THROUGH THE DOOR
SOME people grow up knowing what they want to do; some grow old without finding their true calling. For me, the die was cast at the age of 15 on a half-holiday from school. I opened a betting shop door, and that was that.
From an early age, I loved to play cards, especially if there was the chance of finding someone willing to gamble for small stakes. Maybe my parents’ choice of school contributed a little, as the one-hour coach journey there allowed plenty of time to indulge this hobby.
My parents, John and Norma, had what you might call ‘proper’ careers; my father is a successful businessman and mother used to teach in a primary school. They worked hard to pay the school fees for my brother Jonathan and me, and they would have expected that a good education would lead to a traditional career, probably in the financial world. Maths was my strongest subject at school, so this seemed an obvious path. There was certainly no danger of my becoming an artist, as my attempts to draw or paint were legendary among my classmates. No-one had ever seen anything quite so bad.
However, my interest in gambling skyrocketed the moment I stepped through the betting shop door. My eyes lit up with excitement. I could see odds and numbers everywhere and money changing hands. It was an adult version of playing cards for small change, a fascinating new world and one in which I was determined to become involved. Technically, I was too young, but that didn’t seem to prevent all my bets being accepted – if only that was still the case today.
I’d heard that bookmakers were always supposed to win, but even at that early stage it was clear to me that the typical punter wasn’t giving himself any chance of beating them. The customers in the shop gave little thought to their betting, rather showing an obsessive interest in following the race-by-race selections provided in the newspapers on display. A 15-year-old could have told them – had they been interested in listening to one – the ‘strategy’ was doomed from the start, as if those tips had been consistently successful the betting shop managers would not have pinned them up to begin with.
I started out with one very powerful tool: the knowledge that I didn’t have the first idea how to win. A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but I had none whatsoever. Armed with this innocence, and feeling my way as if down a dim passageway that grew slowly brighter at each turn, I restricted my first few bets to cricket, a game on which I’d been mad keen from an early age. Although my view that England were often overrated wasn’t too far wide of the mark, I couldn’t help feeling that cricket was too simple a betting medium to make it profitable after deducting the dreaded betting tax that applied in betting shops until 2001. That statement may seem odd. Why, you might ask, would I not want betting to be simple? That’s also simple. To win consistently, you need the odds to be wrong. In most sports, the basic abilities of the various teams are widely known. There are only a small number of easily discernible variables, such as pitch, weather and the recent form of the players.
Horseracing grabbed my attention after a short while because it was so much more complex, so much more demanding. It offered the attraction of a huge pool of horses, many of them barely known, with a lengthy list of factors that could affect their performance. I tried a few theories but was stabbing in the dark before the acquisition of a couple of form books gave me something concrete to work on. I’d spend most of my evenings neglecting my homework, instead leafing through the form books trying out all manner of ideas to see what was successful and what wasn’t. In each case I’d assess the profit or loss per bet, in percentage terms, of the strategy. This may seem a little advanced for your typical novice, but I had a way with numbers and it came naturally to me to proceed in this fashion.
What happened if you backed the favourite for a place on the Tote in every race? What about just odds-on shots? What about favourites at starting price? Did they do better in handicap hurdles or novice hurdles? What about the bookmakers’ bonus bets – could I combine the hottest favourites on a Saturday to give myself the best chance of landing the bonus on a Yankee or Union Jack? These were fairly naive strategies – not as naive as following newspaper tipsters race by race, though – and gradually I learned from them. They didn’t show me how to win, but told me which races gave me the best and worst chances of success. Later, I’d find that there were books packed with all manner of such statistics, divided not just by course but by trainer, so that you could analyse the vital data from all angles. Trainer statistics were often interesting at particular courses, as well as when certain jockeys were used and when assessing stables that did well with horses on their first or second run of the season.
My punting became all about horseracing. I’d gone through the looking-glass and there was no going back. I’d bet on Saturdays and on Wednesday afternoons, the half-day at school. There were more than a few winners among the typical avalanche of losers, but I didn’t make a profit after deducting tax, travel costs and the cost of my form books. Crucially, though, I was learning fast.
My progress on the fast track was unfortunately derailed when my father discovered some of my betting slips, and was consequently horrified. He had a working knowledge of racing, being a frequent viewer of televised action, occasional punter and visitor to race-courses himself, where his binoculars were adorned with the typical collection of pasteboard badges. He later became an owner with Peter Beaumont, but at the time he was understandably concerned that his son was being led astray. Led? I was making the running! He phoned the security manager at the local William Hill and demanded to know why they were accepting bets from someone who was underage. I was soon barred from the shop – a taste of things to come, as bookmakers have been trying to stop me betting with them ever since. There are more ways than one through the wood; I took my bets to the nearby Coral shop, and continued as before.
I was a precocious child – you may have gathered – and went to secondary school at ten instead of 11, and then gained another year along the way so that I was 14 when I started A-levels. I submitted my university application form at 15, with not a shadow of doubt that I would do Maths at Cambridge. I think you are supposed to hope to do this rather than decide, but I have to be honest and say I decided. Call it the confidence of youth, if you like, or some other less benevolent term if you must. I filled in my application form with my five choices: Cambridge, blank, blank, blank, blank.
Inevitably, I was summoned by Mr Ward, the Head of Maths, to explain myself. Asked what I would do if Cambridge turned me down, I said they’d have to accept me 12 months later. I wasn’t willing to enter other options as a form of insurance as I wasn’t willing to go anywhere else. We had a similar discussion about the separate Cambridge application form, because I had chosen three famous historical colleges. Once again, I refused his advice to nominate one or two newer colleges that would be less in demand from the best applicants. I must have given Mr Ward a few more grey hairs, but he was to have the last laugh. I looked nailed on for at least one of the two Maths prizes awarded in my year, but he awarded one to a boy who was going on to study engineering and decided not to award the other prize.
My confidence – or maybe that less benevolent term – was rewarded, and I left school at 16 having done A- and S-levels and with my place at Trinity College, Cambridge secured. My interview at Trinity lasted only about ten minutes, although I was told that I might have cause for optimism based on my exam scores. I was expecting this to go down very well with my parents when I returned home, but the discovery that I’d gone to a big race meeting at Doncaster after the interview and managed to lose my travel bag into the bargain meant that I was far from popular.
I didn’t get to Cambridge as quickly as I’d hoped. From the day the letter arrived confirming that I’d got a place at Trinity, there was a two-year wait until I was old enough to start as an undergraduate. The rules were clear – only if my parents moved to Cambridge could I enrol sooner. Had I been a month younger it would have been a three-year wait. It was frustrating that I had to wait so long, especially as Cambridge was just 15 miles from Newmarket …
To provide an income, I took a job as a cashier/administrator at a building society, the best part of a dull job being the office’s proximity to a betting shop. That was my lunch hour sorted, and there were also the occasional ‘unavoidable’ absences from my desk during the afternoons. At that stage, my betting was showing a small profit, but trips to the races, newspapers and form books whittled down that profit into a net loss. Things changed after I turned 17, as my driving instructor, Warren Nicholls, quickly became a willing partner in my betting pursuits. Soon I was having £20 to £50 on a horse without too much worry, the paper trail that winds through the lives of all punters growing with experience and audacity.
Pulled up at the side of the road, ostensibly studying the Highway Code but minds elsewhere, Warren and I devised a plan to take matters further. I would set up a tipping service, advertising in the weekly racing papers and providing my selections on an answerphone. Warren took care of the administration while I made the selections. Combining this with my day job made for a hectic lifestyle, but my racing involvement started to show a profit after expenses and I was able to increase my weekend racing trips while saving some money for university. The day I passed my test, I drove straight to the nearest racecourse for an afternoon’s underage betting! At 18, I finally went up to Cambridge.
My fruitful partnership with Warren ended in my first year, as we were too far apart to work effectively together. During the summer holiday, I realised that a more effective tipping medium would be to advertise in the Racing Post as an ‘odds to’ tipster. This involved clients phoning up on the day of the race and receiving a bet in return for agreeing to pay the profit to a fixed stake, in my case £10, if the horse won. The method had a bad reputation within racing as there were plenty of con-men around, but it had the advantage to clients of being able to join on the same day as their first bet. I had to trust them to pay up, of course, but as long as enough of my bets won, clients would be keen to pay to make sure they received the next selection.
I soon earned a decent reputation and my client base increased quickly, as I was making steady profits. By March of my second year at Cambridge, I had more than 100 people phoning up for my advice. Although I advised only two or three bets a month, it still meant that I had up to £1,000 running on a horse for me each time, which was a lot for a second-year student. It was a lot for a lot of people! I was running up much larger costs in phone bills and travelling more often to the races but still making a decent profit, especially as I now had the funds to bet more heavily myself. By that stage I was playing at the £500-1,000 level when I was very keen on something.
Gambling quickly taught me the twin values of self-discipline and discretion. Any gambler worthy of the name should retain the discipline to keep records of every bet, otherwise it is human nature to remember the winners and conveniently forget the losers. That way you can kid yourself you are winning when the truth is much bleaker. The records also ensure that no money goes missing, should a bookmaker or agent make a mistake in their calculations. However, recording all bets shouldn’t tempt you to dwell too much on them. You shouldn’t assume that because you have been backing losers your methods are wrong. It is not black and white. You must be keenly aware that you are concentrating on a group of animals running across a field, and can’t know for sure which one is going to get there first. Over a period of a week or a month, sheer chance will affect how you perform as a gambler.
Being discreet in all gambling matters is vital. At the age of five I was considered to be uncontrollable and was in no way bashful about what I said. I think I’ve improved a little on that score. When I started gambling, it soon became clear that the bookmaking industry relied on tip-offs to warn them when informed money was being placed. I would need to ensure that I gave no clues to anyone until I was ready to bet.
At Trinity, however, it was impossible to disguise the source of my new income. To support the business, my college room was full of phones, televisions and electrical equipment, causing one friend who called round to exclaim: “It’s like Curry’s in here!” The sheer number of phone calls that my tipping service produced meant that I needed someone to answer the phones for me on busy days. I’d joined the Horseracing Society as soon as I arrived at Cambridge; there were two very attractive girls among the racegoers, so when it came to recruiting telephonists they were the obvious choices. Suddenly my male friends were popping round on a regular basis to gaze adoringly at Katie Derham, now much better-known as an ITV newsreader, and her friend Kate James when they were hard at work answering the phones. I paid them £5 an hour to answer the phones for three hours each morning and pass on my selections for the day, which allowed me more time to concentrate on the form book.
My burgeoning business inevitably led to one or two problems with my tutor. All phone lines had to be registered with the college and when a routine check was made my answerphone message about next Saturday’s bet was discovered. Result: stern lecture and warning about the dangers of addiction to gambling (at least the horse won). I also had to tread carefully with the college porters, as pertinent questions might have been prompted by the increasing amount of my mail. After a successful Saturday I might have 30-40 letters containing cheques on the Tuesday morning. Fortunately, Paddy the porter was a racing man and, after I’d given him one or two carefully chosen tips, he assured his colleagues that young Mr Veitch was a fine gent who should be looked after.
I went racing regularly in that second year, usually with Paul Graham, a PhD student. He had rather more commitments than me, but managed to do his university work in the evenings and frustrate anyone checking on his daytime activities by leaving a trail of notes in various locations, each one suggesting that he had now left and gone somewhere else. My interest in the Maths course had disappeared completely; after the first day of the second year, I didn’t attend another lecture. I still had to survive the twice-weekly one-hour supervisions, which involved taking answers to a set problem sheet, but fortunately I had friends willing to help me.
My copying system relied on the knowledge that we had a different supervisor for each subject, changed every term, so that each supervisor would teach for a maximum of four sittings. A mystery illness (vet’s certificate) would exclude me from one of these, so any supervisor had only three hours to rumble me. Supervisors were mostly research students with a pleasingly easy-going approach, so I survived the first two terms of my second year despite not understanding a single question, never mind my copied answers.
Another ploy was needed for the end-of-year exam, however, and I was fortunate that it was possible to gain quite a bit of credit for doing a shared computer project. I clubbed together with my friend David Craggs, and to my certain benefit we managed to stretch the definition of the word ‘share’, as his efforts were a lot more impressive than mine. Our shared mark, combined with a week of last-minute swotting, allowed me to scrape through the second year. Other students called this last-minute work revision, but in my case it was just ‘vision’.
The end-of-year social events were easier to manage. One night Marcus Armytage, who had won the Grand National on Mr Frisk that spring, becoming the last amateur to win the great race, came to talk to the Cambridge University Racing Society. Marcus, now a racing journalist, seemed surprisingly subdued when he arrived, but as the night wore on and the drink flowed, he became quite full of himself. During his speech he had a light-hearted dig at me by suggesting that strictly on drinking ability I was more of an amateur than him, and afterwards he was so boisterous that he slapped me on the shoulder and sent me off to get him another drink ‘sharpish’. Naturally, I obliged. I bought him a double and kept them coming, with the result that in the last hour before his taxi arrived the hero of the Grand National was laid out cold on a bed in the recovery position.
I bumped into Marcus at Newmarket races the next day. He was much quieter, and reported that he’d had an argument with the taxi driver on the way home the previous night. He’d accused the cabbie of taking him to the wrong address, only to discover – after harsh words had been exchanged – that that wasn’t the case.
Towards the end of my second year, I had a client called Dave Mitchell, who turned out to be the sports manager of Supercall, suppliers of racing commentaries and most of the clublines for the top football teams. He had made good profits from my advice and suggested that we set up a premium-rate telephone service to replace my tipping service. Nearly all the premium-rate tipsters were well-known racing personalities or journalists, but my service would be billed differently. I would be advertised as ‘The Professional’.
The service launched at the beginning of my third year at Cambridge. It was an instant success, soon generating gross revenue in excess of £10,000 a month. I took on a partner, Peter Axon, to assist with the form study and obtaining of information and we worked tirelessly to produce my two daily bulletins. The first message went out at 8.30pm the night before racing, so I would be on the mobile for most of the informal sitting in the college dining hall. It raised a few eyebrows, although most people were used to it by then.
The premium-rate number took up almost all my time. In my first two years at university I’d managed to fit in occasional sporting activities, and I represented Trinity at cricket, squash, tennis and, occasionally, pool and darts. That said, when I played cricket I had to ensure that at least one friend was always among the spectators to answer my mobile and alert me if the call was urgent. Occasionally I had to feign an urgent toilet break in order to deal with the situation. Sports and studies alike went out of the window in my third year, as I dashed around the college to get anything non-racing out of the way before heading back to bury my head in the form book. One of Peter’s friends labelled me ‘Michael J’ after the old film The Secret of My Success, in which Michael J Fox played a dual life as a mailboy and senior executive in the same firm.
Now and again I made it to the college bar before 10.30pm, but even that backfired one night when I bumped into John Maxse, now director of communications at the Jockey Club but then a broadcaster at Supercall. He challenged Dave the next day to explain why their professional gambler was a student at Cambridge, something Dave and I had never planned to make public. John’s fears were put to rest when Dave assured him that I worked twice as hard as most non-students and that he’d extensively ‘tested the goods’ before signing me up.
I may have worked twice as hard as most non-students, but it was all in one direction and there was no time to devote to my finals. I managed to bluff my way through another year’s supervisions but left without finishing my degree, something of an irony considering my single-minded efforts to get to Trinity in the first place. My parents were disappointed, but as my racing business took off I hoped they would understand.