The Perfect Punter Chapter Eight: Talking rubbish and talking sense

The Perfect Punter / Perfect Punter / 23 September 2009 / Leave a Comment

Patrick Veitch, author of “Enemy Number One” and someone worth listening to when it comes to gambling.

“talking to a scholar for a night is better than reading for ten years.”

The Perfect Punter finds his git-tolerance levels dangerously low (which may be down to the pilates classes) and compares a chance encounter with a self-professed scholar with the learned writings of a candidate to be a real-life perfect punter - Patrick Veitch.

I'm not a huge fan of people who quote proverbs at me. Not that it's a regular occurrence in South West London, but earlier this week in a cafe I overheard a pony- tailed git wearing green trousers tell the person that he appeared to be boring senseless that: "talking to a scholar for a night is better than reading for ten years."

The disturbing thing about the conversation seemed to be that our hero felt that he was the aforementioned scholar, and that we would all be better for having listened to him. People with voices as loud as his often cultivate them because no one will take them seriously, and having been subjected to his views on life for half an hour, I took my leave, but, rather strangely, I took the proverb with me. My git tolerance is getting dangerously low. It must be all that Pilates.

Anyway, armed with this apparent drivel, and with little else to do on a day off, I got thinking about scholars, and wondered just how many of them that we really have in the gambling world. The excellent Kevin Pullein of the Racing Post is clearly one, and I'm pretty sure that I've met one or two others in the offices of Timeform Radio, but there are an awful lot of people out there who talk a very good game, but who I wouldn't want to read for ten minutes, let alone ten years. The kind of people that shout the word "value" at you without really understanding what it means. I love the concept of value in betting, but I hate the use of the word, as it's become a panacea to deal with muddy thinking.

Thinking muddily is the last thing that I should be doing as this quest to become as perfect a punter as I can be gathers pace, and so I must confess to being concerned that instinctiveness was one of the three words selected by you which best define you when you're punting well. My issue with the word instinctiveness is that it seems to go against much of what we are told about gambling. That everything must be planned, that every detail has to be intricately researched, and that a thousand building blocks must be constructed before a bet can be placed.

Many people have told me that this is the only way to be successful, although I'm lucky enough to be able to choose who I listen to, and so I decided to revisit probably the best gambling scholar that we have at the moment in the shape of the professional punter Patrick Veitch.

If you haven't already read Veitch's book "Enemy Number One", then I highly recommend it, as, between his Dan Brownesque descriptions of running away from a bad man who wants to hurt him, there are real pieces of wisdom from someone who unequivocally knows what he's talking about. And, most importantly, you know that Veitch practises what he preaches. He is a proper gambler, and given that he has turned down a request for an interview, his book is for the time being the best way to get to the bottom of what he thinks. Much of Veitch's approach is based on slavish study of the form book and on working hard to iron out any flaws in his plans so that he knows when to strike, and that was the lesson that I took from it at first reading.

But having re read "Enemy Number One" this week, and scoured it for mentions of instinctiveness, I was surprised to read the following paragraph, one which had previously passed me by:

"A win in a Chester Handicap for Enfilade was uplifting, all the more so because there wasn't a single strong reason for the bet. I just felt the horse was a big price and finally found the confidence to have a full bet on my own instinctive judgement without needing a long list of reasons to back me up. I looked upon it as a turning point."

So his bet on Enfilade was not just uplifting, but he saw it as a turning point in his route back to success as a punter. What had been missing from his armoury was instinctiveness, that feeling when you just know that a bet must be right. I found it immensely reassuring that someone who I had always presumed was just way more disciplined and better informed and braver and richer than me thinks in this way.

That something which I consider as a wilful flaw in myself is actually an essential weapon in his war with the bookmakers. It convinced me absolutely that instinctiveness is a sense that we have to seek to heighten, and along with that continuing search for balance (I hope that you're all doing your breathing exercises), we have to learn how to make our instincts as sharp and as well aimed as possible.

And as well as making me a better punter, they'll hopefully allow me to walk out of a room the minute that a man in green trousers walks in. Otherwise my rather more base instincts may just take over, like in that other old proverb: "Man who wears stupid trousers will never back winner, and will get punch in face unless he shuts up." Or something like that.

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