An embarassing story…

I wasn’t always a disciplined and focused punter.

(and I’m not 100% disciplined and focused even now!!)

Far from it. In fact, you might be surprised to hear that up until 1995 I found horse racing extremely boring, and a pointless use of BBC Sport air-time to be frank. I once described watching horses run around a field to be about as interesting as watching paint dry.

I would get a bit excited when the Grand National came around each year, but only because everyone else was talking about it, and thrusting the office sweepstake collection tin in front of me.

I hadn’t even heard of the Cheltenham Festival.

It was in 1995 that I first got interested in an offer for a “betting system”.

I saw an advert in the back of one of the Sunday newspapers, and I requested a brochure by Post (this was pre-internet).

But I’m getting ahead of myself, this story actually begins when I was 23 years old, and back then I had a conventional nine-to-five salaried job.

What can I say? When I left the security of living with my parents to get a flat with my girlfriend Sarah, it was the only way that I had ever been taught to put food on the table and a roof over your head.

And if you were on the outside of my life looking in, you might have thought I had it pretty good. I was living with my girl-friend Sarah in a brand new apartment in West London. I’d done well to be promoted as the youngest marketing manager at a multi-national company. Decent income, company car, travelling abroad, only 23 years of age.

And I was frustrated!

What I was confronted with more and more every day was this:

My bosses and co-workers didn’t value results. They didn’t value teamwork. Instead my days were filled with politics, pettiness, and worries about how every move that I made “looked” – rather than doing what I wanted to do, focus on whether a strategy or plan was the best choice for the business.

It was the days when you sported a pair of big red braces at work and as Michael Douglas put it so dramatically in the film Wall Street “Greed was good”. And it was more important who was seen to arrive the earliest at the office, and who’s car was the last in the car park at the end of the day – pathetic macho vanity!

(If you’ve ever had a job like this then you may know exactly how it felt to be stuck in a place where you feel like you’re moving in one direction and the entire world is going the opposite way.)

Sure, on the outside my life looked pretty neat. But, like most young couples in the 1990′s we were mortgaged up to the hilt, and one month’s salary away from being broke.

We looked at a succession of “business opportunities” – each one was going to solve our problems. I say “we” but they were always “my ideas”.

Now let me just say for the record right now that I don’t know what I would have done if it wasn’t for my wife Sarah. While I “experimented” with different schemes and plans, Sarah, pardon my French, busted her ass to feed us and to keep the lights turned on.

Amongst other things, I sold water filters through a pyramid selling scheme (yep, been there, fell for that!), and I got recruited into network marketing with both Amway and Kleeneze. And Sarah supported me every time – goodness knows she has the patience of a saint.

But no-one can ever say I’ve been afraid of hard work, because all this moonlighting was done in my spare time alongside my job.

And then one day, in April of 1995, I read an advert in the back of the Sunday paper. It was for a system that picked horses, a piece of computer software that could predict the winner of any horse race.

I cannot even remember what it was called now, or why on earth it even caught my eye (remember, I was the guy who thought horse racing was boring) but I still remember the A4 purple glossy brochure with all these profit graphs and predicted earnings. With the brochure came a covering letter inviting me to attend a ‘live demonstration’ of the system in action, at the company’s offices in Central London.

I turned up one Saturday morning, and I was asked to pick any three races that afternoon, and find the appropriate race-cards in the Racing Post. They showed me how to enter the form data into the software, and they ran the program. The software gave me three horses, and I went home to watch the racing on TV that afternoon.

Two of the horses won, and by the end of the day I’d written and posted a cheque for £1,800

The software came on two floppy disks which arrived in the Post the following Wednesday.

I had spent £1,800 on two floppy disks with some software on them – back then that amounted to three months’ payments against our mortgage.

I hadn’t told Sarah – I still haven’t told Sarah I spent that kind of money on a floppy disk.

But that piece of software got me hooked on betting horses. I enjoyed the thrill of urging my horse to the line before the other runners, and if I’m honest I enjoyed the thrill of the race even more than collecting the money.

I remember once suggesting to my mates at work that the next day, on the Saturday, we go get some breakfast at the café in town, then go into the bookies and I would show them how good this “system” I had was at picking horses. Again my memory fails me when I try to remember the name of the horse, but I remember it was the second race, it was a grey, and it won at 8/1

I was a hero, and that all adds to the thrill, doesn’t it?

I tipped everyone in the office Lord Gyllene to win the Grand National in 1997 and people would call me to ask me for tips. I loved all the attention.

But this was the real truth of it…

Of course I only ever spoke of my successful tips, and not all those that lost. At the end of the day, I wasn’t making any money from betting.

Now this part of my memory is so vivid I can almost taste it….

It’s quite embarrassing for me to tell you about this part of my life.

It’s not the kind of thing you brag about when you have friends round for dinner, and in fact I’ve only ever opened up about some of the things I’m going to reveal to you, to my closest family.

In 1998 I subscribed to a telephone tipster service. You phoned some premium telephone number at 10am each morning for the tips for that particular day. It actually performed very well, and I was making a profit for several weeks after starting.

But not all was rosy in the garden. Because we could not phone premium rate numbers from the office, I found myself sneaking out to the phone box around the corner – it didn’t go unnoticed by my boss.

Quite regularly, in the 10 o’clock call the tipster running the service would give the time of the race, but instruct to call back ten minutes before the off to get the name of the horse – more premium rate phone calls. But I still did it, because the guy was actually making me money.

But then came the inevitable losing run. And along with the losing run came my decision to chase my losses. This reckless plan of action brought me to my knees, literally.

One afternoon I was driving the hour and a half commute home from the office, knowing I had to make a phone call to get the name of the horse, and desperately trying to spot a phone box (I couldn’t use my company mobile as they would flag up the premium rate calls). My mind had most definitely not been on my work that day – I was more interested in getting a winner, as my losses were racking up at an alarming rate, not helped by my increasing stakes.

I found a phone box, pulled over, and dialled for my information.

Less than two minutes later, I emerged from the phone box, and sank to my knees in disbelief.

After getting the name of the horse, I had phoned my William Hill telephone account and placed a bet of £1,917 on a horse. That was the amount needed at the odds to re-coup my losses. I hadn’t even thought about it. I had then dialled the Racing Post commentary line to listen to the race.

The horse lost.

Only after I had driven like a banshee to find a phone, and pledged nearly two grand on a horse; only when I had seen that money disappear in the time it takes to run a six furlong race; only when I realised I did not have enough funds to make the next bet….

….did I realise how betting was controlling my very life.

Right there was where I started making changes.

Long story short, I took time out to reflect, and I started treating my betting like a real investment business.

The rest is history…. and some of it I hope to cover in future here at SkyBlueKangaroo….

….like how I discovered speed ratings….

….and how I started analysing big-race trends to find winners….

….and how I built a portfolio of winning betting systems.

Blimey, that was in a way somehow very “cleansing” to tell you all that. I’m cream-crackered, so I will wrap up this post for today.

But before you go, can you relate to any parts of my story? Share your thoughts and comments below.

Further reading: The Best of SkyBlueKangaroo