Category: The Rambling Gambler - A Portfolio Life

A Portfolio Life

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

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…

The Race Run

16/11/2018

Bets Out £490
Profit on day £175
(A better day. Some discipline restored. Unfortunately, it’s now Cheltenham for the next three days, the place where discipline and I become arch enemies. And in these forays, sometimes you get the bear…)

My best friend retired yesterday – aged 56. He’s not the first of our (very lucky) University friends to do so, but is the first of our little gang. Our chatgroup wished him luck on his last day at work, and indulged in some jealousy-tinged badinage.

“I now have the disquieting feeling of having lost a race I didn’t know I was in to a finishing line I couldn’t locate,” said one.

“Indeed, as if someone has just brashly run past, elbows out, wiggling his back-side” said another.

“Actually, Gary won that race years ago,” said a third.

“Yes, but he was running in a different race” said the fourth.

Which is true. I was never running in the same race, nor in reality, in a race at all. Which I have to say, back when I was working for the Man, was often very confusing for some of the aspirational men (and it was always men) I worked with. They assumed I was some sort of competitor and either didn’t trust that I wasn’t, or lacked the imagination to see that I wasn’t, or resented me for not being in their club. Plus, I was an arsehole.

Still, I’ve never regretted, in effect, retiring from that world aged 37. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance…

Started Early, Took My Dog

13/11/2018

Out £460
Profit on day £75
I've been keeping Hobbs on side.

A good day. An empty day. No news has filtered through. Just gambling. Profitable. Started early, took my dog.

The slant of my day’s gambling is usually decided in the first few races – especially if they are novice hurdles or two- year old races, where the choice is between a mere handful of short-priced horses. With a tailwind the early results will give me a quick return but, far more importantly, will mean I have a fistful of doubles running on. Sometimes, after the first race at each course I’ll be set for the day – merely a case of hedging against my on-going profits and hoping for the big one. Sometimes, of course, the early results go entirely against me, and then the day is going to be a grind into profit or to limit the losses. Usually it’s somewhere in between.

Each of them a slightly different tune – but the dance, it’s a dance just the same.

No poetry

In which a second-rate writer protects his shins by not writing...

11/11/2018

100+ Bets. Out £835
Loss on day £30
(A Nicholls five-timer and still a loss on the day. I really needed either the six-timer, or to have staked better. I even needed Roger Fell’s 25/1 winner to staunch the losses.)

Sam Leith’s long-awaited review of Indifferent Voices arrived yesterday:

It's ambiguous to begin with:

“Easy good books will, with a bit of luck, find their audiences; easy bad books will do so too, because they are often fun in spite of or because of their badness. Difficult bad books will tend to die in a ditch; and difficult good books, without a helping hand are likely to do so too.”

But then gets to the point:

“The idea of literary fiction is the rock on which many ambitious second-rate writers bark their shins. It’s what gives us plotless novels choked with portentous metaphors and pseudo-profound ruminations.”

Ouch.

No poetry today.

Friday 9th November

10/11/2018

Bets 100+ Out £550
Profit on day £110
(Just a decent day's gambling)

Fulham currently nestle at the bottom of the Premiership. No great surprise. Reminds me of an interview Mick McCarthy gave once. He had just been promoted – Sunderland if memory serves – and was being interviewed in the tunnel. “You must be over the moon about next season?” asked someone incisively. “You must be joking” McCarthy harrumphed. “We’ll be bottom after twelve games and I’ll be sacked by Christmas.” Which turned out to be true.

Which makes me feel sorry for Jokanovic, now odds-on to be the first managerial casualty of the season (plus, surely that should be Mark Hughes). Jokanovic was a hero last year. Now I assume forums and phone-ins are full of people in the cheap seats throwing veg (though, to be fair, there aren’t any cheap seats at Fulham any more, so they can throw what they like. When I started regularly communing with my dead dad, back in ’96, it cost £6 to sit in the Stevenage Road Stand, and you got a whole row to yourself.)

Anyway, he needn’t worry. Our next three away games look more than winnable. Liverpool, Chelsea, Man Utd.

I'll do well over 100 bets today, which will include keeping Ian Williams and Paul Nicholls onside.

No poetry.

The Voice of Gambling

9/11/2018

Bets 95ish. Out £525.
Profit on day £345
(A Henderson double, a 33/1 David Maxwell winner and very nearly a 500/1 double)

Some people seek mindfulness. Not me. I’ve always sought its partner, its mirror – absence. Emptiness. Mindlessness. Stop the voices. Including my own.

Silence doesn’t do this. Meditation, or at the least a lack of distraction, is a gateway to either all the other (indifferent) voices I keep trying to keep at bay, or my one strong inner narrator voice, prattling endlessly on and on.

Gambling does it for me. Partly. The day’s slow movement from morning study and early bets, through to the three hours of frantic betting activity – and it’s important to me that it is frantic – for it to work I need to be betting in virtually every race. That’s what provides the flow, no race any more important than any other, with occasional spikes for big races, or for small races with big possible pay-outs. And then, the winding down with tomorrow’s cards, an updated spreadsheet and a review of the day. And then sleep, thinking about the day gone and anticipating tomorrow – but only in terms of betting. This flow, the total concentration is part of it, of course. The process takes over, and at speed, gathers a rhythm that carries me along in its embrace – a glorious dance.

It’s not emptiness as such, but it is an emptiness of all the things that fill the void otherwise and lead to depression, anxiety, rage. Much better to be cursing a bad bet, or a bad beat in a photo, than about some perceived slight, or some keyboard twat on social media or Brexit or the impending world apocalypse, or any of the other thousand things I might wurrett at otherwise, all of which might bloom voices in my mind.

It’s not voiceless as such, but the one voice is ‘gambling guy’ – excitable but mainly calm, hopeful but mainly pragmatic, with skin in the game but sat sideways to it, focused but driven by distraction. Most people looking in from outside would see this bloke as a loser, as a waste of space, as a fat bloke with a laptop staring at the telly. In fact, people I know and love think that way, including my wife sometimes. Me, I like this guy. I prefer him to the alternatives. And that makes me happy.

No poetry.

Carol Vorderman Sucks Paul Dacre

8/11/2018

75 bets Out £480
Loss on day £80

Nottingham sucks. Under my new methodology, it’s easily my worst performing course (chased hard by Redcar, no wonder this week’s been hard). I’m down £525 there this year. I might decide to omit courses next year. I might not. Pontefract is my best performing course and I would never have predicted that. I think I probably need a larger sample size than one year.

Carol Vorderwoman has been a surprisingly large part of my life - not least in the Dashing Des Kelly years - and I couldn't help noticing on tonight's One Show that her breasts seem to have taken on a life of their own. And her arse. In fact, much like Trigger's broom, I'm not sure how much is original.

Which is fine - go your own way - rage against the dying of the light. Write your own history. Which she also managed to do - on a sofa with Peter Andre and Graeme Swann, and that there Oti (swoon), plus Alex and Matt, all of them talking about the wonder of their times on Strictly Come Dancing without ever mentioning Carol's own less wondrous experience of said event.

I'd still watch her doing sums, mind..

Apparently, Paul Dacre spent 15 minutes of his farewell address lambasting The Guardian. Dacre, who plainly attended the same performance management training as Philip Green – his staff talk about being dressed-down as being given a “double-cunting” – seems to have limped off the field at a strange time, given the world is tilting more towards his socially illiberal stance with every turn.

But he certainly prevailed over the monthly phone calls of the last twenty years between the Guardian me and the Mail my mom. In the last couple of years alone my mother has railed about a tsunami of Syrian refugees getting preferential treatment; about doctors “they’ve been agitating forever”; about how our young are a bunch of softy do-gooders – “because the teachers are brainwashing them”; and that without the royals, we’d lose gazillions in tourism as Windsor Castle fell into loneliness and disrepair (like, say, The Palace of Versailles). She’d always win these battles. She’d goad me to say equally stupid things, or to put the phone down. A needle stuck in a groove.

The closed-mindedness and the hatred drip, drip, dripped daily into her, corroded her senses and rusted her heart. The truth is, whatever else is our relationship, we no longer like each other very much. Well done Mr Dacre, look on your works ye mighty. In your honour I’ve knocked up a title that honours your way with headlines and truth.

No poetry.

Tuesday 6th November - Appleby, Trump, Egg and Poetry

7/11/2018

60 bets. Out £630.
(Dickie Johnson - three short-priced winners)
Loss on day £175

Yesterday seemed a significant day.

Charlie Appleby trained the first British winner of the Melbourne Cup. Which gave me a spring in my step first thing, as I’d backed him. As you can see that was about as good as the day got.

Egg, aka Rick Grimes, died in The Walking Dead. Or rather, died slowly over the hour but was then whisked off in a helicopter to star in three spin-off films – which seemed like a metaphor for the show itself.

America went to the polling booths to provide a half-time vote of confidence, or not, on old Cunty McCunt face. Which, to my basically uninformed eye, looked to be a relegation six-pointer that predictably ended up as a desperate score draw. Which I guess is progress.

And a line of poetry popped unbidden into my head. This was the first piece of poetry I have channelled/written down all year. I have been keeping the voices at bay by obsessing about gambling and putting the hours in. But, finally, a voice managed to creep through the battle-lines. Not a very good line, admittedly, but I’ll keep a wary ear out.

Always, there’s a place where the wall is higher.