Glorious Goodwood / Jack Houghton / 28 July 2010 / Leave a comment Free £25 Bet

Jack Houghton's quest for an unlikely winner is getting desperate now as the Betting Challenge enters its penultimate week. Will Goodwood provide glory or should our man wait for the Gaspers?

There is a truth professional gamblers hold to be self-evident: to be profitable, you must specialise. Losers gorge themselves of all that the great buffet of betting has to offer; winners only ever eat the cheese and pineapple sticks. Who knows what might be lurking in that couscous salad? Therein lies uncertainty, and winners have no truck with uncertainty.

Jack Houghton was a long-time follower of the specialisation theory. Many learned academics credit him with its invention. But now he's turned his back. August 2009. Armed with a £1,000 bank and oodles of likely misplaced confidence, he sets out to prove that, in a year, betting on everything Betfair has to offer, he can turn a profit.

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Multiples! Of course. Why didn't I think of them before?

As a boy, scrabbling around in the fag-ends, stubbed-pencils and screwed-up betting-slips of the never-cleaned linoleum floor -- desperately looking for something to restore profitability -- before heading home to a school-just-called-and-they-say-you-weren't-there-today rollicking; multiples were always the saviour: a way of garnering your last few pence, sending them over-the-top, and winning an unlikely victory.

As often as not, of course, the unlikely victory didn't come -- your soldier-pence slaughtered in the no-man's-land of Perry Barr as the odds-on six-dog stumbled in turn one; the cornerstone of your treble now a pebble skimming across a beach; the betting-slip scrunched and thrown, to join its fallen comrades on the deck.

There was that one day though -- Quest For Fame kicking off a rescue-trixie that netted a few hundred. I need a day like that now. From a starting bank of £1,000, the Betting Challenge is left with £17. Yes, that's right, a very bad day at the bookies indeed. I'm still buoyant though: we're off to Goodwood (which, if I became a porn actor, I would make my screen-name) to find a multiple to restore profitability.

In the first on Thursday's card, Solicitor fits the brief. Lightly raced, the colt was an impressive seven-length winner of his last start at Beverley, 10 days' ago. He's due to go up 10 pounds for that win, so, running under a penalty, gets in here with four pounds in hand of the official handicap. Most impressive at Beverley, though, was the time Solicitor posted: on a night where horses were not running especially fast on the advertised quick ground, he got close to standard time despite running aggressive early fractions in competing for the lead. I expect a big run.

I'm swerving the second. I'm fairly sure Stravinsky was the last horse I backed to win a sprint, so, on that basis and in these desperate times, it seems wise to stay away from the King George Stakes.

It's impossible to oppose Age Of Aquarius in the Goodwood Cup (which is also the name of an award -- one I hope to win one day -- at the Gaspers: the porn industry's Oscars). His second in the Ascot Gold Cup, where he was out-grinded by Rite of Passage, is around nine pounds better than that achieved by anything else in the field and, with very little strength-in-depth in this line-up, I make him an odds-on shot, not the [2.44] currently available. He'll do for the second leg of the multiple.

The final leg has to be Flying Cloud in the Moet Stakes. If this was a handicap, she'd be carrying eight pounds more than the next best in this field and, at around [4.3], she looks a tantalising proposition. If she reproduces her second behind Chinese White in the Group One Pretty Polly Stakes - where she ran a very fast time - then it's hard to see any of these getting near her.

Staking time. The Betting Challenge is having £10 on these three horses in a treble. Looking at the current prices, I reckon it should pay around 80-1, which will leave us with £800 to go to war with in our last week.

This week's bets:
£10 Back Solicitor, Age Of Aquarius & Flying Cloud in treble using Betfair Multiples.

Tags: Glorious Goodwood betting, horseracing betting, Jack Houghton's betting challenge