“YOU MIGHT HAVE told me,” I said to James.
I’d called his mobile when I got back to the house, where there was some decent phone signal. “It cost me a small fortune to send your passport with guaranteed delivery on a Saturday.”
“Yes, sorry, Dad. But it was great that you did send it. It arrived here about eleven, and I took it straight round to the letting agency before they closed. We now have our next year’s flat confirmed.”
“Good,” I said. “But why did you come here in the first place?”
“Gary needed something from his parents’ house. He said he was driving home to get it, so I decided to go with him. That’s all.”
“Did you come into this house?” I asked.
“No need. We went to the Red Lion for a bit, just to watch extra time in the match, and then the penalties. It was a great win.”
“So I believe.”
“But we had to get back to Bristol. A group of us had a booking at Roxy Lanes to go bowling at seven-thirty. We’ve just finished. We’re on our way now to have a quick pizza, then we’re off to a party.”
The busy social life of the modern student.
“Okay,” I said. “Mum’s back here tomorrow evening. Grandpa is doing better, at least for the moment.”
“That’s great news. But I must dash now, Dad, because we’ve arrived at the pizza place. Bye.”
He disconnected.
I went into the kitchen to get some more wine.
I lifted my glass out of the sink and poured a good measure into it.
I stood there wondering what Toni would be doing right now.
I had looked up the Cincinnati Airport on Google Maps.
While the city of Cincinnati itself is in the State of Ohio, the international airport is just south of the Ohio River, in northern Kentucky, just eighty miles north of Lexington, along Interstate 75.
She’d probably be home by now, I thought, in her “two beds and a bath upstairs, and a kitchen and living room downstairs.”
I told myself to stop thinking about her.
She’s gone. It’s over. If you’re not careful, you’ll be calling Georgina ‘Toni’ when she gets back tomorrow, and then you’ll be in trouble.
I took another glass of wine into the sitting room, but that just seemed to make things worse. Would I ever be able to come into this room again, to look down at the sheepskin rug, without thinking about what had occurred on its surface?
Probably not—but I suddenly realised that it was not totally a bad thing.
Overall, the memory made me happy, not sad. It was something to cherish.
I tried watching some television, but there were Saturday-night reality-TV programmes on all channels, and I didn’t give two hoots which one of the so-called celebrities—none of whom I’d ever heard of—was about to be voted out of the jungle, or even which young operatic prodigy would receive the huge cash prize as the nation’s future possible answer to Luciano Pavarotti or Maria Callas.
I flicked off the set and went upstairs, but I didn’t go straight to bed. Not yet.
I had other things to do first.
I had a restless night, tossing and turning and only sleeping in short snatches.
My mind was too active to allow me to rest, in spite of the wine.
At half past four, after a particularly long session awake, I finally got up, put on my dressing gown, and went downstairs.
With the summer solstice being this week, the sky was light even at this early hour, and the sun would be up within the next fifteen minutes.
I made myself a coffee in the kitchen and took it through to my office.
It was too early to call the trainers, even those whose first lots went out soon after five o’clock during the mid-summer months. But I hadn’t come down to use the phone anyway, but to use my computer.
I spent the next hour or so searching through various social media sites and other web pages.
Then I looked up betting systems.
I thought I knew everything there was to know about gambling on horseracing, but I was wrong, very wrong.
Sure, I knew the basics.
I knew you could simply bet on a horse to win, or to place—usually meaning to finish in the first three—and that you could group those two bets together to make an each-way wager.
You can place those bets either with a bookmaker or on the Tote, and the term bookmaker here includes all the high-street betting shops and their websites as well as the men and women standing shouting the odds at the racecourses.
Bookmakers, as the name suggests, make a “book” on each race. In the past, the book was what the bets were recorded in, by hand, but nowadays they are typed into a computer. But the bookmaker still has to decide the fixed-price odds he is offering on each horse in the race.
If a horse is thought to have a high probability of winning, the bookmaker will choose to offer only short odds, say at two-to-one, whereas if the horse is considered to have little chance, the offered odds will be longer, maybe at twenty-to-one or even higher.
The longer odds are to tempt people to back the outsider.
As the time of the race nears, the bookmaker may vary his offered odds either up or down. In this way he regulates how much is bet with him on each horse, and that allows him to calculate his liability for every possible outcome.
The Tote, however, is not a bookmaker. It is a “parimutuel” or “pool” betting system. All the money that is bet “to win” on all the horses in a race is added together into the pool. The Tote then deducts a percentage to cover its costs and profit. The remainder is then divided by the number of winning tickets to determine the payout. So no one “decides” the Tote odds, they depend solely on how many people have backed each horse.
Racetracks in the United States operate parimutuel systems as their only form of gambling. Bookmakers are not allowed.
But there are all sorts of other bets you can make too. Exactas (or trifectas) are where you have to select two (or three) horses to finish first and second (or first, second, and third), and in the correct order.
Then there are also coupled bets for multiple horses in different races.
Doubles, trebles, and other multi-race accumulators require that all the chosen horses must win for the bet to succeed. If any one of them doesn’t win, you lose your stake.
Whereas the chances of that happening may seem small, the returns can be huge. And much stranger things than that do happen in racing. Who could have imagined that Frankie Dettori would ride all seven winners in one afternoon at Ascot? But he did—Frankie’s Magnificent Seven—and the cumulative starting price of all seven was more than twenty-five-thousand-to-one.
And then there are “special” accumulators like the Tote Jackpot or the Scoop6. They are both six-fold accumulators—you have to pick the winners of six races in one day to win—but with a major difference. If no one wins it on any given day, the prize pot rolls over until the next day, and so on, building and building until somebody does win it.
The largest ever Tote Jackpot payout was almost one and a half million pounds to a single one-pound ticket, and in 2014, after an unprecedented twelve weeks of Scoop6 rollovers, eight lucky punters shared nearly eleven million.
All those bets were fairly straightforward. I understood all of them.
But I found there were so many other ways to lose your shirt, or make your fortune, which I was only vaguely aware of.
I’d heard of people placing a Yankee or a Lucky 15, but I didn’t really know what they were. So I looked them up on the internet. They were both multiple-bet combinations on various horses in separate races. And there were many other multi-bet variations too, all of them with exotic names such as Trixie, Heinz, or Goliath.
But the development of internet gambling has opened a whole raft of new and unconventional ways to stake your cash.
The creation of the “betting exchange” is the most obvious new addition, where anyone and everyone can now act as the bookmaker, taking bets from other people by “laying” a horse, which is essentially betting that the horse will lose.
In recent years, this has allowed the emergence of something called “matched betting,” where you place two bets on opposing outcomes.
For example, you bet on a horse to win with a bookmaker and then lay it to lose on an exchange. Clearly, the horse will either win the race or lose it—there is no other possible outcome—so one of your bets will definitely win, and the other one will surely lose.
Now, at first glance this might seem rather pointless, especially if the odds are the same for both. You would end up with no loss, but also no profit.
However, if there is a slight difference in the odds, such that the bookmaker is offering a fractionally higher price than you lay on the exchange, you can turn this variation to your benefit. Provided you calculate the relative stakes correctly, if the horse wins, you end up with a profit, and if it loses, you’re even.
It’s a “no loss” bet with only an upside.
It is as close to a guaranteed return as you can get while betting on horses, as long as you do your sums right and also remember to factor in the small commission charged by the exchanges.
In financial circles it is known as arbitrage and involves buying and selling the same shares simultaneously at slightly differing prices on separate stock markets, in order to make a profit.
But such opportunities are normally few and far between.
However, the gambling business is very competitive, and almost all bookmakers, and even some of the exchanges, are always making offers of free bets to encourage new customers to open an account—“Bet £10 and get £30 in free bets”—or to make existing customers bet more.
These “free” bets make matched betting much more attractive.
But bookmakers aren’t stupid—far from it. If they believe you are matched betting, and winning, they stop offering you any sort of promotion, and if you then go on winning, they will close your accounts.
In effect, all bookmakers, and all casinos for that matter, will only go on taking bets from people who lose. For all their seeming joy at the occasional big winner, they don’t like those who do it all the time, and they won’t continue to do business with them.
I leaned back in my chair and stretched.
My brain hurt from concentrating so much.
But things were beginning to crystallize in there too.
By now, it was too late to go back to bed, so I made myself another coffee, swallowed a couple of ibuprofen tablets, and toasted the last remaining slice of bread, which I found hiding in a dark corner at the back of the fridge.
I decided I must go to the supermarket and stock up on some essential items before Georgina returned. I didn’t want to give her the pleasure of thinking that I was totally useless at looking after myself when she was away.
After a while, I went back to my office and called the Victrix trainers.
Royal Ascot may be over for another year, but racing across Great Britain went on regardless.
There were three race meetings today, four tomorrow and Tuesday, and five or six each day for the rest of the week—thirty-three meetings in total over the seven days, with over two hundred separate races involving nearly two thousand different horses.
My target was that at least six of those horses should be owned by Victrix syndicates, and preferably more, because I had learned over the past twenty-four years that, more than anything, my syndicate members wanted their horses to race, and to race often, rather than be standing idle in their stables at home.
By the time I had finished my calls to the trainers, and I’d emailed all the syndicate members of those horses we planned to enter and run this coming week, it was nine o’clock.
I sighed. It felt more like midday.
I went upstairs to shower and dress.
Tesco in Didcot at eleven on a Sunday morning was as busy as I had ever known it, with cars waiting in line to get into the car park.
I’d made a list but I was still in a bit of a trance as I pushed my trolley up and down the aisles, collecting items off the shelves in a random order.
I’d worked out that Georgina wouldn’t be wanting to cook when she arrived home after several hours on the train, so I bought a tasty, simply-heat-up ready-meal for two, of chicken jalfrezi and rice, packaged together in two wooden ovenproof trays.
I also remembered to add a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape to the trolley, to replace the one I’d drunk with Toni, just in case Georgina had been saving it for a special occasion. And I put two of the cheaper bottles of Merlot in there too, along with a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
I queued to go through a regular, old-fashioned, staffed till rather than using one of the bank of self-service checkouts. I looked around but couldn’t spot Amanda. She was probably off shift.
A young man scanned everything through as I packed it into bags.
“Two hundred and sixteen fifty,” said the young man.
“How much?” I asked in surprise.
“Two hundred and sixteen fifty,” he repeated.
I looked down at the three bags of groceries now back in the trolley.
Granted, the bags were fairly large and almost full, but I had clearly lost touch with the current price of food. And the four bottles of wine didn’t help.
I inserted my payment card into the slot on the reader and entered my PIN.
“Thank you,” said the young man, giving me my long receipt before turning to the next customer.
I pushed the trolley out to the Jaguar and placed the bags in the boot, but I didn’t go straight home. Instead, I went to a pub for Sunday lunch.
In fact, somewhat strangely, I went to three pubs for Sunday lunch.
I had a starter in one, a main in the next, plus a pudding in the third. I had a list of all the pubs in Didcot, and was prepared to visit them all, but it was in the third one that I went to, the Railway Tavern, close to Didcot station, that I found the information I was looking for.