A Portfolio Life - Gambling

A Portfolio Life

Bad Bets. Cheltenham 2019

17/3/2019

Bad beats
Just time for a Cheltenham story (and not one about that chiselling little crook Rich Ricci this time, though I see he’s up to his old tricks).
I went Wednesday and had a lovely day, not least watching my favourite Tiger Roll win the Cross Country. I was standing in the middle of the course at the time and was so excited I managed to fall at the Cheese Wedges the second time around. Anyway, that is not my story. This is.
Thursday. I have not been having a great week, but nothing desperate. Frodon has just won under Bryony to lusty cheers and my only regret is being much under-staked on it. The Mares’ novices’ hurdle looks humdrum. My best mate is with me for the week and I remember on Tuesday saying to him I could see all the front three in the Champion Hurdle being beaten, but failing to do the forecasts to take advantage. Now, looking at this race, my synapses crack and fizzle into life, remembering similar missed opportunities, layered up like a generation of calcified failure. For the drums are now beating like a folk memory. Because this is historically Willie Mullins’ race and he has a load of runners and the shortest in the betting is about 10/1.
A plan forms. I do combination exactas on all seven of his runners. Small stakes, but nice. All the more so when two horses I’ve never heard of fight out the finish, the winner at 50/1 and the second at 66/1. I punch the air. Boom. The exacta pays £3k and bunce and I have most of it. Cheltenham, it is my realm. I am a creative betting artisan in a world of humdrum win-only midgets. I doth bestride Cleeve Hill like an exacta colossus.
One slight problem. Turns out I can’t count. Mullins had eight horses in the race. And them gambling Gods, them was looking…

The Tooting Tissue Annual Racing Awards 2018

23/12/2018

Loss since last post £55
(Would look a lot better had Twiston-Davies managed to get Ballyarthur home).

With no racing today or tomorrow, it must be time for a review of the year’s betting.

It’s been better than I thought it would be. I was aiming for a tentative, conservative, protect-my-fund-at-all-costs approach, with any profit as a bonus, as I fiddled with my new methodologies. Turns out, twelve months on, all three approaches have been profitable. Ok, I’m not rich – but it’s better than collecting trolleys in Sainsbury’s car park, which appeared my destiny otherwise.

There’s no obvious reason why the approaches shouldn’t continue to be profitable so, gambling gods allowing, we’re set fair.

Here’s a look at where the profits (and losses) are coming from. “Top” means most profitable. “Worst” in no way impugns anyone’s ability – other than their ability to make me a profit last year. The figures are skewed by Mick Appleby’s summer four-timer along a golden highway at Pontefract, all ridden by Silvestre De Sousa.

Top Jumps Courses
Uttoxeter
Aintree
Chepstow
Leicester

Worst Jumps Courses
Kempton
Sedgefield
Southwell

Top Flat Courses
Pontefract
Doncaster
Ascot
Epsom

Worst Flat course
Nottingham

Best AW course
Chelmsford

Worst AW course
Kempton

Best Jumps Trainers
Dan Skelton
Gordon Elliott
Tom Lacey
Philip Hobbs
Donald McCain

Worst Jumps Trainer
Alan King

Best Flat Trainers
Mick Appleby
John Gosden
Roger Fell

Worst Flat Trainer
Roger Varian

Best Jumps Jockeys
Harry Cobden
Dickie Johnson

Worst Jumps Jockey
Brian Hughes

Best Flat Jockeys
Silvestre De Sousa
Jamie Spencer

Worst Flat Jockeys
Daniel Tudhope
Ryan Moore

Bisodol

19/12/2018

Loss since last post £200

Word reaches me that Bisodol has been discontinued. For those with normal appetites and digestive tracts, I should point out that Bisodol is the brand name of an indigestion tablet, that comes in a tube of 20 – like a roll of pastilles, which fits handily into your pocket. I never leave home without them. And am not sure what to replace them with. A healthier diet maybe. To be honest I feel bereft.

I was at an Assessment Centre for a job once. As a warm-up exercise they asked us to take a possession we had on us, and use it to introduce ourselves. Bisodol was the only thing I had on me other than my keys and some cash – no handbag, no bling, no suitcase, no phone, nothing. So, Bisodol it was.

I said that I always noticed the small print which said “if symptoms persist see your doctor” but I never did because I never wanted to have the following conversation.

“How often do you have these symptoms?”
“Every day”
“And how long for?”
“Um, about 32 years…”

Still can’t believe I didn’t get the job…

In Praise of....Sitting down to Pee

17/12/2018

Loss since last post £25

I was desperate for a wee – yes, I’d been drinking - but was hanging on for the results, to see if Stacey Dooley had won Strictly Dancing – and so paid for our Xmas. Results announced I dashed to our downstairs toilet for a celebratory wee – in the dark - and in my joy and rush and state, my first shots missed the pan entirely and instead I peed all over the floor behind the toilet.

I found a cloth and started the mop up operation, still in darkness. I knelt down, which was a mistake, for my trousers, which were still undone, fell down and some of the flapping material dipped itself into my sprinklings. Wrestling with this, I knocked my glasses, which fell off my face, straight into the toilet pan. The unflushed toilet pan.

Swearing, I fished them out, and put them in the sink to soak, whilst I completed the original clean-up operation. Job finished, as best as a middle-aged, slovenly, drunken fat man can manage in the dark, I stood up, finally turned the light on and saw in the mirror that I was covered in cobwebs all down one side – for, verily, I keep a clean house.

I was vigorously brushing these off me, like I was being attacked by wasps, and in doing so knocked the toilet roll off its holder and watched agog as it unwound itself along the still-damp floor, finding all those bits I’d failed to clean properly.

So much for practice making perfect. I must have had 250,000 pees in my lifetime. Gathering myself together, I returned to the TV, sat down with a sigh and said to Anne, "Aah, that's better..."

Show me the Money

15/12/2018

Bets since last post (lots)
Profit £180
(Highlights a McCain/Hughes treble yesterday and Bryony on Frodon today.
Lowlights – quite a few!)

I like cash. I always have. I pay for most simple purchases that way and feel undressed without, say, a hundred quid on me. As with many things, this makes me a dinosaur. The last time I was in London I didn’t see a single transaction the whole time I was there that was in hard money. It was all people waving cards and phones over readers. This actually worries me. I can see a situation where chaos could ensue. But that isn’t what I came here to write about.

I came instead to reminisce on how much more thrilling it was back in them olden days to win money on the horses in cold hard cash, than it is now, winning numbers on a screen. I remember my first big win when I was living in Easton, a poor part of Bristol. I can’t remember how much it was, exactly. Let’s say it was £500, which is no life-changer but, back then, to me, and to everyone else who lived there, was a very nice wedge indeed.

So nice that, when I went to William Hill to pick it up, plenty of people in the shop noticed. The chap behind the counter counted the notes out as furtively as he could, slipped them in a brown envelope and whispered “Hang on, I’ll let you out the back.” I sprinted home, excited and scared, a delirious ball of adrenalin. Once safely inside, I chucked the money down on the kitchen table and did a wee dance.

Enter Anne. She picked up most of it without a word, went out and came back with a set of Le Creuset saucepans. Which wasn’t quite what I had planned. Still, 30 years later, we still use the pans, so that was as much of a hairy hunter as I’ve ever got…

What Rough Beast...

13/12/2018

Bets on day £485
Profit on day £440
(Another good day for Hobbs and Nicky Richards. And me.)

Off on a rant – last night Theresa May “won” her vote of no confidence. Extraordinary times. So, this morning, why are the BBC still giving such an enormous platform to the swivel-eyed loons of Brexit? Didn't they just get put into their box, within their own party? This morning on Radio 2, so far I've heard from just four politicians on last night's vote - David thicko Davies, Iain Universal Fuck-up Smith, Little England already forgotten his wossname, and Jacob Snooty Shitstorm Mogg. If they're not careful they'll run out of time to get Nigel McCuntFace Lawson on to tell us climate change isn't...

The media (BBC included) talk about us all being in our own echo chambers, but don't acknowledge that their own pandering to the extremes (half in a misguided notion of even-handedness and half because swivel-eyed loons make better soundbites) is a considerable part of the problem. This way, Yeats was right - the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy etc...

Retirement Envy...

12/12/2018

Total bets £370
Profit on day £760

Our best mates posted the above photo to the chat group our little gang share, a pic of them enjoying their retirement with a cheeky lunch at some seaside resort. Several hours went by, with it becoming obvious that everyone had seen the photo, but no-one had put a like or a smiley face on it, let alone actually engaged with it.

Retirement envy, it seems, is now a thing in our gang.

So, I’m grateful for the serendipity of an article in the paper that had a bunch of quotes to help us on our way.

Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die - Carrie Fisher

Envy is the ulcer of the soul – Socrates

Envy is the rottenness of the bones – Solomon

Envy is its own punishment – Aesop (Beautiful)

Comparison, or the lack of it, is the key, apparently (the author of the article no doubt googling furiously.)

Where there is no comparison, there is no envy – Francis Bacon

Comparison is the thief of joy – Theodore Roosevelt

Nah, not for me, I spent the day winning £760 on the gee gees…

Theresa Green

11/12/2018

Profit since last post £30
(A bad day Monday, a good day Tuesday, which promised to be even better had Skelton or Burke kicked on...)

Trees - they're flipping hard to draw, when you can't actually draw. Pages 32-38 inclusive in my "How to Draw" book are proving an early barrier. I keep being reminded of the William Carlos Williams poem - The Last Words of my English Grandmother. (below).

we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,

What are all those
fuzzy looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I'm tired
of them and rolled her head away.

Drawing the Right Conclusion...

10/12/2018

Bets out since last post - lots
Loss since last post £190
(Tough Saturday. Better Sunday.)

One of the reasons I thought I’d have a go at drawing is because I have 10 unused artists’ pads in my stationery box. Big ‘uns (size). And why is that, pray, I hear you ask.

Well, thank you for asking. Because that’s what I write my poetry on. I start in the middle of the white page with whatever “killer line” has engaged me and draft and play and fiddle, until what usually happens is that in the heat of composition, the killer line itself, around which the very soul of the poem hugged, is deleted from the final version. Which is, at least, my excuse for my poems having no killer lines. Yeah, I know, TS Eliot probably did it differently.

But, as I haven’t written any poetry this calendar year, I was left with these unused artists’ pads. So, in wondering what I could possibly do with them, and after pondering on this tricky conundrum for some considerable time, I thought, hey, I know what they’d be good for…

In which Boris Johnson proves himself a terrible gambler

8/12/2018

Bets out £570
Loss on day £300
(Sandown's proving really expensive this year - which is surprising considering it's my favourite track)

Here's some guff from Boris Piccaninny Piffle Johnson- excerpts of a speech to bankers - taken from Robert Peston's facebook page.

"When you look at Winston Churchill you see a man whose whole career was about risk taking – he was a compulsive gambler. This was a man who took one compulsive gamble after another – and he took all sorts of positions on things that went disastrously wrong. He was wrong about Galipoli, he was wrong about the gold standard, he was wrong about India, he was wrong about the abdication, he was spectacularly wrong for most of his political career.

But in the 1930s he of course took one giant bet. He took a giant bet against Hitler and the Nazi party. And to use the language of finance, he shorted the Nazis in a big way, at a time when much of the British establishment was actually filling their boots with that particular stock. And even when Hitler had taken Czechoslovakia and Poland – and Belgium and Holland and France were about to fall, there was a huge coalition of people in London, high minded liberal people, who were passionately opposed to Churchill and to what they thought he stood for, and his shameless opportunism, and all the rest of it.

(Several missing paragraphs because they’re, um, boring. One day Eton and Oxford will be held to account for the "debating club" shits they shower us with)

" A compulsive gambler was proved triumphantly right. And I think the only lesson I draw from that is that sometimes you do need to do the difficult thing, and you do need to take a position that everyone says is too fraught with risk. And the lesson I draw from that is the UK today has every reason to be confident about our future and what we can achieve”.

Now, I may not know much about politics but I do know a lot about gambling. As someone who has always seen Churchill as a basically terrible and reckless gambler who got incredibly lucky on the biggest gamble he ever made, this much makes sense to me. I'm not sure how Boris, projecting horribly over a terrible analogy, thinks he's making a Churchillian gamble, though. Firstly, he's backed both sides at odds-on so far, so is already a loser, Now, he's nailed his colours to the one mast. but it's hardly a balls-out, contrarian, hit one out of the park, mega gamble on a complete no-hoper. Unless I've read the referendum result wrong, he's just backing the majority view.

Not just a lying entitled chancing prick, but shit at maths as well...

Spotify says...

6/12/2018

Bets since last post - lots
Profit since last post - £345
(Harry Cobden helps thing along as usual with a nice treble, even if he'd been stood down and wasn't actually riding the third leg!)

Spotify sent me a thang saying that the artist I'd listened to most this past year was Paul Simon. Well,
duh. But then it surprised me with a list of my five most-played songs, none of which are by Paul Simon. I obviously must like them...
1. Louisiana 1917 - Aaron Neville
2. Homecoming - Josh Ritter
3. Small Town Heroes - Hurrah for the Riff-Raff
4. This Kiss - Faith Hill
5. Love is a Losing Game - Amy Winehouse.
Enjoy😃

Tuesday 4th December

4/12/2018

Bets out today £385
Profit on day £85

I started watching Little Drummer Girl last night. I like my Le Carre short and tight. I personally believe The Spy who Came in from the Cold to be one of the greatest books ever written (not just a great spy novel). A great film also. So, we'll see. Anne has already abandoned it, so I'll have to fit it in after the racing's finished winter-early.

I haven't read the novel, but I liked this (probably mis-remembered) exchange.

"Do you often drink before nine in the morning?"
"Not in moderation."

It could be the tag-line to John Cheever's Journals (also one of the greatest books ever).

Talking of timeless art, what will doubtless come to be known as Twynam's Pencil Period continues apace, as I tear through my first ever 0.1 drawing pen. I've reached page 29, my attempt at which, as you can see, includes some terrible trees (amongst other crimes.) In my defence, drawing trees doesn't begin until page 32...

The Only Living Boy in New York

4/12/2018

Bets £400
Loss on day £100

"I can gather all the news I need on the weather report."

This is one of my friend’s favourite lyrics. And it's quite close to what I’ve been trying to do this year. Twitter is dead to me, and I have mainly been missing the news and am much happier as a result. Plus, the news is so repetitive and circular, I'm not even less informed.

Instead I've been thinking about two other lines in this old Paul SImon classic.
Firstly, what of this, in the Trump era, as a shout from a New York past to a present:

"Let your honesty shine now, like it shines on me."

Yes, that’s something to aspire to. Away from the posturing, and the politics and the proto-fascism, one thing I don’t get about America voting this lying cunt President is what do they tell their children. You know, like when them pesky kids test the boundaries – maybe tell a wee fib? (And this is Republican, Christian, Silent Majority, Middle America stuff). Do they tell them of George Washington and the cherry tree, as every generation in that America has done hitherto? And, if they do, what do the kids say? “Nah, fuck that, grandma, I'm gonna be like Trump.”?

Which leaves me with this:

"Half of the time we’re gone and we don’t know where and we don’t know where."

No Direction Home

3/12/2018

Total bets at weekend £1020
Profit £250
(Nicholls and Tizzard provided nice wins for their lesser-fancied hopes in the big handicaps and chucked in the forecasts as well. Richards repeated this feat on Sunday, but I missed the forecast, being lost on a hill in Shropshire.)

Well, not lost really. We were blown off one side of Brown Clee so tried to navigate a route down we hadn't tried before, without a map. Now, I'm a good map-reader - an art very much nearing extinction - and even more so considering I have absolutely no sense of direction. Anne, on the other hand, is nothing special at reading a map, but usually can tell in which vague direction to head. Together we rub along just fine.

Except this weekend she was right narky (Brexit, a lost sock, leaves, work and her brother, apparently) and had it in her head that my basic approach of just walking downhill was going to end in disaster. I kept marching forward confidently, she kept saying we were going wrong. It got so she was desperate for me to be proved wrong. She wanted us to come upon a crossroads where she could say "see, I told you so", you know, something like a sign saying car-park 3 miles, or a newsflash saying Nissan had abandoned Sunderland.

Anyway, we didn't. I marshalled us directly down to the car without incident. Which was the light getting through the cracks, maybe.

If Eric Ravilious Couldn't Draw...

30/11/2018

Bets since I last posted – lots
Loss over that period £110
(Which means I finish the month with an acceptable profit – but strip out the exceptional Skelton five-fold and it was a losing month, which is annoying.)

I think I mentioned previously that I have taken up, or intend to take up, drawing, despite having absolutely no talent at it. Or, more accurately, because I have no talent. I reckon it might help keep the voices at bay, there’s no need for validation, or to take it seriously, and so it should be strangely liberating.

To wit, I ordered a set of pencils and stuff and a book on how to do it. The cheap little box of pencils from 1H to 8B, plus erasers and sharpeners and graphite and charcoal, is a thing of beauty, not least when you’ve spent the greater part of your life building a better life by stealing office supplies. I’ve spent quite some time staring and stroking. The book that accompanied it is called something like “With only 10,000 hours of half-arsed practice, even a talentless schmuck like you will draw like Picasso…”

Sadly, there was a shock in store for me on page one. Turns out I’ve ordered the wrong pencils…

Which hopefully helps explains this, my first ever drawing…

Everyone Needs Chums

28/11/2018

Bets £510
Loss on day £390
(Ouch. That hurt. I’m trying to tip-toe towards the end of the month, protecting my profit, so I can pay a dividend. That did not help.)

Three meetings on Attheraces today. No changing channels. So, I did what I’d been planning to do in such circumstances and started five-bar gate counting of the adverts during the programme. My blog was going to be about how the channel seems to only attract advertising focused on the needs of old, sad, waste of space losers.

The problem was, an hour in, my stats weren’t backing up my narrative. There’d been loads of adverts for other stuff. You know, like it’s Christmas, or something, sometime, not very soon.

Then I thought, oh no, just maybe, hitherto, I’ve been subconsciously noticing certain adverts. They’ve been cutting through the noise, because they speak to me. Because they are meant for me. Do you know what I mean?

Funeral insurance, loan sharks, equity-release schemes, elasticated waists…

no poetry

Victoria, Giles, Woody and a Mousetrap

27/11/2018

Bets Out £430
Profit on day £30

There was a question on the deliriously lateral Only Connect last night that was about The Mousetrap and on which I scored 2 points, which is almost cause for a champagne celebration in our house (at least until the missing vowels round, of which I got 12 right ahead of the buzzer last night - just saying).

I knew the answer because, when I was about 14, I was actually taken by my mum to see The Mousetrap – for no other reason than that I was reading a lot of Agatha Christie at the time (all of Agatha Christie at the time, actually), and that it was the longest running play in the West End – twenty-odd years - which seemed unfathomable at the time.

The play was terrible, the acting worse and the atmosphere touristy and funereal, (a foretaste of my general experience of the theatre; “backache, a rumbling tummy and posh people spitting at each other” as Giles Coren memorably described it, shortly before getting (and losing) a gig as a TV theatre critic.

Thing is, that was 32 years ago. And The Mousetrap’s still going strong…

As Woody Allen once noted – eternity lasts a very long time, particularly towards the end…

no poetry

Going Underground

26/11/2018

Bets £445
Profit on day £190

Going Underground came on the radio. Took me back. 1980. I was 17. Maybe 18. I was an angry foot-staring boxroom rebel, who hardly turned up at Sixth Form, choosing instead to ransack Reigate second-hand bookshops for the gamut of European Modern Classics from Camus to Sartre, from all of which I caught a very bad dose of existential ennui.

The Jam were my band. Surrey boys, but angry dispossessed Surrey boys, suburban boys, with a way with a lyric that seemed to speak directly and only to me. I saw them live five nights in a row – at the Rainbow in London and at Brighton. The audience was – well, it was a bunch of me – all shouting along to the lyrics like we were their disciples. Jesus, no wonder Weller wanted out.

The Jam were getting popular. A number one band. That was kinda good and kinda bad. Eton Rifles had already been to the top spot. And, as history has shown, with David Cameron, without a hint of irony, citing it as one of his favourite songs, the very people the songs were deriding were becoming fans. Going Underground caught sight of this.

My friend and I decided to go underground. Literally. Well, overground. We took a Vango Force 10 tent to the top of Priory Park in Reigate and camped there for a week, without telling anyone. We lit a fire, and cooked sausages and talked about shit and stuff, and I doubt it was actually a week, and Chris kinda blew his cover by going to see his girlfriend who worked Saturdays in the newsagents on the high street but, still, he brought us back some sweets, so I forgave him. He’s a kinda famous DJ now, and she was his wife for a long time.

I wasn’t missed. My nan and gramps had given up expecting me home ages since. The world turned. I loved the song, then I tired of it, then it seemed to belong to a different time, a different world. I had grown and changed, Paul Weller had grown and changed (several times, effortlessly regenerating himself). The world had grown and changed.

Now, when I catch it, I realise that Paul and I may have changed a bit, but our core values remain intertwined, and the world, the world we were tilting at, that world is still the same. And so, here I am, all these years on, Going Underground.

no poetry

Like a Drunk in a Midnight Choir...

25/11/2018

Bets £610
Profit on day £80
(Stopped the losing run, at least. A lot of huffing and puffing to not much end though, which of course is mainly my daily lot. Today I'll be ploughing the furrow that is Dan Skelton at Uttoxeter, which has unearthed countless riches this year and is almost certainly bound for (a) regression and (b) being wildly overbet, at least judging by the prices this morning.)

There’s a verse in Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire (if Leonard’s not your voice, check out a brilliant rendition by Jennifer Warne, from which these slightly modified lyrics are taken)

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He said to me, "Don’t ask for so much"
And a young man leaning in his darkened door
He cried to me, "hey, why not ask for more?

That in a nutshell is how I’ve tried to navigate my way through living in a wildly capitalist society. Balancing both. I try to look down not up. I try to count my blessings. But also, I hope for better.

I take the middle ground and I have trouble with people who place themselves on either extreme. Be they the earnest types preaching moderation in all things on the one hand, or the grasping, neoliberal, cunts with empathy by-passes on the other.

In terms of my peer group, or based on any reasonable expectations of future success based on schooling, I’ve probably underachieved towards the undriven end, to my own material disadvantage, but can hardly grumble. If I had that much more I honestly wouldn’t know what to do with it.

no poetry

Jermaine Jenas - you don't have to take your clothes off...

24/11/2018

Bets out £575
Loss on day £250
(Five losing days in a row - a week is a long time in horse racing. Wouldn't mind a Saturday like last week!)

Top of the Pops - a repeat from 1986 - Simon Mayo's first show. Anne and I were watching Julian Cope and chatting about where we had separately seen him live, when Paul Young came on with a song so mediocre neither of us could remember ever having heard it before. Anne said, by way of comparison - now, I don't like it much, but "We don't have to take our clothes off to have a good time" is at least memorable - you know, by whatisname, Jermaine Jenas...

(What's doubly extraordinary about this exchange is I am almost certain that Anne doesn't actually know who Jermaine Jenas is, or has ever even heard of him.)

no poetry