SCOOPING THE SCOOP6
IN this section, I’ve detailed some of the interesting tales and results from the years that followed my comeback, before taking a sabbatical at the end of 2006. Rather than revisiting the diary format I’ve grouped the years together and discussed firstly my biggest wins and losses, before then running through the stories from those years as a large-staking owner.
As I said at the beginning of this book, details from 2005 onward are more sparingly supplied to avoid giving too much away about my current activities, although I’ve included the major highlights. It goes without saying that every punter recalls the stories of winners most vividly. Of course, there are many losing days as well, although I’ve saved the story of my worst losing run – £400,000 in total losses – for part three, when I discuss the mental side of being a professional punter.
My winter break after the comeback season provided an unexpected and highly rewarding diversion in the shape of a massive dividend from the Tote Scoop6. This initially involved picking the winners of a selected six races on a Saturday. All those sharing the winners’ pool then have the chance to try to pick the winner of an extra race the following Saturday to scoop an additional bonus.
The attraction for me and other serious players was the rollover. If the main pool and/or the bonus pool were not won, the funds would rollover to the next payout. That winter, the bonus had not been won for many weeks, and by February 2000 a fund of £1.5 million had accrued. This meant that I could invest in the certain knowledge that the odds were in my favour. On February 5, a day the main bet looked achievable, I had a large perm consisting of a few thousand £2 lines. My sole intention was to get a bonus ticket and play for the rollover bonus pool the following week. A few of my agents and friends had been urging me to become involved, so I let them buy into my bet, and in the end about a third of my stake was owned by these third parties.
Results went our way and all six legs were successful, with Red Marauder, hero of the heavy-ground 2001 Grand National, one of the winners. The results were a little too predictable, however, as 18 other players shared the pot, making the profit on the first Saturday a not-particularly-big £8,442.50. Now I had a lot of competition for the bonus fund.
My immediate reaction was that some of the ticket-holders should join forces to maximise the chances of winning the bonus pool. This would involve a number of ticket-holders agreeing privately that they would each go for a different selection and split the winnings if any of them won. The Tote would be sure to pick as tough a bonus race as they could, so being able to cover quite a number of selections would provide a good chance of the group winning the bonus. But there are pitfalls and complications to such an arrangement, and over the next few days I would become intimately acquainted with most of them.
I contacted the Racing Post on the Sunday to tell them I was interested in forming a syndicate. The big pools in the Scoop6 had attracted plenty of publicity, so it was a story they were keen to follow. Later that day it emerged that a group of Post staff had a bonus ticket as well. On the Monday, a story appeared in the Post, headlining the fact that I was suggesting a syndicate. The first warning sign, however, was that punters were asked to contact the newspaper, where one of the writers, Simon Turner, had a share in their bonus ticket and had been appointed to run the syndicate. From this point on, matters proceeded out of my control. Simon acted very professionally throughout, but two key decisions made by the group were not to my liking.
The first issue was the number of members in the syndicate. I heard from another contact at the newspaper that Simon had been told he could not refuse anyone admission to the syndicate. Ouch. This was far from ideal. The problem regarding the ideal number of members is very much a mathematical one, which depends on the number of runners in the bonus race and also whether the betting is wide open or dominated by just a few horses. Based on the maximum field sizes for the TV races that Saturday, it seemed likely that we would be talking about an 18-runner field. I calculated that a syndicate of about ten members was ideal, as I felt with careful picking this would allow an 85-90 per cent chance of selecting the winner. There would be a strong possibility of no other ticket-holder sharing the pot if the winner was not in the first three in the betting.
The policy at the Post was to include as many people as possible, on the basis that if everyone joined, the syndicate would split the whole pot. Not only did I prefer to gamble with a syndicate of ten, rather than split the pot 19 ways, but if nearly everyone joined, say 16 out of 19, it was mathematically about the weakest position possible. If the favourite won and was picked by the other three ticket-holders, the syndicate members would each receive only 1/64th of the pot.
The second issue was ensuring that everyone got paid. The Tote did not like the idea of syndicates. They wanted to publicise one large individual winner, preferably of over £1m, as this would encourage new punters to participate in the future. As a result, they were not willing to split the winnings themselves, and would send the cheque to whichever member of a syndicate picked the winner. This could create all sorts of problems, not least the possibility of the recipient hightailing it to Mexico with the whole £1.5m, never to be heard from again. This eventuality could be offset by signing documents, although these would be by no means fireproof, as gambling debts are not enforceable in law. Security could be improved if everyone who joined the syndicate had to attend a meeting, have their signature witnessed in person and provide copies of their passport to verify their signature.
Over the next few days, I suggested that we should restrict the numbers of the syndicate by insisting that a live witnessed signature was required to join. Unfortunately, two of the ticket-holders were in Dubai and Portugal, and the original decision not to exclude anybody meant that the syndicate chose to rely on faxed signatures. This was much more risky – the person who received the cheque could simply deny the signature was his.
By Thursday, I had serious doubts about the whole idea. A small number of ticket-holders had not yet made contact, so I was in danger of joining a syndicate that had the worst possible number of members, plus only faxed forms for security. On Friday, at lunchtime, I received the forms prepared by the solicitor that Simon had engaged, and it dawned on me that I was jumping through hoops to do something I was not happy with. I felt I had a reasonable chance of picking the winner of the race, so I decided to go it alone. I now needed to make sure that I made my position absolutely clear to everyone involved. I phoned Simon and the solicitor to tell them my decision and faxed them written confirmation, sending hard copies by special delivery. The letter made it clear that I would not be part of the syndicate, and would not expect part of anyone else’s winnings.
I took very little time to decide that Merry Masquerade had to be my selection. His recent form was terrific and it was hard to find any other horse on a fair weight whose form I liked.
On Saturday, Simon called to say that he had now heard from the remaining three ticket-holders and thought that he could get them all on board. He asked me to consider rejoining the group. A full group of 19 was a safe option, but I had rather warmed to the idea of relying on Merry Masquerade by then. There was also the problem of the letters I had sent, making it clear that I would have no claim over anyone’s winnings, as it wasn’t clear whether they could be legally revoked. I agreed to think it over on the way to Haydock.
With all called to mind, it seemed clear that I had to stick with my decision, and I told Simon this at the racecourse. The Tote had laid on a box for ticket-holders and the group went off for a hurried meeting to discuss strategy. The next time I saw Simon, his team had decided to play a bit of poker. He warned me that although they had 18 tickets for 18 runners, they were by no means forced to place one on each horse. He pointed out that they could leave out the outsiders and might place as many as four tickets on the favourite, so that I would only get 20 per cent of the pool if I did the same.
They were clearly keen to dissuade me from picking the favourite Merry Masquerade, and were hoping I’d chance my arm on another runner. However, I reckoned that if they were going to put four tickets on the favourite, then they would have chosen not to tell me, as it would then have suited them if I picked the same horse. I don’t play a lot of poker but I can recognise a bluff when I see one. I was going for Merry Masquerade anyway. When push came to shove, the group placed two tickets on the favourite and one on all the others bar 100-1 outsider Treasure Chest.
It was some afternoon. Very few people had my new mobile number, so I had a pager that alerted me when a message had been left on my old number. In the next half-hour I received two alerts, which turned out to be angry messages, clearly from people not present, who were connected to the other ticket-holders. They seemed to have been under the impression that I had only left the syndicate on Saturday lunchtime, despite my efforts the previous day to make things absolutely clear in writing.
One said that I was dead if I picked the winner on my own. This left me a little shaken but, after what I had been through in the past couple of years, I was not going to be intimidated by that sort of nonsense.
Tim Watts was at Haydock, as he’d taken a share in my syndicate and was keen to enjoy the day. We stayed out of the Tote box and watched proceedings from a bar, and I was pleased when Merry Masquerade went off a heavily backed 15-8 favourite. He was usually held up, so I wasn’t concerned when Andrew Thornton sat well off the pace. There was quite a bit of market strength behind Martin Pipe’s contender Warner For Players, who had not run for two years. He made the running, and as they turned into the straight he was clearly the one to beat. Merry Masquerade made steady progress but in the testing conditions it was never going to be easy. Even when challenged and then headed, Warner For Players continued to battle on as my selection tired. As they made the long run for home from the final hurdle, I was desperately willing the winning line to arrive. Merry Masquerade just reached it first, a length and three-quarters ahead of Warner For Players.
Tim had been screaming our horse home from the second-last and now he erupted. He is as strong as an ox and he grabbed hold of me, lifted me off the ground and bounced me up and down while screaming “YES, YES, YES, YES”. He then put me down and took to beating me on the back, Tarzan-style, while he continued his chant. After recovering from my beating, I headed to the winner’s enclosure to make sure that no-one stole the jockey before he weighed in!
Some of the other ticket-holders congratulated me, some didn’t. I knew that I’d gone out of my way to make my decision known to them so my conscience was clear. Unfortunately, a brilliant day at the races ended with another message on my pager – one of the earlier callers had returned with a sinister post-race threat. I put it to the back of my mind. A few other agents and a couple of my friends appeared for the evening celebration and we organised dinner for 12 in a private room at Reform, one of the top clubs in Manchester at the time.
There was plenty of coverage in the papers over the next few days, particularly in the Racing Post. There were one or two complaints from people who owned stakes in other tickets who still seemed not to be aware of the full facts. I wasn’t in an easy position to defend myself, as it was the Post syndicate that had chosen a path different from that I would have recommended. Some of the Post coverage was more entertaining, as I was portrayed as having ‘played hard and won big’. They explained that by refusing to rejoin the group on the Saturday, I pushed a guaranteed £80,000 in chips back into the middle and gambled it up to £512,000. After paying out my friends and agents, my share came to £312,958.95.
The Mail’s headline compared my coolness to the Cincinnati Kid. A new magazine called Sports Adviser acclaimed me for the ‘greatest put-away in recent punting history’, theorising that I had concocted the syndicate plan from the start, always intending to withdraw. Mathematics clearly wasn’t their strong point. It was in no-one’s interest for there to be no syndicate at all, and it would have been foolish not to take part in the syndicate if a more suitable number, up to maybe 12, had joined.
And the messages on my pager? By chance, I was due to visit Cambridge police to tie up a loose end that dated back to my car being stolen by Hall. I mentioned the phone calls and they said they would look into it for me. When I got to the police station, I sat opposite the DC who had a list of telephone numbers that had called my phone. From my side of the desk, the list was unfortunately upside down. He pointed out that the police were not in the business of giving warnings and that if I wanted to take the matter further I would have to press criminal charges. Although the intent was clearly criminal, I decided that the people involved, perhaps unaware of the full facts, had made a mistake in the heat of the moment. I’d spare them a criminal prosecution on this occasion.
But, just for the record, I can read and memorise upside-down telephone numbers. The calls came from Ripon and central London. I’d say that there’s one family that has a record of underestimating me.