/ Jack Houghton / 17 July 2010 / Leave a comment Free £25 Bet View Market

Jack Houghton curses his luck and the editors of betting.betfair before telling us where his money is going this week in one of his last, desperate throws of the dice...

There's no point dressing up this Betting Challenge as anything other than an utter debacle. Four weeks of betting to go and I'm scrabbling around in the virtual loose change of the account to find enough to cobble together to be able to make a bet - let alone one big enough to bring any worthwhile profit.

And continuously the scornful editorial collective at betting.betfair send their sniping, scoffing emails: commiserating my latest stroke of poor luck; explaining why this affair was always doomed to end messily. How unlucky, they wrote, to have tipped three of the World Cup semi-finalists, the winner not among them? Indeed.

Well although things may look bad - having only £31 left of an original bank of £1,000 - it does not mean things are yet over. All I have to do is find some big price winners. Easy. I mean, you read about them every other week: the guy who has £7 on some donkey that trades at [1000.0] in-running. Why can't that be me? The guy, I mean, not the donkey.

Some research is required methinks. Time to pull out the press clippings of those big-priced winners. There must be some pattern, some runic sense to be made of these seemingly random happenings.

The stories of Binocular, New Approach and Kicking King offer some hope: all horses who, at some point, had RSVP'd as non-attendees at racing's biggest parties; only to change their minds, gatecrash, and drink all the free booze. All I need is knowledge of a horse, currently ruled out of a big race, that might actually run, and win. Simple. Perhaps I should back Jan Vermeer in the King George at [180.0]. He ran in Paris midweek and isn't expected to turn up at Ascot. But why not? If he ran, it would be on the back of a ten day rest, and he's already run twice this year after only having a couple of weeks off.

Problem is there's very little chance of him winning, even if he does show. No, what I need is a big-price about Workforce. Maybe I'll drop in on my old mate Stoutey, give him the special handshake and nipple-tweak, and see if there are any bugs a-brewing at Freemason Lodge. Preferably one of them 24-hour jobbies.

Maybe not.

Golf seems to have its fair share of maximum-priced winners. Relative unknowns Shane Lowry and Simon Khan have both won tournaments in recent times having been punted at [1000.0]. So all I need is a golfer who I've never heard of, who's trading at a big-price in an upcoming tournament. The issue is that - with the exception of Tiger Woods, Nick Faldo and Jack Nicklaus - all golfers are unknowns to me, so where do I start?

No, it has to be racing. And it has to be in-play. Ever since Tony McCoy hopped back on Family Business at Southwell in 2002 to win - the horse having traded at [1000.0] after an early fall - racing in-running has been the place for lottery-style bonanzas. What's more, a little study I did back in 2005 showed that horses backed at the maximum price actually win one in every 880 races; not the one-in-a-thousand they should. So this isn't desperation punting; it's sound value betting.

The same study showed that courses covered by At The Races had an unsettling tendency to return maximum-priced in-running winners (all of the examples in the sample, in fact). What's that I see? Newton Abbot tomorrow? On ATR? This is a certainty.

Right, don't be greedy, £8 on Classic Swain, at [100.0], in-running, in Sunday's 3.00pm from Newton Abbot.

This week's bets:
£8 BACK on Classic Swain at [100.0], in-running, Newton Abbot 3.00pm.