Bookies fearful of Mullins mauling

Bookmakers could take a battering on the opening day of the 2015 Cheltenham Festival if all four of the Willie Mullins-Ruby Walsh combination of favourites are victorious.

Douvan, Un De Sceaux, Faugheen Annie Power have the potential to get the Festival off to a winning start for the punters.

Ladbrokes' David Williams explained: "The Ruby Walsh 'acca' [accumulator] has the potential to do untold damage."

"It's going to be the most popular accumulator bet we've ever known. If all four horses win we'll never have known a day like it at Cheltenham. It could run to tens of millions of pounds."

"We'll be desperate to see one of them beaten. Anything more than that will be a luxury but we dare not dream."

"We simply want to get through the opening day in one piece and there's no guarantee it will happen."

Bookmakers' bleatings about how much they stand to lose (or have lost) should always be taken with a large dose of salt. In any case, they have three further days to win it all back.

Turf notes 7 March 2015: Cheltenham Festival updates

Rock On Ruby has been taken out of the Ladbrokes World Hurdle after "working poorly" on Saturday morning, according to his trainer Harry Fry.

Fry now hopes to have Rock On Ruby back fit for Aintree in April.

Cheltenham Festival 2015 race preview: World Hurdle

Cheltenham Festival 2015: World Hurdle

Top 10 horse races by betting turnover - July to September 2014

The top ten races by betting turnover in the period July to September 2014 were as follows:

1. Ladbrokes St Leger Stakes
2. Betfred Cambridgeshire
3. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes
4. Coral Eclipse
5. 32Red Cup (Stewards' Cup)
6. William Hill Ayr Gold Cup
7. Betfred Sprint Cup
8. Betfred Ebor
9. Darley July Cup
10. Connolly's Red Mills Cheveley Park Stakes


Source: HBLB

Choosing an online betting account

The UK has one of the most competitive internet betting sectors in the world. This means that UK customers are spoilt for choice when it comes to opening an internet betting account.

The only factors that come into the reckoning when choosing an internet bookmaker are trust and security. Do you trust the particular operator to look after the funds you deposit, pay you out when you win, and will they still be in business for the near future (three years at the very least)? All other considerations are secondary.

At present the majority of internet betting brands, with the exception of Bet365, are not actually regulated in the UK by the Gambling Commission. Instead most firms are located offshore in jurisdictions like Gibraltar (e.g. Ladbrokes, William Hill, Betfair, Coral, Stan James), Alderney (Skybet), and the Isle of Man (Paddy Power). As such, if you have a complaint or dispute with your bookmaker it is to the regulators of these jurisdictions that you must complain.

It is also worth checking if your chosen betting firm is a member of the Independent Betting Adjudication Service (IBAS). IBAS acts as a mediation service between bookies and gamblers in the event of a dispute over a bet. It is an invaluable service.

The situation as regards regulation of internet betting is likely to change following the publication of a new gambling bill in the Queen’s Speech 2013. From late 2014 the new regulation will require all operators wishing to target UK customers to hold a licence issued by the UK Gambling Commission.

When choosing a bookmaker also bear in mind that they are not your friend. However amusing their Twitter feed or Facebook page, however generous they appear to be with their bonuses or cashback offers, do remember these are just marketing activities to induce you to place bets you didn’t really want to place and to give back your hard earned winnings.

Of course, you need to choose a bookmaker that offers the type of bets you usually place. If you make a number of each-way bets you might choose a website that offers slightly shorter odds but regularly offers an extra place for each-way betting purposes in the big races (not forgetting that this is still secondary to the most important consideration stated above).

Bookmakers Aren’t Bookmakers Any More

The major bookmakers, particularly their internet betting divisions, are simply marketing operations with betting tacked on. Sports betting is now used as a way to attract customers and then the idea is the get them to play other online games like poker, bingo, and roulette where profit margins are more stable. The notion of making a book, taking an opinion, and laying a bet is very much a secondary concern.

Ahead of last weekend’s Investec Derby the racing press headlines read along the lines of ‘Bookies out to get Dawn Approach’.

Much was made of the fact that Ladbrokes would be offering the top price of 7/4 for Dawn Approach, having been offering just 10/11 earlier in the week.

Brave move by Ladbrokes you might have thought, taking an opinion about a short-priced favourite in the big race. But read on …

The article went on to say that Ladbrokes would be offering this standout price “for an initial 15 minutes from 8.15am to a maximum stake of £50.”

I’m sure Ladbrokes can take a lot of bets in 15 minutes but if they think I’m going to crawl out of bed at 8.15 on a Saturday morning in the hope of getting 7/4 for 15 minutes about a horse that was happily available at 11/8 or 6/4 elsewhere they are a sadly mistaken. I enjoy my sleep more than getting an extra point (not that I wanted to back Dawn Approach in the first place).

Not that the bookmakers care much. The price is more for show and enabling them to shout they are ‘best priced’ or ‘best odds guaranteed’ in their adverts.

Sometimes, however, the marketing exercise backfires.

Ahead of the Queen Mother Champion Chase at Cheltenham in March, Coral were offering even money about Sprinter Sacre, who was generally heavily odds-on and eventually returned 1/4.

The decision to offer even money was not a bookmaking one, it was a marketing decision. Coral took the view that a £1,000,000 liability on Sprinter Sacre was worth it in marketing terms for the coverage they would get and the new customers who would open an account with them. The maximum bet on this offer was £20.

Sprinter Sacre duly won by 19 lengths. Unfortunately for Coral all of its customers then logged in to collect their ‘free money’ after the race and the new website crashed. Any hope that these customers might then recycle some of their winnings in the subsequent races on the card was lost as the site remained down. This must have been particularly frustrating for Coral when the winning prices for the rest of the afternoon were: 33/1, 25/1, and 25/1.

Race Day Betting: Qipco 2000 Guineas

The betting suggests the first Classic of the season is a match between Dawn Approach (7/4f with William Hill) and Toronado (2/1).

Several of today’s runners found themselves behind Dawn Approach in races last season, be it the Coventry Stakes at Royal Ascot or the Dewhurst Stakes at Newmarket. If all those horses – Dawn Approach, Cristoforo Colombo, George Vancouver, and Leitir Mor – have improved from 2yo to 3yo to a similar level then it is hard to argue that any will reverse the form with Dawn Approach.

There is no doubting what Dawn Approach has done on the racecourse as a two-year-old but he has been described as a ‘lazy’ horse and there has been no opportunity to see him run on the racecourse as a three-year-old. As such, some elements of his prospects for the 2000 Guineas have to be taken on trust as a punter. In return for that ‘blind’ trust I want a bigger price than the 7/4 that is available.

So, the selection is Toronado for Richard Hannon. The colt’s win in the Craven Stakes was impressive, regardless of the quality of the horses he beat that day. It showed a horse that could handle both course and distance as well as quicken at different stages of the race. It provides me with more recent evidence of ability as a three-year-old than I have for Dawn Approach and I get a bigger price for it too.

The Hannon stable has been in good form in general since the start of the season and connections are confident about the chances of their runner.

Richard Hannon Jnr said on the stable’s website: “Toronado did his last proper piece of work last Sunday and goes to Newmarket in the form of his life. We always felt that he was more one for the Derby than the Guineas, but this spring he has been showing much speed in the mornings than he did last year, so, while Dawn Approach is obviously a very good horse, we feel that we have a solid chance of beating him.”

2000 Guineas Betting Offer

Ladbrokes is offering a refund of your stake as a free bet (up to £25) if Dawn Approach wins the 2000 Guineas.

Ladbrokes have Dawn Approach at 5/4 and Toronado at 2/1

Bookies Fail National Stamina Test

Several online sports books experienced some serious technical issued with their websites as they struggled to cope with the surge in demand caused by the Aintree Grand National on Saturday.

Accounts with several online sports betting firms used by the authors of this blog all experienced some technical issues with both their websites and mobile apps at varying points during Saturday.

Some of the problems stated quite early in the afternoon, well before the Grand National itself.

The winner of the Grand National was the 66/1 outsider Auroras Encore trained by Sue Smith. Such a result may even have been a ‘skinner’* on some books.

It will be especially galling for the bookmakers not to have taken as much money as they could because of the technical difficulties. The fancied horses – Sea Bass, On His Own, Teaforthree – were all beaten, with only Teaforthree making the places.

On Twitter there were numerous posts by people complaining about a certain betting website and threatening to take their business elsewhere. It was a difficult threat to carry out because a number of leading betting websites experienced problems at different times.

The inquiries will begin on Monday when senior management returns to the office as to why the technical contingency plans failed to work. It might transpire that some sites were subjected to cyber attacks (though such attacks are rarely acknowledged publicly), although there is no evidence for such activity at present. But it is unusual for such a number of betting sites to suffer outages even on Grand National day. It could simply be that the betting platforms cannot cope with the Grand National day betting surge.

*A ‘skinner’ refers to a horse upon which the bookmaker has taken no money. If it wins, therefore, the bookmaker does not have to pay out any winnings. An excellent result for the bookmaker.

The Grand National – A Bookmaker’s Benefit

In a week in which the UK coalition government has introduced reforms and reductions to various public benefits, the country’s bookmakers can rest assured that their big annual benefit event remains intact – the Grand National at Aintree.

If a bookmaker were able to design the perfect race to maximise their profits, then the Grand National would not be far short of what they would create: a handicap steeplechase with 30 fences, 40 runners, over more than four miles. It is no surprise that it was bookmaker Ladbrokes which effectively rescued the Grand National in the 1970s when Aintree racecourse was sold and threatened with closure. The bookmakers probably saw their big annual pay day disappearing with it.

From a bookmaker’s perspective about the only way the Grand National could be improved to fill their coffers even more was if they were able to change the height of the fences or the width of the water jump at the last second just as the horses approached (as perfected by James Bond’s enemy Max Zorin in A View To A Kill).

The bookmakers’ biggest worry is having enough cashiers behind the betting shop counter, enough agents in the call centre to answer the phone, and that their website can hold up to the extra traffic (a test which Coral’s new website failed in the aftermath of its Sprinter Sacre offer at the Cheltenham Festival last month).

For a gambler who takes their betting even moderately seriously the Grand National should really be a non-betting event, however difficult it is to resist getting sucked in. The overround the bookmakers work to is obscenely high. It is one of the few betting markets where every horse can seemingly shorten in price just before the race without any other runner’s price being pushed out to counteract it (thus increasing the overround further still). At the time of writing, with 48 runners still entered the theoretical percentage on the book is 33%.

In addition, however good your form study, the amount of luck needed in running to get round is a lot higher than for an ‘ordinary’ horse race.

The current favourite for the race is Willie Mullins’ On His Own, which fell in the Grand National last year. The gelding has only run once since that day, winning the Boyne Hurdle at Navan in February. But a price of 7/1 is surely too short in a 40 runner handicap, no matter how good the horse or how talented the trainer.

Even if every other runner in the race were a three-legged shire horse I would still think twice about taking 7/1 in a 4 mile+ steeplechase with 30 fences.

Back Your Bookie

There is nothing quite like the British betting shop. They have an atmosphere, culture, and spirit all of their own. Over the years I have visited what passes for their equivalent in Hong Kong, China, Croatia, Lithuania, Germany, and Nevada and nothing can match them.

My current favourite betting shop is the Ladbrokes shop located just off the town square in Downham Market. This shop achieves its ranking at the top the list for a few reasons: (1) it is good-sized, modern shop with large windows, giving it an open, airy atmosphere; (2) I am in profit for that particular shop out of all the bets I have placed there; (3) there is a café just down the street that does an excellent cheese on toast, perfect for staving off hunger during an afternoon’s racing.

Unfortunately, I no longer have a need to visit Downham as often as I did, so my visits to that shop are few and far between these days.

My second favourite betting shop was the Coral shop in the south terminal at Gatwick airport. There was nothing especially notable about the shop itself except that it did make waiting for a plane more enjoyable. No, this shop’s rating was due to the fact that it was opposite a Krispy Kreme doughnut outlet. There was nothing more pleasurable than scoffing down a trio of doughnuts (one original glazed, one glazed raspberry, one custard filling) whilst watching a few races. Sadly both the Coral betting shop and the Krispy Kreme concession have gone, to be replaced by a Wetherspoon’s.

2011 marked the 50th anniversary of the legalisation of ‘licensed betting offices’ on the UK high street. Almost since they first opened they have been under attack from those groups and institutions which see the betting shop as a blight on the high street. Even today, when retailers are going out of business in towns across the UK, certain politicians and opponents still want to talk down the UK betting sector.

Such is the opposition to betting shops, the Association of British Bookmakers (ABB) has started its ‘Back Your Local Bookie’ campaign.

If you are interested in learning more about the history and development of the UK betting shop, these two books are a good place to start:

Down The Bookies: The First 50 Years of Betting Shops; John Samuels (2011) Racing Post Books

Better Betting with a Decent Feller: A Social History of Bookmaking; Carl Chinn (2004) Aurum Press

If you can get your hands on a copy of Bookmakers Office Supplies (BOS) Magazine, its articles also discuss the UK betting sector’s past, present, and future.

As Graham Sharpe, William Hill’s Media Relations Director, notes in the foreword to Down The Bookies:

“Anyone who has spent even the shortest amount of time in one of these unique, misunderstood establishments will recognise in John’s terrific book their real strengths and their few weaknesses. As the high street struggles to survive, you can bet the betting shop will be among the last to close its doors … [The high street] would not be the same without it.”