Another classic betting coup
Barney Curley may have retired but his presence was felt yet again as four heavily gambled horses romped home in style for a big accumulator today. This brought back memories of May 2010.
Eye of the Tiger came in at 13:30 at Lingfield, Seven Summits at the 13:40 at Catterick then Indus Valley and Low Key in the evening at Kempton.
The link? All the horses involved were previously associated with Barney Curley. Winning trainer John Butler, a former assistant to Curley, denied any knowledge of the coup. “It is all speculation,” he said.
Bet365 had offered morning prices of 10-1 Eye Of The Tiger, 6-1 Seven Summits, 20-1 Indus Valley and 7-1 Low Key. Paddy Power said they would be paying out more than €1 million and Ladbrokes claimed that a day of “frenzied betting activity” had stung the betting industry adding that suggestions of a “multi-million pound bloodbath” were “probably wide of the mark”. Coral pitched the damage to bookmakers’ pockets at £2m with spokesman David Stevens saying: “Although we avoided laying some of the larger prices overnight, we did see a number of multiple bets featuring these four horses both online and in shops, and throughout the day this number increased as word of the gamble that was taking place gathered momentum.”
There is a lot of debate going on this evening about how this affects the integrity of racing. In a week when somebody gets arrested for relaying information at a Tennis match, you have to point at four horses with no real form winning. But I always thought racing was dodgy when I came to the markets, then I learnt over time it’s more a factor of the handicapping system. But from an external perspective, it doesn’t do much to boost racing’s perception with the outside world or quell corruption fears. Others sports are keen to be seen to be avoiding any accusations that betting and their sports are linked in any way, but that’s (obviously) impossible to do with racing. The problem I have on a personal level is that when I say I make money from racing, most people assume because of incidents like this, that it must be something dodgy. But of course it’s far from it in my case.
The interesting thing about these gambles from a trading perspective is that you had to be on very early to get anything from them. I track the price activity on all races to see if I can improve my decision making. The notes I have on my spreadsheet show that from the point I joined the market to post time showed that laying to back would have produced a profit. All the heavy backing for the horse occurred much earlier in the day. I think you could have predicted that, but it was surprising to see not as much momentum as you could have expected in the later races.
I guess we will slowly learn more about today’s coup in the coming weeks.
Category: Horse Racing
