Gambling Story

My best friend made me do it. He was the brains behind the operation and I was sucked in by his foolproof plan.

It's the late 1970s and I'm a teenaged apprentice engineer. My best friend, Tez, has come up with a plan to get rich quick. "Within six months," he declares, "we'll be drinking cold beers on a beach in Jamaica."

"You're sure it'll work?" I say.

"Can't fail. I've been studying it for months…" He flourishes his foolscap notebook at me again, pointing to the colour-coded charts and figures. "Look. Every single day for the last two months… A favourite always wins. Most days, two or three favourites win."

"Yeah, the odds on favourites are crap though."

"That's why we start small and work our way up. First day, we only set out to win five quid each. We pick one race-meeting — say Newmarket or Chepstow or Aintree. We stick to that meeting and go through the race card. Let's say on the first race the favourite doesn't win. Fine. Doesn't matter. The second race, we put enough on the favourite to cover our losses and still be five quid each in profit…" His eyes flash and sparkle. "It's genius! Nobody's done this before. I doubt it anyway."

At lunch breaks, Tez often goes to the "bookies" on the high street. The nickname comes from "bookmakers". They used to be called "turf accountants" as well, harking back to a time when betting shops were illegal. Tez usually backs average or longer-odds horses; he wins some, he loses some; mostly he loses but has a bit of fun.

Me, I prefer to spend my lunches at the engineering firm's sports-and-social club, where the bar staff know that lots of us apprentices are only sixteen or seventeen, but serve us with alcoholic drinks anyway.

"When the favourite wins the first race, or the second or the third, or whatever," says Tez, "we stop for the day. The the next day, we start again. Same strategy."

"It's sounds good," I say. "I mean, it's clever."

"Like I said. Six months from now we'll be getting out of this dump and living in Jamaica."

The Day of Reckoning

I'm the one in the betting shop on that crazy Friday afternoon. I'm stressed out of my head. Of the seven races on the card for the Doncaster meeting, four races are over. No favourites have won. I keep having to work out the odds and calculate how much we need to put on the next favourite to win back our losses and gain five pounds each.

On Fridays, everybody gets paid their wages at lunchtime. Hard cash in a little brown envelope. Tez has used up all his annual leave holidays, so earlier in the week I'd booked a half-day off for Friday afternoon to execute stage one of our foolproof get-rich-quick plan.

So I've got all of his weekly wages and mine stuffed in my pockets, about £150 in total. Antique telephony in those days, too, remember. I dash around the corner to a public phone-box and ring the engineering firm. Tez is called over the Tannoy and has to go to the office to take my call.

"It's all going wrong!" I blurt.

"No, it's not," he says calmly. "You just have to keep your head."

"That last race… Twilight Dancer came nearly last."

"I know," says Tez. "I've been listening on the radio in the tool store. You should still have more than a hundred quid left. Are you making sure you're covering the losses and allowing for a fiver profit each?"

"Yeah, but it's — "

"Great. Just keep your head."

He hangs up and I dash back round to the bookies. I've only got minutes left to fill out the next betting-slip. It doesn't help that I arrive back sweating and out of breath and the manager asks me if I'm sure that I'm eighteen.

I hang in there and keep going. Please let the favourite win this race.

Spindrifter

It's bad. It's really bad. The favourites of the next two races fail to win. There's only one race left. Our horse is called Spindrifter.

I'm totally out of my brains with stress by now. It's twenty minutes before the last race starts, but I know without working it out on paper that we don't have enough to meet the demands of the strategy. I'm only sightly relieved when Tez walks into the bookies. With the four o'clock finish on Fridays, we knew that he'd make it in time for the last race.

"We're screwed!" I say, the second he turns up.

"Sssh! Keep calm."

"Spindrifter's odds are one-to-three on!"

"I know."

"That's, like, we have to bet three quid to win one! We've only got thirty quid left. To win everything back, we'd have to be putting about found hundred and fifty quid on. Have you got four hundred and — "

"No. All we can do is put on what we've got and — "

"Right, lads," says the burly manager, approaching us. "On your way."

"What?" we both say.

"I said on your way. Neither of you look eighteen."

"I've been here all afternoon," I say, "losing money."

"And now it's time to leave," says the manager with a spiteful grin. "l know what your game is. Come on. Get lost, or I'll call the filth."

We get hustled out of the door.

"Quick!" says Tez. "We'll drive over to the bookies on Station Street."

At seventeen, Tez is the first of my friends to pass his driving test. His battered old Mini gets us there just in time to put our remaining thirty quid on Spindrifter. It wins easily. We get our thirty quid back plus another ten quid. Overall, we've lost just over a hundred. Disaster.

As we get drunk together that night at the sports-and-social club, Tez is philosophical. We didn't lose, he insists. We proved that his system works. It was just rotten luck that, on our first day of being professional gamblers, we didn't have the capital to see it through.

"Next time…" he says.

There never was a next time.

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