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**mayo** · 8 September 2012, 04:25 PM

from another bored ...

Phil Bull

Phil Bull made a massive amount of money from betting, but not only was he a successful gambler he was also a breeder, owner, writer and publisher. It is estimated he made millions during his career.

In 1948 he launched the now internationally renowned organisation Timeform.
Phil had a shrewd attitude towards betting. He looked at the season as a whole and his form study was the same for every race.

How To Make A Book by Phil Bull
Phil Bull: The Biography by Howard Wright

JP McManus

Multi millionaire JP McManus is a renowned gambler and race horse owner.

Originally from Limerick in Ireland, McManus started betting as a schoolboy before working in his family’s plant hire business. He had his own betting stand for a while at Limerick’s greyhound track and it wasn’t long before he moved into owning horses as well as betting and laying. These days JP owns the largest number of National Hunt’s horses.

His first ‘big’ win (rumoured to be around �250,000) was at Cheltenham with a horse called Mister Donovan who was 2nd favourite but ended up winning the race. He also won over �1 million from famous Scottish bookie Freddie Williams in 2006 at Cheltenham.

Although McManus is a high level gambler a large part of his wealth is said to have come from international financing and money dealing which he overseas from his base in Geneva.

Unfortunately in 2008 McManus was diagnosed with cancer although he is now said to be doing well.

Alex Bird

The late Alex Bird made a considerable amount of money from betting after the war. It is estimated he had an annual turnover of �2 million from gambling.

His interest in gambling began when he was a child. He learned a lot from his father who was a bookmaker. However, he decided there was more money to be made from the other side and he become one of Britain’s most well known professional punters of all time.

Bird had several methods for getting one over on the bookies but his most famous was probably his success on betting on photo finishes which in those days took about 5 minutes to develop. This process earned him a fortune over a period of around 20 years and only stopped when the modernisation of technology meant there was no longer the delay in photo developing.

Alex Bird made his own mind up when it come to betting and rarely listened to anyone – he stuck to his rules and systems. Even now, almost 20 years after his death, there are current systems available that are based on the practices he used.

His biggest bet was on the well known horse Mill Reef at Gimcrack. The season after this Mill Reef won the Derby, again backed by Bird who had by then backed 7 Derby winners in 8 years.

One of his last bets was on a horse called Final Shot in 1990 when it won the Ayr Gold Cup.

Life and Secrets of a Professional Punter by Alex Bird.

Patrick Veitch

Patrick Veitch is one of Britain’s most successful gamblers who has won over �10 million from betting.

At just 15 years of age this mathematical genius got a place at Cambridge although he never completed his degree, instead he turned to gambling and started his own tipping line.
By his mid 20s Patrick Veitch was already making a lot of money but then came a turning point in his life. He become the target of a criminal and was forced to live in hiding for many months putting his career on hold and leaving him broke. However, following this episode he become more successful than ever and was soon making �1 million a year from his strategic betting methods.

Veitch is a strong believer that there is no short cut when it comes to betting – the only way to win is by working hard at it to get it right.

It is very rare to see Patrick at the races. He uses agents to place his bets and spends most of his time watching and analysing events from his computer.

Enemy Number One by Patrick Veitch (Autobiography)

Harry Findlay

Harry Findlay is a larger than life gambler who has not only made a fortune but also lost a fortune from gambling over the years.

He has always had a love for greyhounds and worked with them for a while after leaving school. Then aged just 20 Findlay spent 11 months in prison convicted of credit card fraud.

These days bets from his home office which is fully equipped with a number of TV screens and monitors often with different sporting events on at the same time.

As well as being a professional gambler Harry is also an owner. He jointly owns the 2008 Cheltenham Gold Cup winner, Denman who has more recently won his 2nd Hennessy Gold Cup. Big Fella Thanks is another of his co-owned horses who he named after his beloved greyhound 1999 Coursing Derby winning Big Fella.

Barney Curley
Barney Curley is a professional gambler and trainer from Northern Ireland who has a reputation for being one of racing’s most colourful characters.

During his childhood he watched his Father run up huge gambling debts but still took up betting himself.

In 1975 he famously organised one of the biggest betting scams of all time – Yellow Sam which made him over �300,000. He has also appeared in court for illegal lottery after raffling his mansion for �1.5 million.

Giving a Little Back by Barney Curley (Autobiography)

Terry Ramsden

Terry Ramsden originally made his fortune from investment company Glen International in the 80s. He was worth millions and, amongst other things, owned a string of race horses.

He was also well known for his betting and in 1985 won �2 million on one horse. The following year he had another big win on Motivator in the 1986 Coral Golden Hurdle Final.

Towards the end of the 80s however, Ramsden’s company collapsed and he started losing massive amounts on bets – he reportedly lost �1 million on one bet alone. This lead to him going bust at which time he fled to America. He had won but also lost millions of pounds.

In the late 1990s he was jailed for concealing assets during his bankruptcy – one of which was rumoured to be a �70,000 plus win on the horses.

Despite returning to public life a few years later Ramsden has failed to recreate his earlier success and has since been involved in a number of arguments over money.
Dave Nevison

Dave Nevison became a professional gambler in 1993 after he lost his job working as a currency trader in the City.

He now has an estimated six figure income made up largely from gambling but also from journalism columns he writes. Dave has also written 2 books and has his own horse racing tipping service.

A Bloody Good Winner: Life As A Professional Gambler by Dave Nevison
No Easy Money: A Gambler’s Diary by Dave Nevison

Alan Potts

At the age of just 14 Alan Potts started betting on horse racing and become a full time professional gambler after being made redundant from his office job in 1991.

He has admitted it took him many years to become a regular winner and despite making an estimated �50,000 a year from betting in the past, he has also suffered losing runs. Although he is also an owner, author and pundit Potts’ main source of income is from gambling.

In 1999 he jointly formed The Golden Anorak Partnership and this is the banner under which his horses now run.

Alan has written 2 books and also writes articles for the betting exchange – WBX.

Against The Crowd by Alan Potts
The Inside Track by Alan Potts
Clive Holt

Legendary punter Clive Holt was first shown that money could be made from betting by his father who kept a couple of greyhounds during the 1960s.

In the early part of 1975 Clive decided he was ready to quit his job working for the Electricity Board and take up gambling on a full time basis.

He started out using a fairly random approach dictated by his finances and he kept no proper records of bets he had placed. He soon made the decision to start recording his bets and this was the first of two business methods he implemented in order to make a better profit. The second was to setup a betting bank.

His first bet was �67 to �30 on Western Jewel who won comfortably and within 6 weeks he had made more money than he was earning in a year working in electricity. Over the years, although rarely winning more than �1,000 at a time, Holt’s profits from betting provided a lifestyle of luxury cars, exotic holidays and a listed country house with acres of land.

A number of books have been written by Clive Holt who was also the man behind Fineform.

**Haley** · 9 September 2012, 04:25 PM

Mike Futter another one who made it pay ...

Last weekend, Mike Futter went to Newcastle races to watch his horse, What Odds, run in the Tote Eider Chase. The horse lost. Yet, by the end of the afternoon Futter had won in excess of pounds 70,000.

That's on top of the pounds 214,000 he'd already won over the previous ten days.

Staggering sums. And that's not all.

Futter has ended up on the right side every year since 1976, notably when hitting the headlines outside our own industry - no mean achievement in itself - on the day that Monty's Pass landed him over pounds 1 million in winning bets in last season's Grand National.

Last year he attended 72 meetings. He won at 65 of them. This year the tally reads 13 from 13.

Futter is quite simply the most consistently successful backer of horses I have met in over three decades of racing.

Furthermore, this isn't just hyped-up hogwash. I can personally vouch for the painstaking care he puts into keeping accurate records of every bet struck - win or lose. He even makes note of the bookmaker with whom the bet was struck.

I had an opportunity to spend a few days with Futter earlier this year, well away from the hustle and bustle of the racecourse.

There is much to learn from the man. During our time together, I was constantly reminded of a story from a Zen master that perfectly illustrates one of the most important psychological attributes of the successful punter - the ability to let go.

Two monks, on the way home to their monastery, came to a ford where they found a young girl hesitant to cross for fear of spoiling her clothes.

One of the monks, without so much as a word, just picked her up and carried her over. The other monk remonstrated for the rest of the journey home while the first, wrapped in meditation, made no reply.

As they approached the monastery, he heard his colleague mutter, "You - a monk - and a girl in your arms. How can you act in such a way?"

He looked over to his angry colleague and replied quietly, "Are you still burdened by that girl? I put her down on the other side of the ford."

I was with Futter when he placed bets that won and I was with him when he placed bets that lost. Some of the stakes involved were quite large - more than enough to pay the annual mortgage on a favourably located detached house.

After every race, win or lose, he walked away - quite literally. Up he would get up and shuffle off, either to another part of the room or outside.

Watch the great Andre Agassi play tennis. After every shot, win or lose, he turns and walks away with those funny little steps.

David Hood saw trainers and owners at close quarters in his days as a jockey. More recently, as head of public relations with William Hill, he has got to know some of the game's major players.

"It's that ability to walk away that makes the difference," he says. "In fact I think that's a characteristic that can reap rewards in any line of business."

Simon Clare, Coral's director of communications, says the same: "Yes, the good ones can take it on the chin if things go against them. They're prepared not to bet, even if it means missing a winner."

Futter accepts that things don't always work out.

"I have no problem after a bad day," he says. "I know I can't win all the time, but that doesn't stop me from approaching each new day with the expectation of winning."

A Zen master once said: "We all cling to the past, and because we cling to the past we become unavailable to the present."

What does become clear, from talking to Futter and those who work closely alongside punters, is that the successful backer must treat each race as an individual event. Those who `chase', or refer to the last race of the day as the `getting-out stakes', have much to learn.

Should we assume from these findings that the consistently successful backer has an ability to distance themselves from the occasion? Views vary.

Futter could never be described as emotionally `detached'. He is probably one of the most altruistic men I've met in racing, as illustrated by the pleasure he still derives from telling the tale of the money won on Monty's Pass by the elderly women who patronise his 11 bingo clubs north and south of the Irish border.

"Some of the ladies collected their small change in a jar and, after four weeks, it had built up to EUR6,000," he recalls. "They had it all on the nose!"

However, when it comes to racing, his approach is rather more clinical.

"If I have a losing spell I tend to go away for a few days and lie on a beach. I can always come back to it later," he tells me.

It seems to me that it's the ability to disassociate oneself from the fallacy that the sun must not be allowed to set on a losing day that is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the successful backer.

Yet that alone is not enough. Next week I'll discuss

self-discipline - perhaps the single most important attribute of all.

CAPTION(S):

Mike Futter: "I know I can't win every day, but that doesn't stop me approaching each new day with the expectation of winning"

**Sefton** · 10 September 2012, 01:06 PM

More about Barney Curley. Legend.

H

e has been out working a horse on the gallops. "Not a sinner about," he says, with wry satisfaction. "Sunday morning, they're all in bed." But the wind has exacerbated his conjunctivitis. There's something wrong with his ears, too – they're stuffed with cotton wool. Barney Curley moves slowly, nowadays, can't walk very far. Last year he lay in hospital for three months. "Lucky to get out. It was evens each of two, live or die." He's 70. And three weeks ago he pulled off one of the most extravagant gambles in the long history of the Turf.

"Nobody will ever win as much on horse racing, this century," he pronounces, in his measured Co Fermanagh tones. Quite how much, he will not say, though industry estimates of �1m sound hopelessly conservative.

One of the men who helped manage a project of rococo complexity, joining us in Curley's sitting room, suggests that it was first discussed before some of the horses involved were even born. Come the day – a humdrum Monday 10 May – four were linked in a series of trebles and accumulators. Three are trained by Curley himself, in probably the smallest stable in Newmarket. The fourth he had sold in 2008 to Chris Grant, a trainer on Teesside.

Agapanthus won at Brighton; then Savaronola did the business at Wolverhampton. But Curley's third runner, Sommersturm, was beaten later on the card. That left Grant's horse, Jeu De Roseau, who made his first appearance in 742 days to win at Towcester's evening meeting.

Had Sommersturm completed the job, the bookmakers would all have reached their various maximum payouts – an aggregate Curley reckons at over �20m. But it has been hard enough getting them to pay out, as it is. "I'm pleased the other one didn't win," he insists. "If these fellows can't pay three, what chance would we have with four?"

Previously, Curley was most celebrated for Yellow Sam, who won at a country track in Ireland in 1975. There was only one telephone at Bellewstown, and Curley had a friend act out a prolonged call to a fictional dying aunt, so blocking desperate attempts by off-course bookmakers to cut Yellow Sam's starting price. His winnings have been computed as the equivalent of €1.7m (�1.4m) today.

Such a ruse, of course, could not be entertained since the advent of mobile phones. "People were telling me that our day had gone," Curley says. "You know, punters I knew over the years. It's finished, they said, over. I never thought like that. Because bookmakers are always trying something new, to rob punters, to get them to bite. That's what beats them. The greed."

And that's what spurs Curley. He doesn't need the dough. Since the loss of his teenage son, Charlie, in a car accident in 1995, his chief purpose in life has been a charity he set up in Zambia. In his youth, Curley studied to become a Jesuit. For all the picaresque and iconoclastic flourishes of his life since, he is respected by some of the most eminent horsemen of his era.

Sheikh Mohammed once facilitated a donation of �2.5m to his charity. Trainers with 20 times as many horses in their care consult his opinion. When they arrived as teenagers, from Italy and Ireland respectively, he was mentor to subsequent champion jockeys in Frankie Dettori and Jamie Spencer. His latest prot�g�, Tom Queally, will be joining them in the Investec Derby on Saturday.

So why persevere with the precarious adventures that redeemed him from the penury of younger days? "It's not for the money," Curley says. "It's for the buzz. Beat the system, you know, beat those bookmakers, those smart-arses. You go into a betting shop and see them robbing these poor fellows, with these gaming machines. They're as addictive as crack cocaine. You see them coming back to the counter with their credit cards, for another tenner. Of course the great thing about those machines is that number nine won't go to even money and win five lengths."

Equally, he remembers sitting in hospital and reading about footballers on �100,000 a week. "I know they're the best at what they do," he says. "But here's me, the best at what I do. And every year, when I came to a certain figure, I said: 'That's enough'. But now I thought: 'I've been underpaying myself the last 15 years. My job's a lot harder. It's about time I caught up with these fellows.'"

Granted that it all pays off, the planning almost seems its own reward. Curley invokes a draughts board. "You'd change the pieces hundreds of times," he says. "Put horse A there, and have horse B in here. But this one's not going well, that one's lame. And we're operating with very few horses, you know. Take horse B out. A week later, back in again. It's not easy. Horses are so unpredictable."

The one that excited most curiosity is probably Jeu De Roseau, but Curley has nothing to hide. Grant is a friend of Andrew Stringer, Curley's assistant. "And I've sold him numerous horses over the years," he says. "If there are five gentlemen in racing, Chris Grant is one of them. A decent, honest, hard-working fella. We were at this sale, and I said to him: 'You should buy this one, there could be a turn in him. He's been sick, given us nothing but trouble. But he did show a bit of form, back in Ireland.' A thousand quid. Can't go wrong."

A while ago, Grant telephoned. The horse had begun to thrive. Curley was sceptical. What would Grant have, to work him with? But he was insistent. "The horse had a very bad virus when he was here, looked terrible," Curley remembers. "And he was saying he was looking well now, that he's turned a corner."

Grant was thinking of running him at Towcester. "That's funny," Curley replied. "I've been trying to find a horse to run in the seller on the card." He had been ringing round, looking to fill another barrel in the bet. But nobody had come up with the right horse. In the event, Jeu De Roseau enabled Curley to switch his sights to a handicap instead.

But the real miracle was for three of his own horses – he only has 11 – to peak together. Their own reformation was mental rather than physical. "Agapanthus turned nasty last year," he says. "We rested him, he loved his day out hurdling, just began to shine. And we did the same with [Savaronola], he was a right nasty piece of goods when he came. One day at Southwell he kicked the place down. Now he's as quiet as a lamb. The horses here have the best time of any stable in the world."

A strategy was gradually refined. A network of agents picked, tested, discarded or trusted. Bets synchronised. "Fifty pounds in the wrong place," he says. "That's all it would have needed. And most people are untrustworthy, when it comes to money."

But much else remains beyond control. There were evidently other days, other horses. It was like postponing the Normandy landings for bad weather. When Grant's horse entered the equation, 22 other entries had to be scratched just to get a run. "Same as someone robbing a bank," Curley says. "The next thing, hasn't been seen for years, but there's a police car parked over the street. You can't plan for things like that. And then, on the Saturday morning, one of them was dead lame. The vets were here, the blacksmiths were here. There was no shouting, no roaring. Quarter to ten, I went up to Mass. If it's going to come, it's going to come. And the next couple of days it got better, and he was just sound to race. In normal circumstances, I'd have done nothing with him for a week."

Another medical drama, for Curley himself, saw him detained in hospital until Monday afternoon. "I get out of all this carry-on at 3.40, so I'm just back in the house to watch Agapanthus at 4.10," he says. "But it was nothing to do with stress or anything. Just my blood was wrong. I'd be watching those races like I'm sitting here now, smoking. My heart would be..." He holds out an impassive hand. "You know, we'd done all we can, that's it."

Now he winds up the flash young jockeys, asking which is the best Mercedes on the road? But all he really wants is to get back to Zambia. September at the earliest, according to his doctors. Direct Aid For Africa has built a school for 1,600 in Zambia. "In racing, people always want to get on your arm," he reflects. "The people giving their lives out there, they don't want anything off you. And once you've been out, it draws you back – those children with their big brown eyes looking up at you, with nothing to eat."

His wife, Maureen, reproaches him for squandering his gifts on horses. "She says I should have been managing director of Tesco, something like that." He pauses, shrugs. "You see, I believe peace of mind is a great thing to have. And I've wonderful peace of mind."

After reading about the coup, Dettori telephoned Curley. "I hear you've had a touch," he said. "I'm pleased. Because the news on the street was that you were losing it."

They had begun to forget about Barney Curley. And now, suddenly, he has left an immortal footprint on the Turf. "It's something I don't think will ever be done again," he says. It will be a good while, however, before any bookmaker grows at all complacent in that assumption.

To learn more about Curley's charity, go to www.dafa.co.uk

Barney Curley

Age 70

Curley managed pop band Frankie McBride and The Polka Dots, the first Irish band in the British Top 20.

�1.4m

Adjusted value of Curley's famous betting coup with Yellow Sam in 1975. Some disgruntled bookmakers paid his winnings in single notes, filling 108 bags.

**mayo** · 16 January 2014, 10:50 AM

Old Harry Findlay Video

**skippymac6** · 22 January 2014, 05:28 PM

Barney Curley looking to pull off another famous punt this evening it seems!!!

**Old Vic** · 22 January 2014, 09:35 PM

Some planning to get four laid out like that

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