The Perfect Punter: Chapter 22 - New Year's resolutions

The Perfect Punter / Perfect Punter / 06 January 2010 / Leave a Comment

"I will be disciplined, I will be organised, and I will come over all cold eyed and steely when I place a bet."

Improving his punting ranks pretty highly on Dave Farrar's list of goals for 2010. So how does he plan to go about it?

It seems impossible to write a betting column of this nature and not mention New Year's resolutions. God knows, I tried to think of ways to get round it, but the reality is that the sense of purpose and clarity with which you start any year lends itself to coming up with good punting plans.

I wouldn't ever own up to thinking clearly on New Year's morning, but as the day progresses, the whisky wears off and as the evening approaches I become a mini Rahm Emanuel*. Lists are written, extraneous household items are clinically thrown away and relationships which are going nowhere are ended curtly, calmly and bloodlessly. (One of the three previous examples may be a lie.)

So I have been writing lists, many many lists, and "sorting out my punting" is third on my much bigger list of life priorities. That seems desperately high, but when you're embarked on a project called Perfect Punter and you're coming into a World Cup year, it was only the need to see my family more and find a girlfriend who's not a) impossibly high maintenance b) a control freak or c) a bit mental, that kept the punting off number one spot.

High on the "sorting out my punting" list, which is a subset of the "life priority" list (eat your heart out Rahm, you Josh Lyman wannabe*), is the word discipline. This takes many forms, with not having a bet for the sake of it being the main one. But that's an of the moment, self-control, what were you thinking (?!), kind of discipline, and there's another kind which I'm determined to get right before I place another bet: a proper staking plan.

Having a staking plan is one of the things that should separate us ("us" being people who bother to read websites like this) from people who simply do a Saturday Lucky 15 on the off chance. And we all know what a proper plan looks like. Ten points is your maximum bet, 10 points can mean a tenner to one punter or £10,000 to another, but the principle stays the same and the discipline keeps your punting on the right path.

In Dave Nevison's first book (the knowledgeable, readable, really excellent one, not the second one which felt like a chimpanzee shouting out bits from the Racing Post), he says that one of his policies is to have the same stake on pretty much all of his bets, so that a £100 win bet on an even money shot pays £100, and when a 20-1 shot comes in, it pays two grand. He argues that you shouldn't place bigger bets on smaller prices and smaller bets on bigger prices, and while I see his logic absolutely, I'm not sure that it's the way forward for me.

The staking system that I'm thinking about (and I haven't made a final decision yet) is the one which was gently suggested by Kevin Pullein just before Christmas in the RP, and that was the idea that whatever bet that you place wins you the same amount. For those of us who don't have the internal accounting skills of a Veitch or a Nevsion or dare I say, a Loughran, it's not a bad place to start. So you decide, for example, that every bet you place will be to win £100 and you stake accordingly. So £10 on a 10-1 shot, £1 on a 100-1 shot and (woo-hoo) £100 on an even money shot. I know that it's pretty similar to the more common points system, but I like it's neatness, it's roundness, and it's easiness to work out.

I know that I should have already had a rigid staking plan in place before starting this enterprise, and I know that not having one makes me look like a mug, but I believe that thousands of us punters secretly break every punting rule on a regular basis (whatever we might say in public) and I'm only being honest. If you can think of a better plan than the one that I'm thinking of using then feel free to get in touch at the bottom of this article or on Twitter.

If you have any punting New Year's resolutions that you wish to share then I'm all ears. As for me, from now on, I will be disciplined, I will be organised, and I will come over all cold eyed and steely when I place a bet. With lists in hand, I will be the Rahm Emanuel* of the ring, what can possibly go wrong?

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*I am an American politics/ West Wing obsessive and, having completed this piece, have just realised that not all of you will know who Rahm Emanuel, or indeed Josh Lyman, is. If you didn't recognise either name then all I can humbly suggest is that you stop watching X-Factor and Celebrity Big Brother, find something worthwhile to talk about and read a book for once in your life. Er, lol.