THE COUP
STUART had given his bet to me and I would handle bets for other members of the partnership. I have always made a point of trying to group all the business together. I have witnessed some fumbling efforts by others to land a coup, and it is remarkable that so many attempts are ruined by those involved acting in an uncoordinated manner.
There was no danger of my making the trip to Nottingham. The off-course betting market was much larger and course bookmakers love to attach importance to who they see at the races. I learned that early on and have never been one for being seen on a day when a carefully laid plan was unfolding. On one occasion, a social visit to Ripon had sparked a huge punt on an unfancied runner from a stable with which I was associated. A domino effect had occurred as ‘informed’ sources scrambled to capitalise on the so-called news that I had been seen at the races. Instead, I planned everything from the office. When people quiz me about my betting, they often ask where my agents go to put the bets on, whether they use telephone, internet, betting shops etc. The answer is that I will aim to hit the bookmakers everywhere during a large bet, rather than focusing on one outlet.
The prime threat to a gamble inevitably comes from trusting others. In an ideal world, I would spend the hours leading up to a race preparing all manner of people for the business ahead. In practice, it only needs one agent to place too much trust in someone close to them and everything can be ruined. It is no solution to withhold the name of the horse or the race time. The mere whisper that ‘something is on today’ can go round the betting world in minutes and leave dozens of people in the industry waiting by the phones, ready to jump straight in and take their share of the action. So I couldn’t forewarn my agents that business was pending. It would just seem like any other day to anyone calling my office.
Geoffrey Pooley and The Robot had a higher security rating, so would be given a few hours’ notice to get ready and a rough idea of the type of business we would be doing, although not the name of the horse. They were the two agents who had the best record on security matters. The race was at 2.45pm. At a small meeting on a Monday, betting shows normally appear no more than eight to ten minutes before the off. From 1.30pm onwards I laid out my desk for the operation.
First, I prepared the phones. I had a dedicated mobile number allowing incoming calls for each of the agents. When the time came, I could then send a group text message, advising them all to call me at the same time. There were also spare phones for one-off use by occasional agents who would be assigned a number on the day. In all, there were 14 mobiles on my desk plus six landlines on a digital switchboard. I then created my checklist, underlining each item that would need my attention and the specific time that I would deal with it. These would be written in note form to save time.
1.55pm Bet check. A full rundown of internet sites to keep an eye on betting activity. All the signs indicated that there was no interest in Exponential, but it was vital to keep checking. If he suddenly attracted attention it would cause me to act differently. If a horse starts to look hot in the betting, there’s a far greater risk of a price collapse, and it would be worth taking the chance of giving everyone more warning to make sure they could all pounce the moment the ‘show’ came through. If everything stayed quiet, I could give very little warning, to minimise the chance of a leak.
2.00pm GP. Check in with Geoffrey, to ensure his accounts were ready.
2.05pm CR. The same check with The Robot.
2.10pm Bet check. Go through the checklist again on the basis that time spent on reconnaissance is never wasted. Some might find my attention to detail obsessive, but with a coup like this you can never be too careful. I would be checking the betting more frequently than 15-minute intervals, but the 15-minute point was the time for a full review of all relevant sites.
2.14pm Nott. I had to watch the first race at Nottingham, which was run over the same course and distance, to check for any surprises from the draw.
2.18pm. Trainer. Last call to finalise David Allan’s instructions after seeing the first race. It had passed without incident, while confirming our view that our middle to high draw offered a slight advantage. Tactics were fairly simple. Stuart felt that trying to hold Exponential up would not be successful as he was quite headstrong, so the plan was to allow him to race handily. David could then pick his own point to strike for home.
I wrote ‘trainer’ rather than Stuart’s name. If I was planning a bet I’d often have to organise important decisions from more public places, maybe a table in the restaurant at a major meeting. With that in mind, out of habit, I’d never write things down that would give too much away to prying eyes.
2.20 to 2.33pm. Individual time slots to contact all the agents involved. The group text for main agents was sent at 2.30pm, but there would be additional calls to prepare other agents that I used more occasionally. I wouldn’t get hold of everyone I tried, but there was a large enough pool of people to call on. It is possible to flood the market with too many bets, so I didn’t need to reach everybody. For a smaller bet, the whole process of communicating with agents would be handled by Geoffrey, but I supervised the largest bets myself.
Each agent would be given a separate timeslot. Those not part of the group text message would start off with a timeslot marked ‘R’, meaning a call at that time to ‘ready’ them that business is pending. Once readied, agents would then be assigned a new time, with an ‘O’ indicating that this is the time to get them ‘on the line’ by telephone. Many agents would have their own sub-agents so would need slightly longer between their ‘R’ and ‘O’ times.
How were things shaping up in the market? From a betting point of view, Exponential was in a coma. On Betfair, he was out to 179-1, and the first show from the course came in at 100-1. Subsequent press enquiries discovered that on-course he was priced at 100-1 on most boards, with a couple at 125-1.
The press thereby dispelled the first myth that went around in the days after the race, that 100-1 was not the true price from the course. Betting is a business that seems to have a huge share of the world’s green-eyed monsters. There is a second myth that has grown with the passing of time. It was decided in certain quarters that the opening show was in some way affected by fake movements on the internet, that the 179-1 wasn’t a real price. Hundreds of thousands of pounds, sometimes millions, are traded on every race, every day on Betfair. I had a look at the amount traded on Exponential just before the first show. From memory, the figure was £8.
This was an incredibly small total to be bet on a horse in around 18 hours of trading. Such a horse was guaranteed to reach a massive price, as those traders who tried to lay small bets on perceived nohopers battled with automatic betting machines – ‘bots’ – to offer a steadily bigger price. So the actual cause of the 100-1 first show was the unique combination of circumstances that caused no-one to bet on Exponential, even at huge odds, except for the £8. We had a horse who was written off on form, on his premature headgear and the trainer’s past record. A watertight stable and owner ensured that noone had sprung the trap early.
At around 2.35pm, it was time to go to work. In the preceding minutes, I had succeeded in contacting the required number of agents and they were now all on the line. I shouted out a bet of ‘£80 each-way times your multiplier’ with a minimum price of 16-1, which would allow plenty of scope for bets after the price started to fall. Each agent had a ‘multiplier’ that would be changed only rarely during the season, reflecting their different strengths. A small agent might have a multiplier of 3 and be seeking a bet of £240 each-way, whereas the largest agent had a multiplier of 30 and was seeking £2,400 each-way. After everyone had rung off to get started, it was time for three final calls to riskier agents who I preferred not to forewarn at all. A massive gamble was now underway.
With about eight minutes to go, what action do I take at this point of a major bet? In fact, I often have nothing to do, because the time needs to be spare in case of communication problems. Everything had gone smoothly, so I had nothing to occupy me for two or three minutes. A peculiar sense of calm hit me. Perhaps the best analogy is that of a submarine commander after he has launched a torpedo. They can take many minutes to reach their target, and after the launch there’s not much to do except wait. I knew that the betting industry would be on fire within two minutes, as bookmakers became aware of the gamble and frantically tried to take cover. There would also be the sheep of the betting world who would realise that something was happening and attempt to join in.
It was vital that the price of 100-1 lasted a few minutes but not too long. With the liabilities involved, the betting on Exponential would very quickly have reached a point where nearly every bookmaker in the land would turn away further bets at 100-1. Having obtained plenty of 100-1, we needed the odds to get down to a less alarming level so that the second wave of business could commence. Once the price had fallen heavily there were bookmakers willing to take further bets, thinking that the ‘value’ had now gone. A second wave of bets was now placed by my agents at 33-1, 20-1 and 16-1.
In the final minutes, it was time for the third wave. After the price had fallen below the agents’ minimum of 16-1, it was time to move in on the internet. With the advent of betting exchanges, the business is full of punters looking to trade by laying a horse at shorter odds than the price they had already taken. Now it was time to turn the work of all the followers to my advantage.
A follower, maybe a bookmaker’s employee who has phoned another bookmaker and ‘nicked’ £100 at 33-1, might now choose to lay £300 at 10-1 on the internet, so that he stands to make a £200 profit if the bet loses and £300 if it wins. Helpful to the end, I was there to accommodate them, knowing that at 10-1 I was still getting an absolute steal. It was during this third wave that the phone calls and texts came back from agents. I scribbled their reports down and could tell that business had gone well.
At Nottingham, Stuart had saddled Exponential and now waited in the racecourse Tote shop for the action to start. He was delighted that a horse carrying so much confidence not only opened at 100-1, but was still that price when the runners reached the start. Security had been perfect. He even panicked for a moment, wondering whether I had been distracted in the final few minutes and failed to place the bets. As the odds finally began to tumble, William Haggas, standing nearby, asked him: “What’s all this about?” Stuart gave nothing away, shrugging his shoulders and replying: “No idea.”
And, after all the planning and preparation, the months leading up to the day and the hectic machinations on the day itself, the race. It was over in 61.72 seconds. Exponential was soon close to the leaders and looked to be travelling well, with David sitting quietly. As the runners passed halfway, quite a few of the jockeys behind were hard at work, but David and Exponential were still travelling smoothly.
David eased Exponential into the lead just after the two-furlong marker and from that point on never really looked like being headed, although the last furlong seemed to last longer than normal. By 2004, I had honed to the limit my skills of staying calm, but I’ll admit my heart may have been beating just a little faster for this final 12 seconds. Exponential had done it. We had done it. He held on by a length and all the planning had been worthwhile.
I started totting up the numbers immediately. First, I had to confirm a few figures with Geoffrey. All the bets had been returned to me and he had a share of my bets. The phase three exchange betting is not normally part of such a bet, as it was rare that we wanted to press on after a price had been savaged, so it was greatly amusing when he replied “HOW much?” when I called over just how much we’d won from phase three. When all the calculations had been completed, the winnings on my sheet came to £327,929.03, which included the stable business and that of my trading manager. My share came to £235,133.71.
What was the total sum won? Well, having spoken to most of the agents involved, I can confidently state that our total was very close to £500,000. If including the bets of those who followed in on the gamble, I would guess that the total won on Exponential was somewhere north of £1 million. I don’t think that being a follower is a good policy in general, as these days the markets move in all sorts of strange ways and just following the ones that shorten is very dangerous, but on this occasion anyone that did take the hint was certainly happy.
It was not a bad day’s work for me, and I write that prime piece of understatement with a grin on my face. I’m sure there have been people who have won a lot more on a race, perhaps even on a quiet Monday, but not with the track record that I had on that day. At the time, I was in the middle of a thunderstorm. In the previous three weeks alone (July 26-August 15) I had made more than £800,000, thanks to an incredible week at Glorious Goodwood that had netted me more than £400,000. What’s more, over the previous 18 months, my winnings were getting on for £4 million. This made me about as much of a marked man as it was possible to be, and made the job of getting my bets on very much harder.
The media pounced on the gamble within minutes of the horse crossing the line. Racing UK were covering the meeting and immediately set to work reviewing the situation. Sure enough, they swiftly dug out the video of his previous race at Beverley and reviewed it for clues to the gamble. This suited me fine, as it was plain to see that Vince Halliday had not put a foot wrong at Beverley. That killed off any suggestion that we had broken the rules in setting up the sting.
At York’s Ebor meeting over the next three days, the gamble was a constant source of interest, and David Nicholls was one of the first to offer his congratulations. Talking to him allows a 5’ 10” person to get an insight into what life would be like as a 7ft basketball player, as I’m sure David won’t mind me saying that he’s about as tall as the average bar stool and that you have to tilt your head right forward to look him in the eye! Although the rumour mill suggested I was behind the gamble, I wasn’t planning to give anything away to him or anyone else, so feigned surprise when David brought up the subject. David is no fool, though, and carried on regardless with his congratulations.
It was a hectic week in terms of press attention. In addition to mass coverage in the Racing Post, there were full-page articles in the Daily Mail, Daily Express and The Sun, and stories in many other papers. By the Thursday, I assumed that things had quietened down, but I received a call from a contact in the betting industry warning that he had heard that The Sun were planning a second big article on the gamble, this time naming me as the mastermind behind it. The call put me on red alert, so when a news agency called me half an hour later I was even more guarded than usual.
Another full-page article appeared in The Sun the next day but without mention of my name, although I was named in the Post, who quoted my stonewall defence in which I refused to confirm or deny my involvement. The Sunday papers continued the debate, with The Sunday Times awarding me the credit and commenting “operating with military precision, Veitch moved his troops under the radar”.
Another story appeared in print a week or so later. In the Post, Jim Cremin wrote a very entertaining piece about the gamble, which praised my efforts and criticised those of the on-course bookmakers for failing to ignore the internet betting and instead devise their own price, an unlikely prospect in my experience. I was branded ‘Bookmakers’ public enemy No. 1’.
The only drawback to the article was the suggestion that we had somehow misplayed our hand, due to my agents asking for bets that were too large and setting the alarm bells ringing. Jim had been misled by his bookmaking contacts here. Bets were placed in all shapes and sizes at 100-1. There were indeed a few sizeable ones, but I might add that not every large bet was refused and it only needed the odd one to slip through the net for a huge profit. In fact, we needed the alarm bells to ring once we had taken our share of 100-1. This allowed the price to contract to a level where bookmakers and internet players were prepared to lay bigger bets at lower odds.
In my view, only one thing could have improved the execution of the business, and it was too much to expect. I have dreams in which a horse gets loose before the start of this race and causes a ten-minute delay. Had this happened, the betting exchanges would have allowed me to place further huge sums on Exponential. The odds would have continued to shorten and I would have filled up at every price, as more and more layers convinced themselves that the gamble had now gone to a silly price and needed to be opposed. The starting price was 8-1, but if luck had given me more time it would have been 2-1 and the extra winnings would have been well into six figures. Sadly, a ten-minute delay was too much to hope for.
My refusal to go public was to have one irritating consequence. A couple of years later, John McCracken, an infamous punter who had been warned off the racecourses for an indefinite period for associating with jockeys, sent out mailshots claiming to be the man behind the gamble. Racing has rightly done its best to rid itself of this character and fortunately no-one took the mailshot seriously, but it was annoying nonetheless. If even one person confused me with an individual like that then it would be one person too many.
The only disappointment to emerge from Nottingham was Exponential’s future career. Stuart thought he was a Listed horse in the making, but sadly he never achieved form that was even close to that level. He suffered problem after problem as a three-year-old and went rapidly downhill, but he had done his job at two and owed us nothing. He was eventually bought at the sales by Milton Bradley, a trainer who does famously well with cast-offs from other yards. Exponential did win a little race for him in modest grade but that was the limit of his success, as even Bradley could not persuade him to repeat that victory.
But, on the afternoon that mattered most, Exponential did not let me down. That was my best-ever day’s business. The money I won wasn’t the most I’ve collected in one hit and, by 2004, a win of that size didn’t have anything like the impact of some touches in my comeback year. But for sheer execution, I feel it was the one bet where I got everything right. We went to war with a horse who was regarded as nailed on by an ultra-shrewd trainer. The coup was organised down to the finest detail, so that he was still completely ignored at 100-1 a few minutes before the off. If I had my time again I honestly wouldn’t do anything differently.