Find The Lady, dear reader, is a very old scam where a street hawker will show you three cards, one of which is a queen, amidst two kings. He will then turn the cards over, and move them around. You are encouraged to wager your judgment against the location in which you believe the queen is to be found.
Of course, with sleight of hand, or prestidigitation if you prefer (!), the hawker will cunningly manoeuvre the queen to a location other than that where your money fell.
It’s a scam, and - should you see these toads around the side streets of Paris or pretty much any other city on the planet - avoid them like the plagued rodents that they are.
Derren Brown, a very clever man with oodles of understanding about mind control, scammed me out of my Friday night last night. Actually, that may be a tad harsh, but let me relate:
Rushing home from a ponce-y gastropub in Mile End (oxymoron?), where I’d been dining with my lady, without getting to the last sups of a very quaffable cotes du rhone, to catch the much feted ‘The System’, was to prove a disappointment.
In case you missed it (perhaps you have a life!), the premise was that Brown has discovered a foolproof system of picking winners. We tracked the progress of non-punter, Doris Stokes (or some such, name immaterial), as she was ushered through a series of five consecutive winning wagers by a mystery tipster.
(Coincidentally, one of them was one of my National fancies, Naunton Brook, who rolled home at 18/1 during the sequence).
After the fifth one had won (Joe Lively being the improbably victor of race five, as the two horses in front of him both fell at the last fence), Brown introduced himself to an incredulous Doris.
He told her that this sixth horse was also going to win, and that he wanted her to get together as much loot as she could, because he wanted to make a difference to her life. Aw, bless…
She blagged a bag of sand (that’s a grand) off her old man, who himself is a Saturday punter (never more than twenty quid though!), and got some further funds from a loans company (I mean, I ask you… Don’t try this at home, kids!!!), and turned up at Sandown with four biggies to wager on a horse that Brown selected.
He told her to bet Moon Over Miami, she gave him the money, he returned with a betting slip, she shat herself… He then explained how he’d managed to appear infallible.
What he had done was one of the oldest racing scams in the tipster book (again, p-l-e-a-s-e don’t contemplate trying this at home!). Brown had asked myriad people at the start to film themselves placing the first bet. One sixth of the 7,776 people were told to back each of the six horses in the race.
(Incidentally, the first winner was called Boz, Charles Dickens’ pen name, and also my schoolboy nickname. Fascinating, I know…)
After the race, unsurprisingly, 6,480 were losers, but - more importantly - 1,296 won. This sizeable group thought that they were onto something.
Even more so when the second horse romped home in a six horse race for one sixth of the remaining players. Naturally, each of these wannabe’s was operating in complete isolation, and with no knowledge that there could possibly be any jiggery-pokery at hand.
216 people had backed two straight winners, and were believing. The next bet would be a little more weighty and gregarious… The next winner was 18/1 shot Naunton Brook in - curiously enough - a six horse race, meaning that 36 staggered punters were thinking they’d stumbled on the elixir to life itself. And the elixir was being drunk from the Holy Grail.
Alas, for thirty more, the Grail would prove little more than a poisoned chalice, as by the end of race four (a, you guessed it, six runner affair), there were just six ‘lucky’ punters left.
All six were invited to Newbury, and invited to place a bet (recommended stake, £150) on a horse in a - ok, so you’re ahead of me now - six horse race. The winner was Doris’ Joe Lively, at 11/2.
She picked up a nice £975 (less stake, profit £825). Doris believed the system was foolproof and, surprisingly to this viewer at least, her belief was reinforced when she was introduced to Brown.
This was the point when he told her that he had this rock solid system, and she was was to ransack everything she could to get a war-chest together.
So, back to Sandown, and Doris realises that - £4k in the hole - she’s been duped. She wants to do heinous things to the loathsome begoatee’d mind-muddler. But, most of all, she wants Moon Over Miami to get her out of the hole alive.
The Moon may have been over Miami, but Marodima won this race from Mahogany Blaze, with the Moon barely visibly behind the clouds some way back.
At this point, after making Doris feel as miserable as she’s probably ever felt in her life, and on camera to boot, Brown reveals that Doris is actually on the winner, etc (though we never saw the ticket and I imagine this element was a bit of showbiz happy ending showboating), and all was fine.
The moral of the story, as you intelligent beings well know, is that there is no short cut to the winner’s circle, no legal get rich quick scheme.
Brown’s most revealing and interesting point was that these 7,776 people (or at least the 1,296 people left after race one) had increasingly bought into a ‘belief system’ and not a ‘horse racing system’.
They believed unquestioningly in the information that was presented to them, and they did this in isolation from any other knowledge.
It is a truism that the world of horse racing punters is a cynical one (just try the betfair forums if you don’t believe me!). Although so many of us actually wager regularly and, when asked, I imagine 90%+ of us say we win overall, the reality of it is that 98%+ lose money overall.
And because they lose, you lose, you say there’s no such thing as a winning system when you get in the company of other horse-y punters.
That’s what I have to contend with when trying to sell my product, which is why I now do it for the love - and a small amount of green folding - rather than relentlessly ‘whoring’ it.
Sure, I put the occasional comment on here and, twice a season, I’ll shamelessly market my product to people who know me and know the value of my free output on this ‘ere bloggie. That’s my prerogative, and I make no apology for it.
Here are the facts that allow me to sleep at night:
TTS 2006/7
Win profits to £20 stakes using betfair (14% over SP, with a 5% commission): £1,207
Placed in the first three: 51.29%
Win and place profits to £20 stakes: £1,794
TTS 2007/8 (to end January)
Win profits to £20 stakes using betfair (14% over SP, with a 5% commission): £1,049
Placed in the first three: 52.58%
Win and place profits to £20 stakes: £2,091
I sold it last year for £57, and this year I could have sold it for £157. But I have sold it for less, at £37 (less still if you took advantage of sale prices). If you bet bigger numbers, you could have won bigger money.
But, lets face it, I don’t actually want you to bet any more than you normally would. I don’t want you to ‘believe’ you’ve stumbled on the secret to beating the ponies.
What I want is this:
1. You acknowledge that, through the application of a solid work ethic and some serious number crunching, it is possible to profit over a mid to long term.
2. You accept that breaking even is probably a considerable positive step forward on your current betting patterns (keep records if you think I’m being harsh - a majority of you are in denial!)
3. You enjoy your punting a little more for knowing a little more, albeit that the knowledge is vicariously in
your hands.
4. You actually are able to say, at the end of the season, through the lean spells (remember November?!!) and the hot spells (December +£956, January +£729 for £20 win stakes on betfair), that you made a modest profit.
5. Deliberately repeating myself, that you enjoy your punting a little more, and finish moderately ahead of the game.
This isn’t meant to be a lecture, and I sincerely hope it doesn’t come across that way (for a start, doing my brains TWICE this week on the same 5h1t football team doesn’t qualify me to lecture on the subject of responsible gambling practices), but there is some really good sense in this post, and I hope that at least a modicum of it resonates with you.
The best of luck to you with your weekend wagers, and may your next trip to the betting window be to collect.
Matt