Betting

You had to feel for ITV’s new racing team on their opening day at Cheltenham. It was cold, wet and utterly miserable but they opted not to take refuge in a warm studio but to stay close to the action under their brollies, putting a brave face on things. During what I nowadays look back on as my misspent youth as BBC political editor, I once did the same. As I began a live interview for the Nine O’Clock News from an outside balcony at a Labour party conference, bursting to reveal some exclusive information, the heavens opened. I was drenched within 30 seconds but continued, only for the newscaster

Bookmaking’s image has changed. Alongside the arrival of the betting exchanges, the evolution of the big names like Hills, Coral, Betfred and Ladbrokes into gaming operators rather than old-style bookmakers has seen the decline of the family firms where clients could be sure of the personal touch, total discretion and often half a point or so above the generally quoted odds. Most of the big firms have decided too that telephone betting is not for them, which is how I have (part accidentally) become — to Mrs Oakley’s surprise and potential alarm — a client of Fitzdares, a bespoke operation catering mostly for high-rollers and happy to be described as

Forced to depart Ascot earlier than usual to fulfil a cruise lecture booking on the fjords, I hadn’t reckoned with June in Norway. It turned out to require anoraks and sweaters rather than shorts and suntan oil, although Mrs Oakley and I were better prepared than one lady passenger: having travelled without a scarf, she confessed that it was indeed her deftly folded nightie she had wrapped around her neck for warmth. At least a bit of book-signing went without a hitch, better than the time a young lady asked me to write ‘To Bubbles with love and kisses’ and then, when asked to pay for the signed volume, demurred,

I shared a taxi from Cheltenham station to the house party in an outlying village with a stripper. Finding a taxi in Cheltenham during the Festival is as difficult as picking a winner in the Bumper, and we were amazed and pleased to have got one so easily. One wouldn’t have guessed that the dark, petite young woman, thickly wrapped against the cold night air, was a stripper, but she was proud enough of her occupation to talk about it on the seven-furlong ride between the station and the ‘gentleman’s club’ where we dropped her. She’d come all the way from Cardiff, she said, to dance in a cage from

For the Cheltenham Festival I received the customary tipster circular from my pal Soapy Joe. Soapy’s most convincing credential as a horse-racing tipster is that he is banned from every high street bookmaker in the land because he takes too much money off the poor souls. I slept with him once. I woke up in an upstairs bedroom of a Gloucestershire stately home on the second morning of our week-long Cheltenham Festival house party, pieced together where I was, and why, and saw, sitting up in the next bed, Soapy in his stripy pyjamas listening to the commentary of a horse race in Dubai or somewhere on a pocket radio.

Summer is a difficult time for serious investments — it’s hard to be rational when hot — so why not try betting on the football world cup instead? Thanks to technology, sports gambling can feel a lot like investing these days. Internet betting exchanges are not bookmakers, but trading platforms. Any adult can buy or sell a bet — or position, if you prefer — and ‘trade out’ at a profit or loss before the match, race, or tournament even begins. Which means you are gambling less against sporting chance, more against the human whims of the market. Let me give you an example. If you had taken the advice of,

I wrote a piece about the Fixed Odds Betting Terminals uproar in the magazine this week, and it has prompted some angry responses by email and over social media. I’m told that I didn’t treat problem gambling with sufficient seriousness. I’m not sorry about that, I’m afraid: I think it’s silly to be too serious about the vices of others. My point was that the political and the media classes are having something of a moral panic about FOBTs  — and as always with moral panics, the political and media classes don’t really know what they are talking about. I doubt Ed Miliband or Tom Watson, who both seem dead against FOBTs, have ever spent more than

Hands up: who knows what a FOBT is? It stands for fixed odds betting terminal. No? Well, you should, because they are a serious menace to society. That’s what Ed Miliband says, anyway. FOBTs, you see, are those souped-up slot machines one can find in bookmakers’ shops all over the country, especially in deprived areas, usually next to Poundland. The most popular ones offer casino-type games, such as roulette, and have become notorious because of the speed with which they enable punters to lose large sums of money: up to £100 every 20 seconds, apparently. The Daily Mail likes to call FOBTs the ‘crack cocaine of gambling’, which makes them

How would you bet on the outcome of the Scottish independence referendum? With Ladbrokes offering odds of 1/5 on a ‘No’ vote, its a much better return than any savings account. But should writers put a wager on something they can possibly influence? Matthew Parris discussed how he might bet with Alex Massie on our podcast last week — a conversation that has stuck in his mind. This was what Parris says on the matter in his Times column today (£): ‘Something came over me. Last Wednesday, in the middle of a debate about Scottish independence with Alex Massie, a Scottish columnist who writes for The Spectator and The Times,

A successful gambler once told me: ‘Never bet on football, never bet on multipliers, and never ever bet on football multipliers.’ Multipliers, in case you don’t know, are those enticing combination wagers on bookmakers’ shopfronts: ‘Liverpool win 2-0 + Sturridge to score = 33/1.’ Mugs like me fall for them every time. My subconscious tends to add together the two probabilities — that of Sturridge scoring and that of Liverpool winning 2-0 — when really I should be multiplying them. Duh. The bookies don’t always triumph when it comes to football, however. This year’s Champions League has so far seen few upsets: as a result, the major sports bookmakers have

Gripped by his habitual despair, the French novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend in 1872, ‘I am appalled at the state of society. I’m filled with the sadness that must have affected the Romans of the 4th century. I feel irredeemable barbarism rising from the bowels of the earth.’ Warming to his bleak scatological theme, he continued, ‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.’ Many commentators would feel that exactly the same words could be applied to modern Britain. According to the pessimistic narrative of national decline, Britain is now drowning in