in the third person, the Perfect Punter has also been getting around in the last couple of weeks. After learning more Festival pointers at Cheltenham on Friday, and feeling that I could never get any colder, I went to Berne on Saturday night for the world heavyweight title fight between Vitali Klitschko and Kevin Johnson. And I got colder. And colder. There was a snowstorm in Switzerland, and nobody told me that it was coming.

As well as wishing that I'd packed three extra coats, I spent my journey to the jauntily named Post Finanz Arena thinking about a conversation that I had on Friday with my friend and Cheltenham Radio colleague Alex Steedman. There were a couple of short priced runners, and I made the point that a lot of people wouldn't want to get involved at "those sort of prices." He made the extremely valid point that, if you're going to chuck twenty quid on a horse, then would you rather lose it, or get £44 back, provided that the short priced horse wins. The point being that it's better to win at a short price and place your bet with a degree of logic and certainty, than it is to chuck the money away on a bet which is near total speculation.

In Berne, Klitschko was [1.09] on Betfair to beat Johnson, and while that seems a prohibitively short price, there were reasons to consider it, rather than mutter the words "there can't ever be value at 10-1 on" and move on. [1.09] wouldn't normally be my kind of price, but it was impossible to see Klitschko being beaten, and I don't mean unlikely or improbable, I mean impossible.

Johnson is a stylist, a neat boxer, who was moving up several levels. His best previous win had been against a former US Olympic captain called Devin Vargas, and both Johnson and Vargas were regarded as a long way less dangerous than Chris Arreola, who Klitschko had beaten comprehensively three months earlier. There was the danger that Johnson would improve massively, but even if he did, he admits himself that he doesn't have punching power, and that the only way that he could win would be to outpoint the Champion. And that wasn't going to happen.

His strength, the jab, is Klitschko's strength too, and while his speed might trouble the bigger man, there was nothing to back it up. I spoke to a friend from Vegas who was sitting next to me at ringside, and he told me that he had put a hundred dollars on Johnson at a big price. My ears pricked up and I wondered if he knew something about the challenger that I didn't, but when I asked him to justify the bet, he said that it would be a dull fight and he wanted an interest, and "Klitschko might put his shoulder out like he did against Chris Byrd." Well yes, I suppose that he might have done, but given that the event being referred too happened nearly ten years ago and had never been a problem since, I was prepared to take that tiny chance.

As it happened, the Kingpin, as Johnson calls himself, performed with a good deal of chutzpah, and while he was criticised for being far too defensive, the fact that the best performance of his career by a long way came nowhere near being good enough to beat Vitali proved that the [1.09] was a good bet. It was a huge leap of faith to think that Johnson could last even six rounds with the much bigger man, the fact that he went the full twelve allowed him to come away with credit, but despite this massive overachievement, he still lost every single round on two of the judges' scorecards. My friend from Vegas had chucked a hundred dollars away on a whim, I still had my stake, plus a decent amount of interest. It was the Steedman rule writ large.

When the word "value" is constantly being drummed into you (the "v" word is sometimes valid, but it can hide a multitude of sins), it's always worth remembering a quote with which Harry Findlay is credited: "what do you mean you can't have value at 1-10? If a racehorse was running against a donkey and I offered you 1-10 about the racehorse, would you turn me down?" All of us punters, large and small stakes, know the answer to that.

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