Horseracing Betting: Is being a winner all that great?

General / Jack Houghton / 24 May 2008 / 3 Comments

Jack Houghton has considered what it takes to be a successful punter - and he's not sure he wants to be one

Walking to town last week I passed a very fat man wearing a homemade tee-shirt with a caption emblazoned across it: "I BEAT ANOREXIA".

It made me laugh and I share it here primarily because I think it will make you laugh too. However, randomly relaying funnies doesn't normally go down well with the betting.betfair editorial staff (particularly after I inserted a joke about masturbation mid-way through a Cheltenham preview that only got picked up after complaints from a big cheese). So I will now need to make the opening somehow relevant. Relevant to what I haven't yet worked out, but let's see where this goes.

The man with the homemade tee-shirt is a super-high achiever in two spheres. First, in his fatness. Second, in his self-effacing comicality (don't look it up, it is a word). And it got me thinking (it didn't really, but stay with me, people are listening) - what lessons can super-high achievers in other walks of life teach us recreational punters about being more profitable?

Lance Armstrong, when cycling competitively, completely dedicated his life to just one pursuit: winning the Tour De France. His all-consuming desire led him to train for hours each day, to weigh all his food to ensure his power-to-weight ratios were never compromised, and to endlessly plan, and counter-plan, the team strategies that would take him where he intended to go.

If we want to win at punting in the same way Lance wanted to win at cycling, what can he teach us about making it happen?

Well I think the whole power-to-weight ratio thing is a bit redundant (unless I make some strained analogy about increasing your stake when you feel the odds represent biggest value) and anyway, I wasn't intending to be that literal.

Most of all, I think Lance can teach us about self-belief. He had a mental image of his future history - him standing victorious on the Champs-Élysées - and nothing was ever going to stop it happening. Successful punters have a similar self-belief. If they think a horse is the value bet in a race, they won't hear anyone tell them otherwise. Even a lacklustre performance from said horse can rarely persuade them their original opinion was wrong.

There's a story about Jack Nicklaus (which I will now recount inaccurately) where he is asked what made him so good during the final stages of big tournaments. His response of "I never two-putted when it mattered" is challenged by his questioner as nonsense, with a number of examples given where Nicklaus did, indeed, two-putt. The story is used to highlight not only Nicklaus' self-belief, but his ability to completely eradicate any past fallibility from his mind.

Maybe successful punters are the same? Not only was their losing bet the right bet, but the horse didn't actually lose.

Come to think of it, this is poppycock. Self-belief and forgetfulness hardly seem a profitable partnership. Prior to the 2007 Rugby World Cup, Harry Findlay would tell anyone who listened that New Zealand would win it. Not were good value to win it, but would win it, end of story. His reported losses on the event - hopefully exaggerated - will provide a lasting memory of his fallibility and, as punters, these stinging reminders are probably a good thing.

Hang on, I've got it - it's all about hard work. I'm on safe ground with this one. What our fat, ex-anorexic friend and countless other super-high achievers teach us is that success only comes through dedication and toil. All the successful punters I've ever met share a Lance-like work-ethic directed toward profit. Long hours, complex computer models and analysis of the minutiae of form: this is what succeeders share.

Bored? Me too. No-one wants to hear that success can only be gained through drudgery and sweat. We want quick fixes. Well I'm afraid they don't exist. If you want to win at this game you need to work at it.

But take solace in answering this question. Do you really want to be profitable? I mean, is it all it's cracked up to be? There's plenty of evidence to suggest these uber-aces aren't all that easy to live with.

Take the undoubted star of betting.betfair's racing tipster team, Simon Rowlands. It is alleged that Rowley conducts time-and-motion studies on all activities carried out by him and his girlfriend. In one irregularly repeated activity, it is said that Rowley has applied his sectional timing expertise to shave three minutes of a task previously taking seven.

(By the way, has anyone read Rowley's article about Irish trainer form? Blimey mate - get a life - you're the only one who understands that stuff).

Self-sacrifice and discipline. I'm sorry, I can't be doing with it. If that's what it takes, then I'm happy to be average at this punting game. We can't all be champs. For every Lance there needs to be a whole lot more clowns riding round on unicycles. For every Nicklaus there needs to be hundreds of pitch-and-putters on seaside cliff-tops. And for every Rowley, there needs to be a load of us mugs smashing into a gud ting in the last at Fairyhouse.

Comments (3)

1. Simon Rowlands | 30 May 2008

   I have no wish to stoop to an ad-hominem tit for tat with a gap-toothed cretin, but it should be pointed out that the 2002 Martin Wills Award was a particularly weak renewal.

   And you don't need "trends" to figure that out. Buddy.

   Simon "Rowley" Rowlands

2. Bish Fish | 30 May 2008

   Houghton is spot on. Who is this Rowlands guy? Using big fancy school words. Why can't he use real people words? We use to throw paper aeroplanes at his sort in class then beat him up for his lunch money afterwards.

   If that what takes to win count me out. I'd rather be one of the cool kids. I'll be keeping it real like Jack here - real stupid.

3. Jack Houghton | 31 May 2008

   Bish Fish again hey? You haven't answered the question I posed you after your comment on the Dubai article.

   And Rowley... I'm hurt. Beyond the factual inaccuracies of what you post (I believe Timeform has rated the 2002 renewal of the Martin Wills' as a contest inferior in quality only to Sea-Bird's Arc) I would have hoped you would have focused more on the compliment of calling you the undoubted star of the betting.betfair team, rather than some of the more negative aspects of the article.

   And anyway, I didn't write much of the negative comment. I keep submitting pieces saying how great you are and then, by the time they appear on the site, the betting.betfair editors have changed all the positive comment to abuse of my fellow commentators. I think they're trying to marginalise me before kicking me out...