Enemy Number One

By Ronan Groome

So recently I have been reading a book called Enemy Number One which is about the secrets of the UK’s most feared professional punter. You probably know the book I am talking about if you read the Racing Post regularly, as it was around about this time last year when the Post frantically advertised it, with large extracts and quotes on one day of every week, for more than a few weeks. The book is now available to buy with a big discount buried away in the shop part of the Racing Post’s website.

Despite the cut down price I bought it for a month ago, it is actually quite a good read, and trust me I have read the lot when it comes to gamblers’ stories. The book tells the story of Patrick Veitch, he tells it himself actually, how he was banned from betting shops at the age of 15, how he employs agents to go and get his bets on, and how he has taken the bookies for over £10 million over the years. My deep sudden interest in the book comes as a blow really as I was just getting a bit of realism into my life, thinking of the future and how I need to study at college this year to get decent results in my exams and enhance my career prospects. That view has now faded away once again and I’m back to professional gambler mode.

Veitch reports that he won over £400,000 out of Glorious Goodwood two seasons in a row, how he backed Media Puzzle to win the Melbourne Cup – got up at 4.09 am to watch the race, watched Dermot Weld’s horse famously win, then was back in bed by 4.15 am, waking up the next morning remembering he won €100,000 during the night – how he backed his own horses to win after carefully planning out a gamble with trainers and how he master-minded his own sole winning ticket in the bonus Scoop 6, winning nearly half a million.

Do you ever wonder how people make a living by gambling on horses? People always bandy about the word value and insist that they only back horses whose price is good value, ‘it’s all about value’, they say. It is obviously much more than that. While value is key, discipline is next to it. What is the point in backing horses that are good value at 10/1, then piling on to a favourite in the last at an atrocious price to try and get your money back? All your good work goes out the window. In gambling you have to take the good days with the bad days and there is no point continuing if you can’t stomach a losing day.

A perfect example of this would be my silly-ness at the weekend. On Sunday I got up and studied the form for Dundalk and identified that Patrickswell was a great bet in the five-furlong handicap at a price of 16/1. He was even better on the exchanges, trading at 23 on Betfair and 7.6 on the place market, so I loaded €15 on both those prices. Patrickswell got over from his wide draw early on, which was half the battle, to race prominently into the straight. He was in front two furlongs out, only to be swamped by four other horses inside the final furlong, finishing two lengths away in fifth. I had right to an extent, Patrickswell ran a much better race than his price had suggested, yet I was still annoyed at losing my money so I loaded on Kilkenny to win by 1-5 points in the All-Ireland final. I fancied Kilkenny but I thought it would be extremely tight so I went for the winning margin spread. There was obviously a strong chance of that happening, but it wasn’t a 2/1 chance. No discipline, punishment.

In the book, Veitch gives you an insight to his everyday life. He reflects on a three-year period when he worked seven days a week, twelve hours a day; watching racing, taking notes and studying form for all of it. Anyone who tells you that they go into the bookies, study the form with the day’s paper available in the shop and make money regularly is lying. To make money from horses you have to watch races every single day, to have any sort of grasp on the form. If you bet with just a brief knowledge of form on each race you may as well start the fire as they say, and start throwing your money into it.

While backing horses will always be known as a ‘mugs game’ to most, Veitch has taken the bookies for £10 million over the years and he can hardly be categorised as a mug. And while most people will think of him as special or one of a kind, it appears to me that most of his success has come from organisation, dedication, knowledge of the game and guts – all of which are manageable in my book. That’s what I took from the book when I finished reading it, it could be manageable.

By Ronan Groome