Paul Kent: Betting pros team up to make punters smarter

It’s hard to beat the bookies at the best of times, but some of the sharpest professional punters in Australia have come together to help give the ‘mugs’ a chance.

Not even in the days of the mid-90s when the Randwick betting ring was flooded with counterfeit $50 notes, beautifully crafted bills that for a short time were worth far more than the paper they were ever printed on, was it possible to feel sorry for the bookmaker.

Even with all those counterfeit fifties they still held the edge.

Time has made it only worse.

The Everest will bring in tens of millions of dollars on Saturday. Most of it driven by mug punters who will never win no matter how many bonus bets they are given or what edge they should receive in the betting.

The mug punter will load up on a $2.30 shot that should be $4 all because a mate’s cousin has a small share in the horse and at the pub on Thursday night he declared it a certainty and then sent it out on WhatsApp.

They can never win this way.

Smart punters, meanwhile, are increasingly forbidden from winning.

In February this year my friend George had $1000 on Best Of Bordeaux in the Silver Slipper (1100m) at Rosehill. Clearly he is no small punter by ordinary standards and, this day, he got $10.50 fixed. No need for suspense, Best of Bordeaux led throughout and won by half a length.

“It was a nice little earn,” George said.

While this was a particularly bold bet for him, George had a habit of picking up nice little earns like this. His mates considered him something of a tinny punter given the way he regularly put $1000 into his account and built it up to $10,000 or so, withdrawing his profit and starting again.

The betting ring was a hive of activity on big racedays. Picture: Mark Evans

As we know, though, these kinds of punters are the worst kind for bookmakers.

They are called winning punters, and the corporates have no use for them.

Soon after Best of Bordeaux saluted George was out for the night and wanted some cash so transferred $1000 into his corporate bookmaker’s account, which acts like a debit card.

At least he tried, but for some reason the bookmaker was denying him.

He then tried to have the money transferred into the account that deposited the money and was denied there as well.

He had $500 on a horse that failed in the run but given the bet was accepted he knew there was nothing wrong with his account.

“It was allowing me to keep gambling but not take any money out,” George said.

Frustrated, he rang their helpline.

“You’ve got a red flag on your name,” he got told.

This shocked George.

He didn’t know what else, besides winning, he had done wrong.

“What’s that mean?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“It could be anything,” a boss up the line told him, “things like money laundering.”

At that a four-bell alarm went off in George’s head. Red flags might be there for money laundering but they are also pinned to punters who have shown a pattern of winning over time, no matter how much they bet, which was likely the case here.

So typically the corporate bookmaker was happy to continue taking his bets, it emerged, but unwilling to pay out his winnings, and when he wasted a few more dollars on bets, and they continued to delay any action to help him withdraw his winnings, he saw what the game was and took them on.

Rather than slowly punt it all away while they gave him the runaround he called the relevant ombudsman to lodge a complaint, where he got the same veiled references to money laundering.

There was not a skerrick of proof, and George played their game for so long until he finally threatened legal action.

His problem is not uncommon in racing.

Bookmakers turn over millions of dollars in every metropolitan race every Saturday and boosting their profit is that they often refuse to let the winning punters on.

Wolfden is a new app driven by a group of professional punters.

Bets are rejected or reduced for all kinds of reasons.

Now the small war between corporate bookies and punters has stepped up when, just a few weeks back, a new app called Wolfden was launched which threatens to make it even harder for the bookies.

Driven by professional punters Kingsley Bartholomew and Adam Sparrow, as well as other smart punters like Richie Irvine, Matt Taylor, Scott Fitzsimmons and Dan O’Sullivan, the app borrows an idea so old it is new again.

They figured that given nearly everybody bets from home now, or the pub, and almost always over their phone, it is designed to recreate the old betting ring, where punters could share information and see where the money was going.

“We’re trying to educate people who bet,” Sparrow said.

“You can learn a lot off the app about the dos and don’ts of betting.”

Punters put up tips, post mail that is hopefully strong, and share what they know to take on the bookies. Punters can choose tipsters to follow.

Bartholomew is one of Australia’s most successful punters and has been for more than 20 years.

Where once the bookies began getting tricky letting him on he has seen it filter all the way down to basically any punter that continues to win over time, no matter how small.

The bookies are making it harder so, along with Sparrow, who grew up around the track, they are planning to make the punters smarter.

“For example Dan has put up 28 tips for punters in the countdown to the Cup,” Sparrow said.

“Things like staking plans, like three-year-olds in open company that go back to their own age group.”

All that is left to give is to give the bookies courage, or have the governments demand they do.

At the moment bookmakers are required to hold to lose various minimum amounts under legislation, according to State laws and whether they are provincial or metropolitan tracks, but the corporates don’t care. They can find any reason to knock back a bet.

Knock back a smart punter and allege a concern for money laundering, for example.

Given it is the small punter they know it is rarely worth the effort or time to pursue a complaint with all the hoops they must jump through. And even then if they are successful on appeal, they get what? The race is long gone.

So the corporates act with impudence, reviewing and restricting bets, if not rejecting them entirely, because they are more like accounting firms nowadays and racing administrators let them act freely.

SHORT SHOT

What it really was all about, quite simply, was power.

When chief executive Stephen Humphreys left the Sea Eagles midway through the season Des Hasler stepped in as the jack-of-all-trades, the guy who could make it work, and quietly put the slows on a new appointment in the role.

The club didn’t really need a CEO, it went, because they had Hasler.

Which is the way Hasler liked it, who long ago lost faith in CEO’s being able to deliver what winning clubs need. And his now famous pride jersey speech went a long way to underline that.

Modern clubs simply can’t work that way anymore. Without a CEO Hasler, the game’s biggest control freak, was in control from top to bottom, from salary cap all the way through coaching and down through recruitment.

Des Hasler was sacked by Manly on Thursday.

A ferocious worker, few would have had the appetite for it, while others realise the madness of it and appoint the right people.

The club suspects Hasler was deliberately combative following the pride jersey debacle in an attempt to bully competent people from their jobs, which would make sense. But it was simply not sustainable.

The Sea Eagles don’t appear to know what they want, having once promised to never pay a coach out again, always urging the club works best under a “Manly” coach, that Hasler was the man, that they’re in a premiership-winning window and need a premiership-winning coach (which Hasler is) and so on.

What is clear, though, with Hasler sacked on Thursday with a year to run and no obvious reason for it, with a hefty payout to come, with the players in his corner and the support of most fans behind the coach, they still really, really wanted him gone.

That’s how bitter it got.