The Perfect Punter / Perfect Punter / 12 September 2009 /

Last week's request for punters to offer up words which best describe qualities required for successful gambling threw-up interesting results. Dave Farrar has been analysing your choices and is now ready to set out on a crucial leg of the journey to perfect punting...

So, as well as being a preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as Parklife (see picture of cockney man above, and if you don't get the reference ask a 30-something indie kid), confidence is also the word which readers of this column and everyone else who contributed to this week's Perfect Punter survey feel is the most important to them when they're gambling successfully.

Nearly two hundred punters told me the three words which best described them when they're in that "zone" - the one in which they are at their most successful and their sharpest - and in the end over 90% chose confidence. I expected it to feature, just not to be the on the bridle winner. In future weeks we'll have to ask why confidence is so important to us all. It sails so close to over-confidence that it must be a dangerous emotion as well as a productive one, but as I set off to see professionals in many different fields over the next month or so, the first thing I need to get right is how we can best approach each big punting day in the most confident frame of mind possible.

Obviously, it's something which can be self-perpetuating, and that would be a fabulous state to reach, but for now let's presume that we start every day in neutral, and that confidence is something that we have to grab hold of by the start of the day's racing, the evening's football, whatever your poison might be.

And talking of neutral (rather than per word, I'm paid per seamless link), that brings us onto the state of mind which finished second in the poll. You found many different ways to describe it: balance, equilibrium, poise, calmness. I know that they all mean subtlely different things, but for our purposes, they amount to the same.

Confidence must be tempered by, and maybe even created by, a feeling that we are clear headed, sound bodied and centred enough to carry out our plans accurately. I suspect that the solution to the hastily arranged equation - confidence minus equilibrium - is probably cockiness and ultimately, penury. As a friend of mine once pointedly said: "I never punt worse than when I think I've got it cracked." We should all remember that every time our finger is on the back or lay button.

The third word is difficult to choose, because the real answer was discipline, and in fact "confident, balanced and disciplined" were the three most frequently occurring words, but I think that discipline will come if we get the first two right, and I'll be learning a lot about discipline when, later on in this project, I talk to people who trade for a living. So, with respect to schoolteachers and indeed dominatrices all over the world, I'll focus instead on the fourth most frequently mentioned word: instinctive.

I take this to mean that out instincts and our senses should be as heightened as possible when we gamble. That we should be in a position to take advantage of any mistake that a layer might make, and be able to read match and race situations as sharply as possible. The opposite of "pissed" would be another way of putting it.

I'll now take those three words as my mantra, and over the next few weeks this column is going to resemble a bizarre shopping list, and make me look a bit odd. You have to decide whether you're on board for this journey or you're hopping off, because now you have to take a bit of a leap of faith, as I'll be doing some strange things and suggesting that you do likewise. I'm going to build a mini-regime that we should get in the habit of doing on every day that we gamble, to best bring out those three words: confident, balanced and instinctive. And I'm warning you, I spoke to a psychologist this week who answered my first question by saying: "Ah, but what exactly is confidence? Have you thought about that?" To be honest, I hadn't, and I realised that this Perfect Punter thing may take longer than I thought.

By the way, there was a word which, surprisingly, was mentioned only once by respondents to the Perfect Punter survey, and I think that it bodes well as we start searching for confidence next week. That word? Lucky. For all our sakes, I just hope that you're right.

You can follow Perfect Punter on Twitter, where he has many confused followers. Just go to www.twitter.com/perfectpunter and sign up. There you will find the odd tip, and more than the odd rant, the latest being about the judges of the Mercury Music prize.

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