The Perfect Punter: Chapter One - Go against the crowd

The Perfect Punter / Perfect Punter / 05 August 2009 / Leave a Comment

Bernard, a Michael Jackson impersonator, insisted on doing things his own way. As a gambler, so should you.

"People can say what they want, they can say that I shouldn’t be here, they can shout and scream at me, but I ain’t exploiting no one, I’m on my own train, and not on nobody else’s.” (Bernard, Michael Jackson impersonator).

In the first chapter proper of Dave Farrar's quest to become The Perfect Punter, he travels to Las Vegas in the afternath of Michael Jackson's death and learns valuable gambling lessons from one of the deceased's impersonators and a blackjack player.

When they came to Hollywood to mourn Michael Jackson, the lookalikes took a back seat. On any run of the mill day in the middle of the summer, you can get your photo taken with Elvis and Marilyn, with an unconvincing Johnny Depp, with Barney and Shrek, and with more Playboy bunnies than you can shake a euphemistic stick at.

And yet Bernard was making money: Bernard had decided that there was a game to be played as they poured out of the subway station to stare at a star on the sidewalk. Bernard is a Michael Jackson impersonator, and the day after his hero and meal ticket breathed his last, Bernard went to work, and to hell with those who thought it was in bad taste: "people can say what they want, they can say that I shouldn't be here, they can shout and scream at me, but I ain't exploiting no one, I'm on my own train, and not on nobody else's." I admired Bernard just a little bit, as he danced and moved and picked up his five dollars a time. What he was doing turned out to be in no worse taste than Jackson's memorial service, and he was doing what was right for his conscience and his pocket, and wasn't jumping on anyone else's train.

I thought of Bernard's "road less travelled" a lot when I was in Vegas. It's the town where people are scared of missing a trick, and where a rumour can become reality in the blink of an eye. If you hear that there's a party with free drinks at a club on the strip, then half an hour later you'll be standing with a martini in your hand and an eye full of female skin, and if word goes round the Sports Book at the Hilton that there's a good thing running at Churchill Downs, then it will be backed off the boards.

There's not too much room above the noise to hear the beat of a different drummer. Vegas is the perfect place to think about punting, the only one where the quest to become a Perfect Punter could really start. Value isn't a concept in this town, it's all about luck, and if you ever needed a lesson that gambling is about a lot of hard work, a dash of science, a knowledge of numbers, and as little luck as possible, then that lesson is on offer everywhere, only in reverse. It's not just about getting lucky, about your numbers coming up, about some warped sense of destiny: card counters and poker players aside, if you do the opposite of what everyone does in Vegas, then you're somewhere near the right track.

In the spookily accurate Paris casino, I sat at a roulette table and saw a man in a pink suit, playing with pink chips, drop a couple of grand in five minutes, all playing the number 17, his lucky number. He then played red and black, that false even money shot, and dropped four thousand more. And when a guy sat down on the other side of the table and started to get lucky, he jumped on the train and played the new numbers. And watched 17 come up twice, and dropped thousands more. Everywhere I went, the herd mentality was on view, and it got me thinking about the times that I'd fallen into that trap. An overreaction to football team news, jumping on a horse when the price has plummeted, convincing myself that I know something when all that I really know is the way that the crowd is moving. The lesson that Vegas teaches us is that you have to move in the opposite direction to have any chance of making a go of this. Ignore the crowds or push against them.

So don't rush out and back Hilary Mantel to win the Booker Prize because her odds have tumbled. All that's happened is that one of the judges has got drunk at a party and said that they liked the book. She may not even make the short list. And don't back Seta to win next year's 1,000 Guineas at [10.5]. She was mightily impressive at Newmarket on Saturday, but on closer analysis, she didn't really beat much. Do you really want to take the [4.6] about Freddie Flintoff being Sports Personality of the Year on the back of two good performances, and the public perception that an average England side will beat a poor Australian one and win the Ashes? And do you deep down think that Spain should be as short as [5.7] to win next summer's World Cup because they have a bunch of well known players and won a major tournament last year?

The people in Vegas would be happy to place all four of those bets because that's what everyone else is doing, but we have to learn to look elsewhere. Neither the man in the pink suit in Vegas, nor Bernard the Michael Jackson impersonator would be my chosen role models, but I'm pretty sure that I know which one is happier with himself this morning, and who has more five dollar bills in his back pocket.

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