I’d heard of people placing a Yankee or a Lucky 15, but I didn’t really know what they were. So I looked them up on the internet. They were both multiple-bet combinations on various horses in separate races. And there were many other multi-bet variations too, all of them with exotic names such as Trixie, Heinz, or Goliath.
But the development of internet gambling has opened a whole raft of new and unconventional ways to stake your cash.
The creation of the ‘betting exchange’ is the most obvious new addition, where anyone and everyone can now act as the bookmaker, taking bets from other people by ‘laying’ a horse, which is essentially betting that the horse will lose.
In recent years, this has allowed the emergence of something called ‘matched betting,’ where you place two bets on opposing outcomes.
For example, you bet on a horse to win with a bookmaker and then lay it to lose on an exchange. Clearly, the horse will either win the race or lose it — there is no other possible outcome — so one of your bets will definitely win, and the other one will surely lose.
Now, at first glance this might seem rather pointless, especially if the odds are the same for both. You would end up with no loss, but also no profit.
However, if there is a slight difference in the odds, such that the bookmaker is offering a fractionally higher price than you lay on the exchange, you can turn this variation to your benefit. Provided you calculate the relative stakes correctly, if the horse wins, you end up with a profit, and if it loses, you’re even.
It’s a ‘no loss’ bet with only an upside.
It is as close to a guaranteed return as you can get while betting on horses, as long as you do your sums right and also remember to factor in the small commission charged by the exchanges.
In financial circles it is known as arbitrage and involves buying and selling the same shares simultaneously at slightly differing prices on separate stock markets, in order to make a profit.
But such opportunities are normally few and far between.
However, the gambling business is very competitive, and almost all bookmakers, and even some of the exchanges, are always making offers of free bets to encourage new customers to open an account — ‘Bet £10 and get £30 in free bets’ — or to make existing customers bet more.
These ‘free’ bets make matched betting much more attractive.
But bookmakers aren’t stupid — far from it. If they believe you are matched betting, and winning, they stop offering you any sort of promotion, and if you then go on winning, they will close your accounts.
In effect, all bookmakers, and all casinos for that matter, will only go on taking bets from people who lose. For all their seeming joy at the occasional big winner, they don’t like those who do it all the time, and they won’t continue to do business with them.
I leaned back in my chair and stretched.
My brain hurt from concentrating so much.
But things were beginning to crystallize in there too.
By now, it was too late to go back to bed, so I made myself another coffee, swallowed a couple of ibuprofen tablets, and toasted the last remaining slice of bread, which I found hiding in a dark corner at the back of the fridge.
I decided I must go to the supermarket and stock up on some essential items before Georgina returned. I didn’t want to give her the pleasure of thinking that I was totally useless at looking after myself when she was away.
After a while, I went back to my office and called the Victrix trainers.
Royal Ascot may be over for another year, but racing across Great Britain went on regardless.
There were three race meetings today, four tomorrow and Tuesday, and five or six each day for the rest of the week — thirty-three meetings in total over the seven days, with over two hundred separate races involving nearly two thousand different horses.
My target was that at least six of those horses should be owned by Victrix syndicates, and preferably more, because I had learned over the past twenty-four years that, more than anything, my syndicate members wanted their horses to race, and to race often, rather than be standing idle in their stables at home.
By the time I had finished my calls to the trainers, and I’d emailed all the syndicate members of those horses we planned to enter and run this coming week, it was nine o’clock.
I sighed. It felt more like midday.
I went upstairs to shower and dress.
Tesco in Didcot at eleven on a Sunday morning was as busy as I had ever known it, with cars waiting in line to get into the car park.
I’d made a list but I was still in a bit of a trance as I pushed my trolley up and down the aisles, collecting items off the shelves in a random order.
I’d worked out that Georgina wouldn’t be wanting to cook when she arrived home after several hours on the train, so I bought a tasty, simply-heat-up ready-meal for two, of chicken jalfrezi and rice, packaged together in two wooden ovenproof trays.
I also remembered to add a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape to the trolley, to replace the one I’d drunk with Toni, just in case Georgina had been saving it for a special occasion. And I put two of the cheaper bottles of Merlot in there too, along with a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
I queued to go through a regular, old-fashioned, staffed till rather than using one of the bank of self-service checkouts. I looked around but couldn’t spot Amanda. She was probably off shift.
A young man scanned everything through as I packed it into bags.
‘Two hundred and sixteen fifty,’ said the young man.
‘How much?’ I asked in surprise.
‘Two hundred and sixteen fifty,’ he repeated.
I looked down at the three bags of groceries now back in the trolley.
Granted, the bags were fairly large and almost full, but I had clearly lost touch with the current price of food. And the four bottles of wine didn’t help.
I inserted my payment card into the slot on the reader and entered my PIN.
‘Thank you,’ said the young man, giving me my long receipt before turning to the next customer.
I pushed the trolley out to the Jaguar and placed the bags in the boot, but I didn’t go straight home. Instead, I went to a pub for Sunday lunch.
In fact, somewhat strangely, I went to three pubs for Sunday lunch.
I had a starter in one, a main in the next, plus a pudding in the third. I had a list of all the pubs in Didcot, and was prepared to visit them all, but it was in the third one that I went to, the Railway Tavern, close to Didcot station, that I found the information I was looking for.
Chapter 31
Georgina called me at five o’clock from Paddington to tell me that she would be on the expected train, getting in to Didcot at ten past six.
‘Shall I buy something for supper from Marks and Spencer?’ she asked.
‘If you like,’ I said. ‘But I have already bought us a ready meal for tonight. But it will keep until tomorrow if you want something else.’
‘What did you get?’
‘Chicken jalfrezi and rice.’
‘That’s great. I could really do with a curry. All the food Mum cooks is so desperately bland. Neither of their systems can cope with anything spicy. She doesn’t even put salt in anything because she thinks it’s bad for Dad’s blood pressure. I tell you, I can’t wait to get home.’
She sounded so excited at the prospect.
But how did I feel about it?
Georgina and I had now been apart for a whole week — far longer than ever before during the twenty-five years of our marriage.
I had to admit that, in spite of a few lonely moments, I had quite enjoyed the separation, and not just because I had been brazenly seduced by a blonde beauty from across the Atlantic.