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Point Blank: The Cost Of Being Right

The trouble for tipsters is that they have to pick a few every day so it’s no surprise they are not on the plus side. Proper “good things” don’t appear every day, or even every week. Watch the Will Win thread, I’ll bet my house that you won’t see one put up on there every day.
 
Spot on mate. And i have to say that the Hugh Taylor piece made me laugh. If your data shows that Taylor is a losing tipster if you get 10% less than the recommended price then i dread to think what percentage less many of his followers were getting. I shook my head in disbelief when it was announced that we were going to cut his prices as soon as they came out regardless of whether we had taken a bet or not. Just as the punters out there were refreshing his site constantly, so were we. And as soon as the selections came thru (i think it used to be around 9.45am) the prices were slashed. And far more than 10%. 12's into 7's, 16's into 10's etc etc were the initial type of cuts and yet still the punters played. And then they would be cut again.
Same with Pricewise. I dont know if they still put them out at 8.00 on a Friday night, Pricewise has never bothered me and i dont get on with Segal anyway. But same again. As soon as his selections were on the site they would be slashed. And many times before we had taken a single bet depending on how quick their fingers were.
And it wasnt just our firm. Plenty of others did/do the same.

P and L - Totally meaningless !!
I remember the same conversation about Hugh Taylor and the rest in Power Tower. Pricewise was literally the only real work we had to do all week. The shift started at 8am and your job was simple: push the prices back out and set the lay-to-lose to either €250 or €500 — I honestly can’t remember which.

The first time I did it I forgot to lock the limits, so customers could get the full bet on. We closed every single one of them.
 
The trouble for tipsters is that they have to pick a few every day so it’s no surprise they are not on the plus side. Proper “good things” don’t appear every day, or even every week. Watch the Will Win thread, I’ll bet my house that you won’t see one put up on there every day.
Exactly right. I wouldn’t dream of putting something up unless I really believed it was a proper bet. I’m also under no obligation to ever put anything up.
 
"The first time I did it I forgot to lock the limits, so customers could get the full bet on. We closed every single one of them"

I bet that went down well :D

Our "strategy" (:unsure:) was the same every week. "Just give them £25" !

The funniest whinge i ever heard was from an old lady whose family only ever bet with us on a Saturday and i think it was six of them all came on for their £25's. So we shut five of them but prior to that the old lady of the family came on for her bet and she was the last one. I told her she could have 50p and no more. I explained to her that all of her family from the same address were taking the piss by only betting with us on a Saturday morning and only on the Pricewise selections. She said, "My address isnt the same as theirs, i live in the granny flat at the bottom of the garden" ! :LOL:
 
"The first time I did it I forgot to lock the limits, so customers could get the full bet on. We closed every single one of them"

I bet that went down well :D

Our "strategy" (:unsure:) was the same every week. "Just give them £25" !

The funniest whinge i ever heard was from an old lady whose family only ever bet with us on a Saturday and i think it was six of them all came on for their £25's. So we shut five of them but prior to that the old lady of the family came on for her bet and she was the last one. I told her she could have 50p and no more. I explained to her that all of her family from the same address were taking the piss by only betting with us on a Saturday morning and only on the Pricewise selections. She said, "My address isnt the same as theirs, i live in the granny flat at the bottom of the garden" ! :LOL:

There were hundreds of customers in the shops as “Pricewise Saturday.” The reality is that Tom Segal has the easiest job in the world — he only needed to be a bang-average judge to be considered “good” at it.

I think the record was 12 horses on this list that were big arbs when PP had to guarantee the Pricewise grid. It was the Good Friday all-weather cards. That just shows you how bad the markets were at pricing that racing, and how absolutely pointless the Pricewise grid was in the online age.
 
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Me I bet cos I enjoy the mental exercise of the analysis etc but if you have skills there are far easier ways to make a living, especially if want anything above min wage/holiday money betting profits.

I admit I'm a bit ocd with records but I understand the view of you are either in plus or not, which I like as it makes betting a great leveller.
But personsally I've improved my approach by reviewing my successes & failures.

@Quixall Crossett which bookie did you work for?
 
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I'm sure you asked me that last year mate :)
I refer you to my previous answer. :)
When i mention them all i get from others is "they ripped me off", "they restricted me to 45p". "they closed me down"etc etc etc.
So i just say a big firm who used to be good but now are as bad as the rest.

With respect.
 
I have much the same view re "pundits" & fantasy prices, if they aren't showing a profit at prices that much over bsp then there's something wrong
 
There’s something I’m not getting here.

You ex bookies are showing no respect to Pricewise and Hugh Taylor yet also saying that you made sure no one could get a decent bet on their selections. You even closed the accounts of their followers.

Why would you bother doing that unless they were both very effective at their job of picking winners?
 
My guess is they knew these horses would shorten so, regardless of whether or not they thought the sources of the tip were good judges or not, they didn't want a significant liability at the peak price.

Plus punters whose only activity is to cherrypick stuff like that are no use to bookmakers in the long run - they play the punter's oversll pattern of activity, not the individual bet, if a recreational punter who loses thousands a year wants a few quid on a Pricewise or Hugh Taylor hot-pot, no problem, he will give it back over time if he wins, but if that's all a punter does they're no use to the bookie.

When I worked with my Dad's bookmaker friend Bill Arrowsmith as a callow youth, the first thing Bill said to me was: "We want every horse in the book at the shortest possible price, so we let others get knocked over early doors with the live ones and don't get involved ourselves until the market settles down."
 
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There’s something I’m not getting here.

You ex bookies are showing no respect to Pricewise and Hugh Taylor yet also saying that you made sure no one could get a decent bet on their selections. You even closed the accounts of their followers.

Why would you bother doing that unless they were both very effective at their job of picking winners?
Firstly, I find it insulting to be labelled as an ex-bookie employee. Nowhere on this forum do I defend how they operate. I had the balls to walk away and not lie in that cesspit of morality.

Pricewise: first crack at tissue prices. He literally needed to be half-retarded not to win.

Hugh Taylor: tips in shit races pre-9am. Literally anyone could do it.

Why bookmakers don’t lay them is obvious — it’s a risk you can’t justify.
 
There’s something I’m not getting here.

You ex bookies are showing no respect to Pricewise and Hugh Taylor yet also saying that you made sure no one could get a decent bet on their selections. You even closed the accounts of their followers.

Why would you bother doing that unless they were both very effective at their job of picking winners?
Morning Grey,
Quick reply, we are leaving at 9.00.

I cant speak for the others but i am not saying that nobody got a bet. Quite the opposite. Plenty of people (regulars, long standing customers and of course, lifetime losers) all got their bets on. And plenty of customers, again from the above categories, got their bets on long after the prices had gone. There were quite a few who would come on for their bets at the same time every day, lets just say 11.00, and of course on a Pricewise day, the prices had long gone by then. but they would still be accommodated.
The ones we would knock back or restrict are the ones that never bet with us at all during the week and we only ever saw them on a Saturday morning. And all they ever bet was the Pricewise selections. Now bear in mind that no firm can have endless liabilities so a limit had to be set when we reverted back to the prices at 8.30. These selections would still be backed during the rest of the day so of course the risk was managed. So of course, like in every type of business, you look after your good/regular clientele. The last thing you would want to do is give every once a week punter as much as they wanted on the selections and then hit the limit and have to knock back all of your good and loyal customers. Believe me, the ticker was spinning with the bets coming thru every Saturday morning and plenty will have got thru. It was mad 20/30 minutes until we cut the prices. But if these once a week punters played the game and asked for say 50 or 60 quid they would probably get the bet. But £200 and upwards was a regular call and that is just taking a bet or two away from a regular client which was a non no. No business, no matter who they are or what they trade in wants to piss off their good and regular clients.

On a smaller scale, i used to get it occasionally when i had my shop. Being a one man band i had to "buy in" my morning and ante post prices and i used Stanleys. And when they cut their prices it obviously changed on my screens even though i may not have even taken a bet on said selections. But again, if a.regular came in an hour or so later and asked what the price was, i would lay him a bet at the price it was in the grids. But i remember one incident in particular. The prices changed around 8.45 and this bloke, who i had never seen before, came in around 9.30. He asked for four prices and they were the four Pricewise horses. I showed him the prices on the screens and he started questioning me on how many bets i had taken and how much i had laid. Of course it was none of his business and i told him so. I never saw him again for about two months and we went thru the same rigmarole again. And i told him that if he wanted to start betting with me and coming in on a regular basis then i would accommodate him with as much as i could on a Saturday morning.
I never saw him again.

I hope this gives you some sort of insight and reasoning behind it all. I could have gone on a bit more but i have to go now because otherwise the missus will knock three shades of whitewash out of me.

Have a good day mate.
 
Thanks for the detailed reply, QC. This has been a fascinating thread.

Enjoy your break.
 
The bit that really matters is this: Tom Segal used to get the firms’ prices first, before 5pm on a Friday. Those prices were compiled by maybe four lads spending half an hour at it. The pricing was flawed — that’s the nature of 24-hour markets back then.

So basically Tom got to pick out ricks. It would have been embarrassing if he didn’t win.

Hugh Taylor was the same idea in another guise. Tip into weak, early markets before 9am and the price collapses behind you. Anyone could look sharp doing that.

That’s why they looked effective — not because they were shrewd beyond the rest of us, but because they were gifted a head start in markets that weren’t robust to begin with.
 
Having worked on the Racing Post, including in production, dating back to when Mark Coton did it, I can confirm what Slim says.

All the participating firms submitted a blind tissue to the RP, the only people who saw the full picture were Coton....and the production staff!

One of them, who later achieved brief notoriety on the Racing Channel, would cherrypick the ricks himself before the ink was dry on the paper.

He had £20 each way on Rouyan of Rod Simpson's at 33/1 circa 1990 for some Sandown handicap hurdle and the price was cut to 20/1 either before the paper went into print or first thing in the morning.

Coton - christ, that bloke loved himself - wasn't a bad judge, but he wasn't the God they all fawned over in the RP offices as he has the easiest job in town plus he had a mole in Dick Hern's yard and, as I joked in the RP at the time, Coton's main claim to fame was putting up Nashwan for the 2,000 Guineas and The Derby virtually when it was a foal.

No surprise he failed to cut it as a professional gambler - odds on the only real money he ever made out of betting was by writing about it.

Ditto Segal and all of them IMO.

The only one I know of who turned pro successfully (though he's back doing media work now) was Eddie Fremantle, easily my best-ever signing when I was Editor Of the Racing & Football Outlook (Fremantle alludes to this in an interview with Simon Nott somewhere on the web).

But he was the exception - most of them stay in the cosy world of paid, not P/L-tested, media tipping for a reason: they're no bloody good at it in the long run.
 

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