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Steve Lewis Hamilton today. Same vital bit of information missing.
How do they get their bets on.
He has over 4 decades won large amounts of cash off the bookmakers.
How do they get their bets on.
He has over 4 decades won large amounts of cash off the bookmakers.
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If there's already winning bets on your account, then adding a few subscribers is logical to some extent - it's not that much pressure if you already win in your trading.
Seems he didn't have any problems getting on because "I only did jump racing – it was all on-course because you still had off-course betting tax –
yesterdays RP article a lot to unpick especially the reference to Betfair
it is the sort of scene that would work perfectly in a blockbuster movie. The only living soul in that scene could just as easily be the movie's hero.
On a scorching hot afternoon a Ford Explorer travels down an otherwise deserted desert highway somewhere between Tucson and Phoenix. In the driver's seat is an exquisitely tanned man who wears expensive jewellery, a suit and sunglasses. He is the epitome of cool. He is also one of the world's biggest, most successful and wealthiest gamblers.
Over the coming days our Masters of Betting series will feature legendary punters of the past and present. You will read about exceptionally shrewd individuals from whom some valuable lessons can be learned. These are extraordinary people who are living or lived extraordinary lives. Quite rightly leading the way is Don Johnson.
It's a good name for someone whose story feels ripe for a Hollywood portrayal. Johnson is a former jockey and racecourse manager who in a five-month spell won $15 million from three Atlantic City casinos. The 63-year-old is good at blackjack and not bad at racing, either, which is handy as he is part of a computer-assisted wagering syndicate that regularly pumps millions of dollars into pari-mutuel pools. Perhaps, not surprisingly, the Miami Vice star's namesake knows a lot of famous people.
"I have some friends who happen to be actors or actresses, people like Paris Hilton, Kevin Dillon and Charlie Sheen," says Johnson from behind the Explorer's steering wheel. "Some of those guys love the ponies. They don't have to pay Kevin to show up for horseracing. He loves it."
Johnson loves it, too, and always has done, right back to when he was spending his childhood in Oregon on a thoroughbred farm and then earning a living riding races, generally at a level some way removed from the Triple Crown or Breeders' Cup.
Don Johnson (third from left) has a number of celebrity friends, including actor Kevin Dillon (far left)
Don Johnson (third from left) has a number of celebrity friends, including actor Kevin Dillon (far left)
"I was born into the racing industry," says Johnson. "I fell in love with it and I've never had to leave. I've flourished in this industry because I enjoy it.
"I loved being a jockey and probably rode around 100 winners but I'm 6ft 1in, so I was starving myself just to make the weight. I rode in Oregon, Idaho, Washington and northern California but a lot of those circuits I rode on weren't even printed in the Daily Racing Form, so there is no record of many of my races.
"After I finished riding I transitioned over to officiating on racing and then kept looking up, trying to get the next position. I was a junior racing official, a steward, a racing judge and then ran a racing commission. I moved on to managing tracks and ultimately wound up at Philadelphia Park."
It was while working at the Pennsylvania track that Johnson's life changed. His interest was sparked by groups of punters – known as 'handicappers' in the US – who repeatedly turned up at the track and consistently seemed to win. Supported by two British bosses, Bob Green and Bill Hogwood, who shared his enthusiasm for using data, he made a point of supplying the punters with all the information he could muster, knowing that the more they bet, the more it would increase the track's betting handle and therefore also its profits. Johnson watched and learned.
"It was obvious they weren't degenerates or addicts," he recalls. "They knew what they were doing because they were making money – and they were all using additional information.
"It was clear to me they had an edge. There was a science behind what they were doing. That made me think about transitioning that science across to other areas of gaming. That's when I got the blackjack idea. I was lucky to meet the right maths guys at the right time. It gave me the confidence to put some real dollars behind it and to start building up a bankroll."
Don Johnson won $15 million from Atlantic City casinos across a five-month period
Don Johnson won $15 million from Atlantic City casinos across a five-month period
The bankroll quickly got bigger and bigger. At the same time, casinos hammered by the financial crash became desperate to attract high rollers, offering an array of perks and concessions in an effort to bring vast sums of money into their halls.
"If your edge is big enough, it doesn't take a lot to get going," says Johnson. "At the time, Atlantic City were giving away too many advantages. I don't think even they realised they were giving away their house edge. You can't give somebody a 20 to 25 per cent rebate on their losses per trip and expect to win. I never bet to lose more than the maximum rebate. All I had to do was play perfect strategy."
In one jaw-dropping period he played that perfect strategy perfectly. Between December 2010 and April 2011, Johnson won $4m from Caesars, $5m from the Borgata and $6m from the Tropicana, where he staked in the region of $60m.
"Everyone asks me how I felt but it really wasn't emotional," he says. "It was mechanical to me. I don't ever remember high-fiving anyone. It wasn't like that. It wasn't an emotional ride. I just carried on playing because I had enough confidence in the edge.
"It was a bit surreal but there wasn't any celebrating between hands, even after the largest hand I ever played, which was $800,000. At some point I knew the game was going to end – and in one of the games that was after I'd won the $6m. It wasn't like I had any plan of stopping at that point but I didn't realise the regulations stipulated they weren't allowed to put more chips on the floor than they had cash in the cage to cover their liability. I had already taken all the cash. I do remember at that point thinking I was awfully tired and wanted to take a nap."
Johnson adds: "I was very good at the execution. I figured out clever ways to get the money down but at some point the casinos decide they just can't take bets from someone winning so much money. Pool betting on racing is different. A winning punter can be a good partner to the racing industry.
"Even during those Atlantic City days I was still working on trying to figure out an analytics model that would work for betting on racing. It's all about always trying to come up with new data. You don't always know where the data is going to come from but then you test it and find it has value."
Don Johnson: "A winning punter can be a good partner to the racing industry"
Don Johnson: "A winning punter can be a good partner to the racing industry"
Following a brief stop on the road, Johnson resumes his journey towards Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and then on to his Pennsylvania home. Behind him is an awful lot of sage brush and a University of Arizona symposium, at which he attended a session assessing the value to racing of computer-assisted wagering (CAW), the betting approach that uses algorithms and advanced technology to assess form, odds and real-time betting data before automatically placing large numbers of bets in the final moments before a race. Johnson is now a prominent member of the CAW scene. Indeed, his turnover, prowess and profits earn him a lofty position in a table of the world's biggest gamblers, at which the number-one spot goes to the publicity-shy London-based Australian Zeljko Ranogajec.
Stressing that he does not work alone, Johnson says: "The largest team in the business has north of 2,000 people working for them and they're doing in the ballpark of $6 billion a year. The smaller groups are doing maybe $100m a year. Our syndicate is somewhere in between, although we're definitely at the higher end of the food chain, rather than the lower end.
"Not everyone in the group appreciates the exposure but, for me, the exposure is already out there because my blackjack endeavours were written about years ago.
"The architect of our group is the maths genius who did the modelling and wrote the mathematical code. I call him Good Will Hunting because he never went to university and started what he's doing now in high school. He then perfected it and made it better and better over a number of years. I've now been working with him for a little over 20 years, which shows you this didn't just happen overnight."
It could be said that 'overnight' is practically the only time that Johnson and his crew are not consumed by racing and the quest to find winners and new winning systems.
"I watch racing every day," he says. "Everyone like me does that. To us, watching racing is like breathing or drinking water. We look at every pool type in every race every day. Everything gets handicapped because you don't always know where your edge is going to come from. You also don't know what the betting public is going to do. Someone could cause an outlier anomaly in a pool that drives up a price and makes a horse undervalued.
"I don't ever get tired of it but I could never have envisaged this happening at this level. Even now, there are days when I'm astounded by the turnover numbers. It's crazy how big they can be. There are days when we're betting in the millions. If it's a day with a few big races around the globe, we can certainly bet $5m in a single day. That would not be inconceivable.
"We've knocked down a few of the big Pick6 pools, winning anywhere from $1m to $2.5m. You're not hitting all of them, though, and there's a lot of variance. When a 99-1 shot wins people say the CAW players are bound to have backed him. There's no guarantee of that. We still have to handicap a horse, like everyone else, and there's no reason we should have the extreme outliers. You're dumping big dollars into those pools, and it's great when you hit the big numbers, but sometimes you blank."
Money is also pumped into British and Irish racing pools and markets, although their attractiveness may be fading.
"Betfair has got increasingly difficult because there is less liquidity," says Johnson. "For me, the UK Tote is also a bit problematic because it's well known they bet into their own pools. As a former regulator, I have a problem with that. If you're the custodian of a market and you bet into that pool, it looks like you're competing with your own customers. It also says to me that you lack liquidity."
Ethical Diamond beats Rebel's Romance in the Breeders' Cup Turf
Don Johnson enjoyed a big win when Ethical Diamond landed the Breeders' Cup TurfCredit: Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)
Having developed software that better assesses the merits of horses trained outside the US, Johnson is now increasingly comfortable backing European-trained runners in his home country. That proved profitable when his syndicate aligned itself with the Willie Mullins-trained 27-1 Breeders' Cup Turf winner Ethical Diamond.
"It was really something for me to be backing an Irish jumps trainer," says Johnson. "It was mostly to do with the fact the class of jumps horses he had been competing against was similar to the quality of horse he could have been racing against in Grade 1 Flat races in the US. He was a phenomenal grass horse and we could see the trainer was very good with jumps horses going on to the Flat.
"The week after the race I was in Melbourne for the Cup and went to a breakfast hosted by Robbie Waterhouse. Ethical Diamond's trainer showed up for that, which was a real treat for me.
"I actually went with Robbie to Cheltenham a few years ago. I loved it, although it was confusing at first. I couldn't work out how the hell the jockeys knew where to go. It looked like they were jumping a hedge, then a moat, doing a loop-the-loop and then running up a hill."
While the intricacies of jump racing remain something of a mystery to Johnson, gambling does not. He made headlines when winning millions of dollars from vast casinos that were forced to wave white flags of surrender. Since then he has focused his skills on his first love, horseracing, embracing a method of betting that has proved controversial, not least for its tendency to pour huge sums of money into pools less than a minute before races start. Indeed, a class action was last year filed against a number of leading American racecourse groups and featured allegations of collusion, a **** system and 'no risk, no loss' wagering.
Don Johnson, pictured in Melbourne with partner Kyla Nicole Healey and Willie Mullins in Melbourne last November
Don Johnson, pictured in Melbourne with partner Kyla Nicole Healey and Willie Mullins in Melbourne last November
Johnson – now a racehorse owner and successful in numerous big races – refutes the accusations and argues his preferred method of betting will aid, not damage, the sport.
"We did a study through Southampton University in the UK that highlighted how much recreational players benefit from the informed trading pros," says Johnson. "Recreational punters all get sized up when the pros miss – and they miss more often than people think.
"The computer-assisted wagering acronym was created 20 years ago when they were calling it robotic wagering. The reality is none of this is robotic. This isn't about Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's not The Terminator and the machines aren't taking over. It's not Armageddon. None of this runs itself. It all has armies of humans working behind the scenes to keep improving the software.
"People talk about CAW players but everyone is a computer-assisted wagering player. Everyone is now using a hand-held device that is more powerful than computers were 20 years ago. We also all know young people want to use data. It was true 20 years ago, it was true ten years ago and it's just as true today. As technology improves, if you want to attract a younger generation to racing, you have to let them use the toolkits they're accustomed to using. That's what turns them on."
It's what turns him on, too. It is also central to the piece of advice he offers regular punters.
"There is a lot of data out there that you can use in your own handicapping that will make you a better player," says Johnson.
Coming from one of the very best players in the world, it must be a tip worth taking.
it is the sort of scene that would work perfectly in a blockbuster movie. The only living soul in that scene could just as easily be the movie's hero.
On a scorching hot afternoon a Ford Explorer travels down an otherwise deserted desert highway somewhere between Tucson and Phoenix. In the driver's seat is an exquisitely tanned man who wears expensive jewellery, a suit and sunglasses. He is the epitome of cool. He is also one of the world's biggest, most successful and wealthiest gamblers.
Over the coming days our Masters of Betting series will feature legendary punters of the past and present. You will read about exceptionally shrewd individuals from whom some valuable lessons can be learned. These are extraordinary people who are living or lived extraordinary lives. Quite rightly leading the way is Don Johnson.
It's a good name for someone whose story feels ripe for a Hollywood portrayal. Johnson is a former jockey and racecourse manager who in a five-month spell won $15 million from three Atlantic City casinos. The 63-year-old is good at blackjack and not bad at racing, either, which is handy as he is part of a computer-assisted wagering syndicate that regularly pumps millions of dollars into pari-mutuel pools. Perhaps, not surprisingly, the Miami Vice star's namesake knows a lot of famous people.
"I have some friends who happen to be actors or actresses, people like Paris Hilton, Kevin Dillon and Charlie Sheen," says Johnson from behind the Explorer's steering wheel. "Some of those guys love the ponies. They don't have to pay Kevin to show up for horseracing. He loves it."
Johnson loves it, too, and always has done, right back to when he was spending his childhood in Oregon on a thoroughbred farm and then earning a living riding races, generally at a level some way removed from the Triple Crown or Breeders' Cup.
Don Johnson (third from left) has a number of celebrity friends, including actor Kevin Dillon (far left)
Don Johnson (third from left) has a number of celebrity friends, including actor Kevin Dillon (far left)
"I was born into the racing industry," says Johnson. "I fell in love with it and I've never had to leave. I've flourished in this industry because I enjoy it.
"I loved being a jockey and probably rode around 100 winners but I'm 6ft 1in, so I was starving myself just to make the weight. I rode in Oregon, Idaho, Washington and northern California but a lot of those circuits I rode on weren't even printed in the Daily Racing Form, so there is no record of many of my races.
"After I finished riding I transitioned over to officiating on racing and then kept looking up, trying to get the next position. I was a junior racing official, a steward, a racing judge and then ran a racing commission. I moved on to managing tracks and ultimately wound up at Philadelphia Park."
It was while working at the Pennsylvania track that Johnson's life changed. His interest was sparked by groups of punters – known as 'handicappers' in the US – who repeatedly turned up at the track and consistently seemed to win. Supported by two British bosses, Bob Green and Bill Hogwood, who shared his enthusiasm for using data, he made a point of supplying the punters with all the information he could muster, knowing that the more they bet, the more it would increase the track's betting handle and therefore also its profits. Johnson watched and learned.
"It was obvious they weren't degenerates or addicts," he recalls. "They knew what they were doing because they were making money – and they were all using additional information.
"It was clear to me they had an edge. There was a science behind what they were doing. That made me think about transitioning that science across to other areas of gaming. That's when I got the blackjack idea. I was lucky to meet the right maths guys at the right time. It gave me the confidence to put some real dollars behind it and to start building up a bankroll."
Don Johnson won $15 million from Atlantic City casinos across a five-month period
Don Johnson won $15 million from Atlantic City casinos across a five-month period
The bankroll quickly got bigger and bigger. At the same time, casinos hammered by the financial crash became desperate to attract high rollers, offering an array of perks and concessions in an effort to bring vast sums of money into their halls.
"If your edge is big enough, it doesn't take a lot to get going," says Johnson. "At the time, Atlantic City were giving away too many advantages. I don't think even they realised they were giving away their house edge. You can't give somebody a 20 to 25 per cent rebate on their losses per trip and expect to win. I never bet to lose more than the maximum rebate. All I had to do was play perfect strategy."
In one jaw-dropping period he played that perfect strategy perfectly. Between December 2010 and April 2011, Johnson won $4m from Caesars, $5m from the Borgata and $6m from the Tropicana, where he staked in the region of $60m.
"Everyone asks me how I felt but it really wasn't emotional," he says. "It was mechanical to me. I don't ever remember high-fiving anyone. It wasn't like that. It wasn't an emotional ride. I just carried on playing because I had enough confidence in the edge.
"It was a bit surreal but there wasn't any celebrating between hands, even after the largest hand I ever played, which was $800,000. At some point I knew the game was going to end – and in one of the games that was after I'd won the $6m. It wasn't like I had any plan of stopping at that point but I didn't realise the regulations stipulated they weren't allowed to put more chips on the floor than they had cash in the cage to cover their liability. I had already taken all the cash. I do remember at that point thinking I was awfully tired and wanted to take a nap."
Johnson adds: "I was very good at the execution. I figured out clever ways to get the money down but at some point the casinos decide they just can't take bets from someone winning so much money. Pool betting on racing is different. A winning punter can be a good partner to the racing industry.
"Even during those Atlantic City days I was still working on trying to figure out an analytics model that would work for betting on racing. It's all about always trying to come up with new data. You don't always know where the data is going to come from but then you test it and find it has value."
Don Johnson: "A winning punter can be a good partner to the racing industry"
Don Johnson: "A winning punter can be a good partner to the racing industry"
Following a brief stop on the road, Johnson resumes his journey towards Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and then on to his Pennsylvania home. Behind him is an awful lot of sage brush and a University of Arizona symposium, at which he attended a session assessing the value to racing of computer-assisted wagering (CAW), the betting approach that uses algorithms and advanced technology to assess form, odds and real-time betting data before automatically placing large numbers of bets in the final moments before a race. Johnson is now a prominent member of the CAW scene. Indeed, his turnover, prowess and profits earn him a lofty position in a table of the world's biggest gamblers, at which the number-one spot goes to the publicity-shy London-based Australian Zeljko Ranogajec.
Stressing that he does not work alone, Johnson says: "The largest team in the business has north of 2,000 people working for them and they're doing in the ballpark of $6 billion a year. The smaller groups are doing maybe $100m a year. Our syndicate is somewhere in between, although we're definitely at the higher end of the food chain, rather than the lower end.
"Not everyone in the group appreciates the exposure but, for me, the exposure is already out there because my blackjack endeavours were written about years ago.
"The architect of our group is the maths genius who did the modelling and wrote the mathematical code. I call him Good Will Hunting because he never went to university and started what he's doing now in high school. He then perfected it and made it better and better over a number of years. I've now been working with him for a little over 20 years, which shows you this didn't just happen overnight."
It could be said that 'overnight' is practically the only time that Johnson and his crew are not consumed by racing and the quest to find winners and new winning systems.
"I watch racing every day," he says. "Everyone like me does that. To us, watching racing is like breathing or drinking water. We look at every pool type in every race every day. Everything gets handicapped because you don't always know where your edge is going to come from. You also don't know what the betting public is going to do. Someone could cause an outlier anomaly in a pool that drives up a price and makes a horse undervalued.
"I don't ever get tired of it but I could never have envisaged this happening at this level. Even now, there are days when I'm astounded by the turnover numbers. It's crazy how big they can be. There are days when we're betting in the millions. If it's a day with a few big races around the globe, we can certainly bet $5m in a single day. That would not be inconceivable.
"We've knocked down a few of the big Pick6 pools, winning anywhere from $1m to $2.5m. You're not hitting all of them, though, and there's a lot of variance. When a 99-1 shot wins people say the CAW players are bound to have backed him. There's no guarantee of that. We still have to handicap a horse, like everyone else, and there's no reason we should have the extreme outliers. You're dumping big dollars into those pools, and it's great when you hit the big numbers, but sometimes you blank."
Money is also pumped into British and Irish racing pools and markets, although their attractiveness may be fading.
"Betfair has got increasingly difficult because there is less liquidity," says Johnson. "For me, the UK Tote is also a bit problematic because it's well known they bet into their own pools. As a former regulator, I have a problem with that. If you're the custodian of a market and you bet into that pool, it looks like you're competing with your own customers. It also says to me that you lack liquidity."
Ethical Diamond beats Rebel's Romance in the Breeders' Cup Turf
Don Johnson enjoyed a big win when Ethical Diamond landed the Breeders' Cup TurfCredit: Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)
Having developed software that better assesses the merits of horses trained outside the US, Johnson is now increasingly comfortable backing European-trained runners in his home country. That proved profitable when his syndicate aligned itself with the Willie Mullins-trained 27-1 Breeders' Cup Turf winner Ethical Diamond.
"It was really something for me to be backing an Irish jumps trainer," says Johnson. "It was mostly to do with the fact the class of jumps horses he had been competing against was similar to the quality of horse he could have been racing against in Grade 1 Flat races in the US. He was a phenomenal grass horse and we could see the trainer was very good with jumps horses going on to the Flat.
"The week after the race I was in Melbourne for the Cup and went to a breakfast hosted by Robbie Waterhouse. Ethical Diamond's trainer showed up for that, which was a real treat for me.
"I actually went with Robbie to Cheltenham a few years ago. I loved it, although it was confusing at first. I couldn't work out how the hell the jockeys knew where to go. It looked like they were jumping a hedge, then a moat, doing a loop-the-loop and then running up a hill."
While the intricacies of jump racing remain something of a mystery to Johnson, gambling does not. He made headlines when winning millions of dollars from vast casinos that were forced to wave white flags of surrender. Since then he has focused his skills on his first love, horseracing, embracing a method of betting that has proved controversial, not least for its tendency to pour huge sums of money into pools less than a minute before races start. Indeed, a class action was last year filed against a number of leading American racecourse groups and featured allegations of collusion, a **** system and 'no risk, no loss' wagering.
Don Johnson, pictured in Melbourne with partner Kyla Nicole Healey and Willie Mullins in Melbourne last November
Don Johnson, pictured in Melbourne with partner Kyla Nicole Healey and Willie Mullins in Melbourne last November
Johnson – now a racehorse owner and successful in numerous big races – refutes the accusations and argues his preferred method of betting will aid, not damage, the sport.
"We did a study through Southampton University in the UK that highlighted how much recreational players benefit from the informed trading pros," says Johnson. "Recreational punters all get sized up when the pros miss – and they miss more often than people think.
"The computer-assisted wagering acronym was created 20 years ago when they were calling it robotic wagering. The reality is none of this is robotic. This isn't about Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's not The Terminator and the machines aren't taking over. It's not Armageddon. None of this runs itself. It all has armies of humans working behind the scenes to keep improving the software.
"People talk about CAW players but everyone is a computer-assisted wagering player. Everyone is now using a hand-held device that is more powerful than computers were 20 years ago. We also all know young people want to use data. It was true 20 years ago, it was true ten years ago and it's just as true today. As technology improves, if you want to attract a younger generation to racing, you have to let them use the toolkits they're accustomed to using. That's what turns them on."
It's what turns him on, too. It is also central to the piece of advice he offers regular punters.
"There is a lot of data out there that you can use in your own handicapping that will make you a better player," says Johnson.
| Cell 1 | Cell 2 |
| Cell 3 | Cell 4 |
That explains the sudden drop in the price of Ethical Diamond. Was about 40, then collapsed
Didnt back it as it was obviously going to win
Met Zeljko in a casino. Wouldnt know he had a nana
Didnt back it as it was obviously going to win
Met Zeljko in a casino. Wouldnt know he had a nana
Well at least that article is a bit more relevant.
BTW, thanks both above for posting these.
BTW, thanks both above for posting these.
Atlantic City casinos circa 2010 were giving too much away? Wasn't that roughly when top deal artist and former Apprentice host Donald Trump was going skint running casinos in Atlantic City?
Don had clearly read my post on here
Joined: 09 Mar 03 | Topic/replies: 16,666 | Blogger: howard's blog
Ethical Diamond has become a very good horse with the hood. How good ? 01 Nov 25 20:28
Joined: 09 Mar 03 | Topic/replies: 16,666 | Blogger: howard's blog
Ethical Diamond has become a very good horse with the hood. How good ? 01 Nov 25 20:28
"It was mostly to do with the fact the class of jumps horses he had been competing against was similar to the quality of horse he could have been racing against in Grade 1 Flat races in the US"
Mostly to do with being a Royal Ascot winner and gagging up in the Ebor under a big weight. Then getting a super trip on ground he loves against European horses that weren't quite as good as many thought.
Mostly to do with being a Royal Ascot winner and gagging up in the Ebor under a big weight. Then getting a super trip on ground he loves against European horses that weren't quite as good as many thought.
Alan Potts today a very good article. Nice to see sbtw get a mention.
Have a good day guys and gals.
Ronnie.
Have a good day guys and gals.
Ronnie.
Good morning Ronnie hope your well I don’t suppose you know how to post today’s article as I’m out of the country and can’t buy a racing post .
Jimnast.
Sorry can't do it my phone.
Sad to say had better times took my dad out for supper on Saturday he was fine then he had a heart attack on Monday in the corrany care unit in Darl will be transferred to James Cook when a bed becomes available.
Ronnie.
Sorry can't do it my phone.
Sad to say had better times took my dad out for supper on Saturday he was fine then he had a heart attack on Monday in the corrany care unit in Darl will be transferred to James Cook when a bed becomes available.
Ronnie.
Potts interview ... long but doesnt say much
An ideal midwinter tonic is to spend an afternoon at the races with Alan Potts, punter, author and owner, listening to tales of 90s racing and chewing over thorny issues like the problems facing modern gamblers and whether the old ways still work.
Champagne corks can be heard popping in the rooms around us as we wander through Newbury's grandstand, but it seems unlikely that any of those betting here will ever have as many occasions to celebrate as this unassuming man, who worked hard to leave his mug punting days behind and make the game pay.
There's nothing flash about Potts or his methods and he long ago sought to dispel any romantic notions that people might have about betting for a living. In the preface to his 1995 book Against The Crowd, he assured us that professional punters do not have "a year-long suntan, expensive clothes and a top-of-the-range BMW in the car park" and nor yet are they "perpetually down to their last ten quid, ducking and diving from one shady deal to another". Well, not all of them.
I could claim that racecourse bookmakers were scared of Potts when he was at his most successful, a period he identifies as being the last decade of the last century and the first decade of this one. He certainly extracted a huge amount of money from the ring over that period and has the ledgers to prove it, so it's tempting to imagine the layers as nervous bunnies, thumping on the ground at the sight of him to warn each other a predator was approaching.
It wasn't like that. I know because Potts tells me, and also because he shows me footage from a 1996 TV show, Tales Of The Turf, in which his moustached younger self is shown collecting a total of £2,700 from three Sandown bookmakers on a fruitful, sunny afternoon. The mood is relaxed, affable, as you'd expect from people who do business with each other every day.
"I was always polite and friendly," says Potts. "Probably key, I wasn't backing favourites, quite the opposite. I always used to say that I would win on the days that the bookies won, and lose when they lost. Because we were both taking on the favourites."
'It was David's nature to explain things'
With rare exceptions, we probably all start out as mug punters. The main question is whether we're happy to stick with carefree, unprofitable habits or make the necessary effort to grow up a bit.
Potts remembers those days, which, for him, were back in the 70s at a time when he was working as a computer operator.
"If I was watching on TV, I'd do a Yankee, or if I didn't have enough cash to hand for that, just the six doubles. If I went racing, I'd chase losses, bet every race, and drink between races rather than go to the paddock. I always bet the last race, where the stake would be whatever I had left in my wallet."
Unsurprisingly, such behaviour did not lead to sustainable, long-term profit – and, in fairness, Potts had never expected that it would. But the possibility began to nag at him as he learned about the game and then, in 1978, the chance to break with those habits came in the form of a job in the Middle East.
Along with a couple of other Brits, Potts was hired to work as a consultant in the Kuwait government computer centre, earning £1,000 a month (the equivalent of around £5,500 now), tax free.
It was a posting that eventually allowed him to enter low-level ownership in partnership with a couple of friends, and thereby gain a mass of new insights into how racing works. One of the friends lived just outside Salisbury, so the budding owners signed up with the locally based David Elsworth, then only a couple of years into his training career.
David Elsworth gave a young Alan Potts invaluable lessons about the sport
David Elsworth gave a young Alan Potts invaluable lessons about the sportCredit: Chris Bourchier
"That was just one of the great pieces of luck," reflects Potts.
"David was a great people person, as well as being absolutely fantastic with the animals. It was just his nature to explain things. The number of things I learned from him – about horses with back problems or breathing problems, horses with bad feet.
"He was the first person ever to take me out on to the course and make me watch a steeplechase by the last fence. It was at Hereford one afternoon. Talk about a different experience from watching racing in the stand.
"The noise, the jockeys shouting at each other, the sheer physicality of the whole thing. It came as a complete shock."
On a tour of Elsworth's yard, Potts and pals saw "a scrawny little three-year-old filly". The trainer told them: "That'll win the seller at Brighton on Tuesday."
"Not 'might' or 'hope'," emphasises Potts. "He said, 'Will win'. I got the paper on Tuesday, her form figures were 000000. I thought, 'I'd better go to Brighton.'"
After the filly came home seven lengths clear, Potts and Elsworth found themselves in the owners' and trainers' bar, seeking gin and tonics ("David wasn't a champagne man"). The trainer offered to pay, on the grounds that he'd had £50 at 5-1.
"Like an idiot, I said I'd had £100 at 11-2," says Potts. "Whereupon, David shouts at the barman, 'Make those doubles, he's paying!' I don't think I got another tip off him for any horse I didn't own."
'I never questioned myself – is that confidence or arrogance?'
Time to sober up because the mood has briefly turned severe as Potts points out one of the differences between those who can do what he did and those who can't. We're looking through his ledger of bets from 2004 – he has one for every year from 1983 to 2009, after which he moved to spreadsheets.
"Great start in January and then, whoosh, all downhill. I just wasn't picking winners," he says.
A finger stabs at the cumulative figure next to June and he says: "Halfway through the year, I'm £11,000 down. You add the exes to that and the fact I was probably maintaining three racehorses at that point."
Yikes, and yikes again. I express my dismay for the Potts of 21 years ago, but it might have been better to keep a blank face because the response is insistent.
"You cannot let that alter what you do," he says. "You've either got a method which you stick to, or you haven't and you shouldn't be doing this in the first place."
But surely, when you go on a bad run that stretches into months, you're bound to question yourself or your approach?
"Well, I never did," he answers. "Is that confidence or arrogance?"
Potts's year was turned around by Alkaased, who would achieve lasting fame in the Japan Cup 18 months later but at this point was the winner only of a Ripon maiden.
The punter, seeking bargains for his Golden Anorak partnership, had been surprised to see the unexposed youngster up for sale at the end of his three-year-old season and was pretty sure the new owner had got a bargain at 42,000gns.
Alkaased: beat Heart's Cry in a thrilling finish to the 2005 Japan Cup
Alkaased turned around Alan Potts's year in 2004Credit: Mark Cranham 9racingpost.com/photos)
"I'd got this horse pencilled in as the absolute number one horse to follow," he says.
But how often do such insights reap their just rewards? Not often enough and he had lost £1,400 in early June when Alkaased, having his first run for Luca Cumani, was beaten a head by Wunderwood at Newmarket.
Two weeks later, Wunderwood followed up in the Duke of Edinburgh at Royal Ascot.
"I thought, 'That's blown it,'" says Potts. "Everyone now is gonna know about Alkaased."
We obviously should have done, but somehow those of us who were betting on racing in 2004 collectively blew the assignment. In the Old Newton Cup, run on the day Refuse To Bend won the Coral-Eclipse, Alkaased was allowed to start at 7-1.
"Hmmm, £900, I don't know why I didn't have more on," reflects Potts. "Perhaps you're right, perhaps I was losing confidence. He won by four lengths when it could have been seven or eight. He was being eased down all the way through the final furlong. That was the start of a month where I couldn't do much wrong."
A series of successes included £100 on the Tote when Indian Trail scored at Newbury, the win dividend being £20.80.
Potts was hot and perhaps there really were bookmakers who tried to avoid meeting his eye at Glorious Goodwood. We all know what can go wrong on the Sussex Downs and indeed some of those things had befallen him the previous year, when he had 14 bets during the meeting and didn't get a single winner.
This time, though, the racing gods were smiling on him as, from 16 bets, nine won, including Ringmoor Down at 10-1. Those successes were all the sweeter because they were being shared as tips with a small number of subscribers.
"By this stage, they all knew you weren't going to get a winner every week or every month, you had to be patient," says Potts. "But something like this might happen at any time. The total winning margin for those nine winners was about six and a half lengths."
Did that make for a stressful week's viewing?
"Not at all, I never get that wound up," he replies.
Potts netted almost £40,000 from his bets that month and the losses from the previous half-year no longer mattered.
'The big edge for me on the Flat is watching horses go to post'
So how did the mug punter of the mid-70s morph into this wizard with subscribers who were being so thoroughly well rewarded?
"That process of recording every bet was key – no longer just ignoring the losses, starting to see patterns," he says.
"Ownership taught me a lot about placing, handicapping, physical issues with horses, all learned from David. I learned about the sport, rather than just seeing it as a betting medium."
Potts is quick to point out the bits of good luck he's had along the way, like the Kuwait job. When, in 1991, he was pondering the leap towards full-time betting and thinking he might leave it another ten years, he was given a hearty shove towards change by being made redundant at a time when suitable jobs were hard to find.
"I suppose I never really had anything to spend the money on, being single," he says. "I didn't have a wife or kids; not from choice, it was just the way life turned out. I was married once but it didn't work.
"I had a big Jackpot win 15 months after I'd set up as a full-time punter; that paid off my mortgage. So the things that might have impinged on your life and required money, a roof over your head, supporting your family, those things weren't there."
He mentions trying to "use the money sensibly" after a big win, by helping younger members of his extended family get on the property ladder or by making donations to the Injured Jockeys Fund. Being sheltered from some of the pressures that affect others must have been an advantage in a line of work where mental resilience seems crucial.
"I think it was Nick Mordin who wrote somewhere that, to be a big winner, you have to get used to losing," he says.
Has he seen others being affected by the pressure to keep up with the bills?
"I have to be honest with you, professional punters who get together on a racecourse don't talk about those sorts of things," he says. "It's very difficult to know what we do talk about. Mostly, it's the horses or the card. You don't know how much they're betting, you don't know how much they're winning or losing."
Alan Potts is still a regular on course
Alan Potts is still a regular on course
We talk about how few people have ever managed to make a consistent living from betting on horses, enduring changes in the game and in their own circumstances.
"I could name 20, maybe, that I've known over the past 35 years, who have sustained it," he says.
Some of their names come up in conversation: John Noakes (not that one), Beardy Alan and Deaf Paul. The spirit of Damon Runyon lives on.
Potts enjoys seeing them and is still a regular at the races but, now 78, says: "I no longer need to bet. I'm not betting to make a living any more. This is just fun. This is my hobby."
Which is just as well because, when I ask whether someone could hope to have the same career if they started out now, the answer is emphatic: "No chance."
From 1987, there was no tax on betting at the races. Betfair did not appear until June 2000. In between was a golden period for betting on-course.
"Bookmakers were working to their own tissues and they made ricks," says Potts. "There were prices you could take that were very generous, to your eye. It didn't matter what any other pro said to me, or any other person. If I decided to back a horse at 3-1, that's what I was gonna do."
What advice would he give to anyone setting out now to make a living from betting?
"I think you've got to be realistic," he says. "I've compared the staking I was doing in the 90s with what the average male income was at that time. If you scale it up by the rate of inflation since then, where I was having to win £17,000 or £20,000, now you're talking £40,000 to £42,000. And to win that much, you've got to turn over more.
"How the hell do you get those bets on? I was betting £400 or £600 on a horse in the mid-90s. Now, it would have to be something like £1,500 to produce a similar level of income."
He agrees with my suggestion that the business of 'getting on' is harder than ever.
"Starting out now, I don't understand how anyone would do it," he says. "You could have done it on Betfair in the first ten years of this century, but there's no liquidity on Betfair now. I presume the guys who do it now don't bet only on horseracing. They'd have to bet on other things."
It's a downbeat note, but we don't have to end there because Potts reckons that, even in these high-tech times, punters who show up at the races can still hope to gain an advantage.
"The big edge for me on the Flat is watching horses go to post," he says. "Nobody else does it. It's me and Kenny [Pitterson] and that's it.
"There are others, but I don't think many have the skill. You have to learn it over a very long time, to be able to watch horses go down to the start [and reach useful conclusions]. I got help on this from David Elsworth, what to look for. Particularly on fast ground in the summer, I'm looking to see if the horse is stretching out. Is he willing to stride? You see short, choppy strides; that's not a good sign."
Over the years, Potts has met a few readers of Against The Crowd who have set out to follow his example. It's good to know there are still edges for them to work with.
An ideal midwinter tonic is to spend an afternoon at the races with Alan Potts, punter, author and owner, listening to tales of 90s racing and chewing over thorny issues like the problems facing modern gamblers and whether the old ways still work.
Champagne corks can be heard popping in the rooms around us as we wander through Newbury's grandstand, but it seems unlikely that any of those betting here will ever have as many occasions to celebrate as this unassuming man, who worked hard to leave his mug punting days behind and make the game pay.
There's nothing flash about Potts or his methods and he long ago sought to dispel any romantic notions that people might have about betting for a living. In the preface to his 1995 book Against The Crowd, he assured us that professional punters do not have "a year-long suntan, expensive clothes and a top-of-the-range BMW in the car park" and nor yet are they "perpetually down to their last ten quid, ducking and diving from one shady deal to another". Well, not all of them.
I could claim that racecourse bookmakers were scared of Potts when he was at his most successful, a period he identifies as being the last decade of the last century and the first decade of this one. He certainly extracted a huge amount of money from the ring over that period and has the ledgers to prove it, so it's tempting to imagine the layers as nervous bunnies, thumping on the ground at the sight of him to warn each other a predator was approaching.
It wasn't like that. I know because Potts tells me, and also because he shows me footage from a 1996 TV show, Tales Of The Turf, in which his moustached younger self is shown collecting a total of £2,700 from three Sandown bookmakers on a fruitful, sunny afternoon. The mood is relaxed, affable, as you'd expect from people who do business with each other every day.
"I was always polite and friendly," says Potts. "Probably key, I wasn't backing favourites, quite the opposite. I always used to say that I would win on the days that the bookies won, and lose when they lost. Because we were both taking on the favourites."
'It was David's nature to explain things'
With rare exceptions, we probably all start out as mug punters. The main question is whether we're happy to stick with carefree, unprofitable habits or make the necessary effort to grow up a bit.
Potts remembers those days, which, for him, were back in the 70s at a time when he was working as a computer operator.
"If I was watching on TV, I'd do a Yankee, or if I didn't have enough cash to hand for that, just the six doubles. If I went racing, I'd chase losses, bet every race, and drink between races rather than go to the paddock. I always bet the last race, where the stake would be whatever I had left in my wallet."
Unsurprisingly, such behaviour did not lead to sustainable, long-term profit – and, in fairness, Potts had never expected that it would. But the possibility began to nag at him as he learned about the game and then, in 1978, the chance to break with those habits came in the form of a job in the Middle East.
Along with a couple of other Brits, Potts was hired to work as a consultant in the Kuwait government computer centre, earning £1,000 a month (the equivalent of around £5,500 now), tax free.
It was a posting that eventually allowed him to enter low-level ownership in partnership with a couple of friends, and thereby gain a mass of new insights into how racing works. One of the friends lived just outside Salisbury, so the budding owners signed up with the locally based David Elsworth, then only a couple of years into his training career.
David Elsworth gave a young Alan Potts invaluable lessons about the sport
David Elsworth gave a young Alan Potts invaluable lessons about the sportCredit: Chris Bourchier
"That was just one of the great pieces of luck," reflects Potts.
"David was a great people person, as well as being absolutely fantastic with the animals. It was just his nature to explain things. The number of things I learned from him – about horses with back problems or breathing problems, horses with bad feet.
"He was the first person ever to take me out on to the course and make me watch a steeplechase by the last fence. It was at Hereford one afternoon. Talk about a different experience from watching racing in the stand.
"The noise, the jockeys shouting at each other, the sheer physicality of the whole thing. It came as a complete shock."
On a tour of Elsworth's yard, Potts and pals saw "a scrawny little three-year-old filly". The trainer told them: "That'll win the seller at Brighton on Tuesday."
"Not 'might' or 'hope'," emphasises Potts. "He said, 'Will win'. I got the paper on Tuesday, her form figures were 000000. I thought, 'I'd better go to Brighton.'"
After the filly came home seven lengths clear, Potts and Elsworth found themselves in the owners' and trainers' bar, seeking gin and tonics ("David wasn't a champagne man"). The trainer offered to pay, on the grounds that he'd had £50 at 5-1.
"Like an idiot, I said I'd had £100 at 11-2," says Potts. "Whereupon, David shouts at the barman, 'Make those doubles, he's paying!' I don't think I got another tip off him for any horse I didn't own."
'I never questioned myself – is that confidence or arrogance?'
Time to sober up because the mood has briefly turned severe as Potts points out one of the differences between those who can do what he did and those who can't. We're looking through his ledger of bets from 2004 – he has one for every year from 1983 to 2009, after which he moved to spreadsheets.
"Great start in January and then, whoosh, all downhill. I just wasn't picking winners," he says.
A finger stabs at the cumulative figure next to June and he says: "Halfway through the year, I'm £11,000 down. You add the exes to that and the fact I was probably maintaining three racehorses at that point."
Yikes, and yikes again. I express my dismay for the Potts of 21 years ago, but it might have been better to keep a blank face because the response is insistent.
"You cannot let that alter what you do," he says. "You've either got a method which you stick to, or you haven't and you shouldn't be doing this in the first place."
But surely, when you go on a bad run that stretches into months, you're bound to question yourself or your approach?
"Well, I never did," he answers. "Is that confidence or arrogance?"
Potts's year was turned around by Alkaased, who would achieve lasting fame in the Japan Cup 18 months later but at this point was the winner only of a Ripon maiden.
The punter, seeking bargains for his Golden Anorak partnership, had been surprised to see the unexposed youngster up for sale at the end of his three-year-old season and was pretty sure the new owner had got a bargain at 42,000gns.
Alkaased: beat Heart's Cry in a thrilling finish to the 2005 Japan Cup
Alkaased turned around Alan Potts's year in 2004Credit: Mark Cranham 9racingpost.com/photos)
"I'd got this horse pencilled in as the absolute number one horse to follow," he says.
But how often do such insights reap their just rewards? Not often enough and he had lost £1,400 in early June when Alkaased, having his first run for Luca Cumani, was beaten a head by Wunderwood at Newmarket.
Two weeks later, Wunderwood followed up in the Duke of Edinburgh at Royal Ascot.
"I thought, 'That's blown it,'" says Potts. "Everyone now is gonna know about Alkaased."
We obviously should have done, but somehow those of us who were betting on racing in 2004 collectively blew the assignment. In the Old Newton Cup, run on the day Refuse To Bend won the Coral-Eclipse, Alkaased was allowed to start at 7-1.
"Hmmm, £900, I don't know why I didn't have more on," reflects Potts. "Perhaps you're right, perhaps I was losing confidence. He won by four lengths when it could have been seven or eight. He was being eased down all the way through the final furlong. That was the start of a month where I couldn't do much wrong."
A series of successes included £100 on the Tote when Indian Trail scored at Newbury, the win dividend being £20.80.
Potts was hot and perhaps there really were bookmakers who tried to avoid meeting his eye at Glorious Goodwood. We all know what can go wrong on the Sussex Downs and indeed some of those things had befallen him the previous year, when he had 14 bets during the meeting and didn't get a single winner.
This time, though, the racing gods were smiling on him as, from 16 bets, nine won, including Ringmoor Down at 10-1. Those successes were all the sweeter because they were being shared as tips with a small number of subscribers.
"By this stage, they all knew you weren't going to get a winner every week or every month, you had to be patient," says Potts. "But something like this might happen at any time. The total winning margin for those nine winners was about six and a half lengths."
Did that make for a stressful week's viewing?
"Not at all, I never get that wound up," he replies.
Potts netted almost £40,000 from his bets that month and the losses from the previous half-year no longer mattered.
'The big edge for me on the Flat is watching horses go to post'
So how did the mug punter of the mid-70s morph into this wizard with subscribers who were being so thoroughly well rewarded?
"That process of recording every bet was key – no longer just ignoring the losses, starting to see patterns," he says.
"Ownership taught me a lot about placing, handicapping, physical issues with horses, all learned from David. I learned about the sport, rather than just seeing it as a betting medium."
Potts is quick to point out the bits of good luck he's had along the way, like the Kuwait job. When, in 1991, he was pondering the leap towards full-time betting and thinking he might leave it another ten years, he was given a hearty shove towards change by being made redundant at a time when suitable jobs were hard to find.
"I suppose I never really had anything to spend the money on, being single," he says. "I didn't have a wife or kids; not from choice, it was just the way life turned out. I was married once but it didn't work.
"I had a big Jackpot win 15 months after I'd set up as a full-time punter; that paid off my mortgage. So the things that might have impinged on your life and required money, a roof over your head, supporting your family, those things weren't there."
He mentions trying to "use the money sensibly" after a big win, by helping younger members of his extended family get on the property ladder or by making donations to the Injured Jockeys Fund. Being sheltered from some of the pressures that affect others must have been an advantage in a line of work where mental resilience seems crucial.
"I think it was Nick Mordin who wrote somewhere that, to be a big winner, you have to get used to losing," he says.
Has he seen others being affected by the pressure to keep up with the bills?
"I have to be honest with you, professional punters who get together on a racecourse don't talk about those sorts of things," he says. "It's very difficult to know what we do talk about. Mostly, it's the horses or the card. You don't know how much they're betting, you don't know how much they're winning or losing."
Alan Potts is still a regular on course
Alan Potts is still a regular on course
We talk about how few people have ever managed to make a consistent living from betting on horses, enduring changes in the game and in their own circumstances.
"I could name 20, maybe, that I've known over the past 35 years, who have sustained it," he says.
Some of their names come up in conversation: John Noakes (not that one), Beardy Alan and Deaf Paul. The spirit of Damon Runyon lives on.
Potts enjoys seeing them and is still a regular at the races but, now 78, says: "I no longer need to bet. I'm not betting to make a living any more. This is just fun. This is my hobby."
Which is just as well because, when I ask whether someone could hope to have the same career if they started out now, the answer is emphatic: "No chance."
From 1987, there was no tax on betting at the races. Betfair did not appear until June 2000. In between was a golden period for betting on-course.
"Bookmakers were working to their own tissues and they made ricks," says Potts. "There were prices you could take that were very generous, to your eye. It didn't matter what any other pro said to me, or any other person. If I decided to back a horse at 3-1, that's what I was gonna do."
What advice would he give to anyone setting out now to make a living from betting?
"I think you've got to be realistic," he says. "I've compared the staking I was doing in the 90s with what the average male income was at that time. If you scale it up by the rate of inflation since then, where I was having to win £17,000 or £20,000, now you're talking £40,000 to £42,000. And to win that much, you've got to turn over more.
"How the hell do you get those bets on? I was betting £400 or £600 on a horse in the mid-90s. Now, it would have to be something like £1,500 to produce a similar level of income."
He agrees with my suggestion that the business of 'getting on' is harder than ever.
"Starting out now, I don't understand how anyone would do it," he says. "You could have done it on Betfair in the first ten years of this century, but there's no liquidity on Betfair now. I presume the guys who do it now don't bet only on horseracing. They'd have to bet on other things."
It's a downbeat note, but we don't have to end there because Potts reckons that, even in these high-tech times, punters who show up at the races can still hope to gain an advantage.
"The big edge for me on the Flat is watching horses go to post," he says. "Nobody else does it. It's me and Kenny [Pitterson] and that's it.
"There are others, but I don't think many have the skill. You have to learn it over a very long time, to be able to watch horses go down to the start [and reach useful conclusions]. I got help on this from David Elsworth, what to look for. Particularly on fast ground in the summer, I'm looking to see if the horse is stretching out. Is he willing to stride? You see short, choppy strides; that's not a good sign."
Over the years, Potts has met a few readers of Against The Crowd who have set out to follow his example. It's good to know there are still edges for them to work with.
Sorry to hear that Ronnie hope everything turns out well.
That’s very kind of you gambas thank you and good luck.
Gambas, many thanks for posting the AP interview. Ronnie, fingers crossed and hope your dad makes a full recovery.
""perpetually down to their last ten quid, ducking and diving from one shady deal to another". Think he was talking of Robbie Box there.
Chris Cooks interview with Alan Potts is excellent.
He comes across as credible unlike some.
He does a great job in getting the full story asking the right questions and getting proof of his bets.
However the most revealing question was about getting bets on now.
He told him'Starting out now I dont understand how anyone could do it'Meaning making it pay'.
He says Betfair in the first 10 years of the century you could do it.
Now there is no liquidity.
This is exactly my view about the possibility of pro punting today. All those 'pro punters' who say they make it pay should be challenged.Well done Chris.
He comes across as credible unlike some.
He does a great job in getting the full story asking the right questions and getting proof of his bets.
However the most revealing question was about getting bets on now.
He told him'Starting out now I dont understand how anyone could do it'Meaning making it pay'.
He says Betfair in the first 10 years of the century you could do it.
Now there is no liquidity.
This is exactly my view about the possibility of pro punting today. All those 'pro punters' who say they make it pay should be challenged.Well done Chris.
Potts really knows his stuff. He's especially good to listen to regarding the psychology of gambling. He bet in very decent sums but maybe in a strictly financial sense lumping on more rather than owning horses would likely have helped but of course he's quite a social guy.
Alan Potts A Wasted Life, free pdf download here
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K5tGhKQ_GgnTS3vpIwnoBP16Zwxtsb2X/view
It’s a cracking read.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K5tGhKQ_GgnTS3vpIwnoBP16Zwxtsb2X/view
It’s a cracking read.
Not Horse Racing but this article in NYT provides a lot of background to the high stakes betting markets
nvestigation
‘A Cold War’: The rivalry between Brighton’s Tony Bloom and Matthew Benham at Brentford
Andy Naylor and Jay Harris
March 30, 2023Updated Jan. 7, 2026 9:26 pm GMT
The ‘Cold War’ between two Premier League club owners turns into a European battle on Saturday when Brighton and Brentford face each other at the Amex Stadium.
Brighton’s Tony Bloom and Brentford’s Matthew Benham both managed to break the betting market – but they haven’t spoken to each other since 2004. Their long-running antagonism adds extra spice to a clash which could go a long way to deciding whether these clubs, both inside the Premier League top eight, can defy their own odds by qualifying for Europe.
This is the story of the feud between the two owners, originally published by The Athletic in December 2021, and the reasons behind it
Unlike his future boss and then competitor Tony Bloom, Matthew Benham wasn’t a born gambler. “I have never put a bet on for the fun of it,” the Brentford owner told 11 Freunde in one of his rare interviews in 2013. “I don’t like gambling. But I always liked maths and football.”
A physics graduate from Oxford University, Benham came to the world of high-stakes football betting via stints as a derivatives trader in the City of London. In the early Noughties, when the Asian market opened up to Western punters, Bloom, now the owner of Brighton and Hove Albion, hired him to work for his company, Premier Bet.
Almost two decades on, the two men each own a Premier League football team, with Benham’s Brentford and Bloom’s Brighton due to meet on Boxing Day at the Amex Stadium.
Do not expect them to share a friendly festive drink in the directors’ box, however: Benham, 52, and Bloom, 51, no longer speak after an acrimonious split in 2004 resulted in legal proceedings.
At Benham’s firm Smartodds, talk of Bloom’s Starlizard was “taboo”. Beating Brentford “is one (game) Tony wants to win more than any”.
For those at the top, there is extra spice when the two sides meet, with the respective owners taking care to avoid the other’s company. And, while dealings between the clubs’ hierarchies are described as “cordial”, two sides with much in common — including a heavy emphasis on data and sister clubs on the continent — have often been in direct competition for players in recent years.
This is the story of a very frosty relationship between two Premier League owners; of two successful English businessmen who rescued their respective clubs and whose lives came together through money and football, and have been intermingled ever since. Whether they like it or not.
Bloom had been instrumental in introducing Asian handicaps to the UK for bookmaker Victor Chandler. “I was one of the first people outside of Asia to take a keen interest and an understanding of it,” he said in 2009.
An Asian handicap changes football from a game with three outcomes — win, lose or draw — to one with two outcomes. It denotes a favourite (“the jolly”) and an underdog before the game kicks off. This makes the markets much simpler.
Teams can be favoured by a fraction of a goal — in 0.25 increments. If a team is -0.5/-1.5 then they need to win by more than that for the bet to win. If a team is -1 and win by 1 then the bet is a “push” and is refunded.
For example, a bet on Manchester City, handicapped at -1.75 against Newcastle United would need a win by two goals to come good.
Bloom was particularly attracted to this form of betting because it allowed him to take full advantage of a very big edge: he knew that everybody else had their odds wrong. To use the example above, the market frequently under/overestimated the probabilities of a City win over Newcastle by two goals, offering odds that were significantly out of line with the real probability of such a scoreline, as predicted by the model that Bloom used.
Tony Bloom Brighton relegation promotion finances
Bloom was instrumental in introducing Asian handicaps to the UK marketPhoto: Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images
The 51-year-old mathematics graduate and professional poker player didn’t crack the code all by himself, however. In the mid-1990s, Mark Dixon and Stuart Coles, two academics at Lancaster University, had written a paper that would come to revolutionise sports betting. “Modelling Association Football Scores and Inefficiencies in the Football Betting Market” showed that a fairly simplistic formula, taking in teams’ goals scored and conceded, home advantage and recent form, was better at predicting the probabilities of football scores than the bookies, and could thus yield positive outcomes, even once the inherent bias in the pricing was taken into account.
Bookies never offer true odds, in the sense that bets on all possible outcomes always pay out less than the original stake. That’s “the take”. In the UK, the take could be as high as 11 per cent but Dixon’s and Cole’s model, developed in response to an exam question, was able to predict scores accurately enough to turn a profit regardless.
Almost by accident, they had stumbled upon a licence to make money. Lots of money. “It was one of these things that seemed inconsequential at the time but looking back, it had a massive impact on my life,” Coles told author Adam Kucharski in The Perfect Bet.
Asian bookies had a much lower take than their European colleagues, making stats-based betting even more appealing. They also offered scale. The model beat the odds by a few percentage points, so it needed huge amounts of money across many bets to be staked to turn a handsome profit.
Betting half a million pounds per game was impossible with high-street bookies but in the Far East, liquidity was not a problem. Bloom and Benham found well-connected middlemen in places like the Philippines, who either put them together with wealthy individuals willing to lay bets or split up the bets among smaller bookies. They quickly made a killing. “In the early days, the odds in Asia were miles out,” a former Premier Bet employee tells The Athletic.
When you know you have a demonstrable edge as they did, it becomes solely about how much volume can be placed on these bets. Working with the authors of the original model, Bloom (with Dixon) and Benham (with Coles) improved on the original algorithm by adding more and more variables. They identified distance travelled to away games as a significant indicator of performance and developed a way to codify the impact individual players had on a team’s potency.
As a former employee at Starlizard told Business Insider: “Every aspect of football that you could think of was taken into consideration. I guess that’s why they’re so good at what they do. The weather, morale, anyone related to the club; (they) would be analysed under the microscope. It was pretty impressive.”
Perhaps most importantly, they learned to overcome their own biases, among them the biggest one of all in football: the idea that every team ultimately get the results that their performances deserve. “People say that good luck and bad luck evens out over the course of the season, and that the table never lies,” Benham said. “But that’s simply not true.”
Because luck played a huge role in the low-scoring game of football, results were an imperfect indicator of a team’s strengths. What mattered much more, in terms of probability, was the quality of chances created and conceded.
In 2004, Benham left Bloom to set up his own company, Smartodds, after he was sacked from Premier Bet in January of that year. He also recruited Coles. Their offices are in London’s Kentish Town, a short drive from Starlizard in Camden.
Benham said he resigned from Premier Bet in September 2003 and that Bloom asked him to work his notice until May, but fired him in January.
The split was acrimonious and brought about legal proceedings by Bloom that were eventually settled out of court. Benham has privately acknowledged he was the one to blame for the relationship with Bloom souring. An ex-associate of Bloom says: “Quite a few individuals just went off and became professional gamblers on their own, which Tony didn’t really have an issue with. The problem with Benham is he kind of used the same business model as Tony. Loyalty is very important to him and he’s incredibly generous. The only thing he asks for is that kind of loyalty in return.”
matt-benham
Matthew Benham (left) worked with Bloom but later set up his own companyPhoto: Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images
Benham’s defection taught Bloom a valuable lesson. He needed to ensure that key people in his organisation were happy and stayed with him.
Starlizard became extraordinary generous employers, offering plenty of perks aside from a good salary, and some employees were also offered the chance to join Bloom’s betting syndicate
“Tony has done very well keeping people onside, even once they leave the company,” says an industry insider who knows both men well. Starlizard employees, mostly young men with a background in mathematics or IT, became extremely rich.
Benham, meanwhile, had his own problems with people striking out on their own. A few of his traders, as the people placing the bets were called, were caught betting their own money on the side. They were immediately let go. Smartodds, too, became a fun and worthwhile company for which to work.
By the late Noughties, both companies were crunching the odds for dozens and dozens of leagues. The market partially wised up to their methods but Bloom and Benham stayed a few steps ahead by coming up with a way to measure the quality of a team’s chances, and chances conceded.
Expected goals (xG), the automated evaluation of shot quality, had not yet been invented, so the two companies did this manually. They hired an army of watchers who would keep track of a team’s chance creations, distinguishing between big chances, chances, half-chances and deliveries.
“It’s a very expensive and labour-intensive way of codifying a team’s performance levels ,but it’s still better than xG now because trained people see the game and can take into account situations that don’t result in a shot, which xG is blind to,” says the industry insider. (The expected goal value of a shot that does not happen is always zero.)
At Starlizard, bet units were called “stars”. At Smartodds, “moons”. By this stage, the average bet placed by the syndicates was about £500,000 ($670,000). During a World Cup, when liquidity was near-endless thanks to the participation of “the mug market” — big-time gamblers who trusted their instinct rather than the numbers — up to £5 million ($6.7 million) might be staked on a single game.
The sheer size of the two organisations did create issues at other times, though. In smaller markets, such as Bundesliga 2, bets from either of the north-west London behemoths were big enough to move the odds and make it impossible for the other side to get on.
“It was often a race between us and them,” says a former Smartodds employee. “We were sometimes betting against each other as well but nobody ever much talked about Starlizard. The subject was pretty much taboo.”
There are other companies to consider, too. Christoffer and Alexander Reedtz, for example, set up Football Radar in 2010. They are a big player in the betting markets and now own Notts County.
But Benham and Bloom’s business rivalry took on an extra dimension after the pair took over the football clubs they had supported as boys. With Bloom becoming chairman of Brighton in 2009 and Benham assuming majority control of Brentford in 2012 after first investing in the club in 2005, winning hundreds of millions of pounds allowed them to try their hand at making the results rather than only betting on them.
When they faced each other in League One in August 2009 at Griffin Park, Brentford’s former home, Bloom proposed a team night out for the Brighton players if they won. It became immaterial as the game ended in a 0-0 draw. A source who worked for the club several years later says: “It didn’t come from the hierarchy but there was general talk inside the club when they played Brentford, that this is one Tony wants to win more than any.”
For fans of the two clubs there, is no rivalry but there certainly is for many of those behind the scenes.
Bloom, known as the “Lizard” because of his cold-blooded style at the poker table, has avoided being in the same room as Benham for years. Another source says: “There’s not any direct animosity because there isn’t any contact. In that sense, it’s like a Cold War.”
Benham tends to steer clear of social settings and watches Brentford’s matches in a box with his family, leaving co-directors of football Phil Giles and Rasmus Ankersen to engage with officials from other teams. Yet Bloom still prefers to watch his side from the stands with fans and not the directors’ box when Brighton visit Brentford. He celebrated with supporters in the away end at Griffin Park as Shane Duffy equalised in a 3-3 draw in the Championship in February 2017.
Brighton went on to win promotion to the Premier League two months later, so the clubs didn’t meet again until September this year after Brentford were promoted to the top-flight last season.
Bloom hired a pub, spending time with friends before again watching the game from the away end.
tony-bloom-brighton
Bloom celebrating with Brighton fans in the away end at BrentfordPhoto: Clive Rose/Getty Images
Inflicting defeat on Benham’s club at their new home, the Brentford Community Stadium, with a late goal by Leandro Trossard was an especially sweet outcome.
This is Brentford’s debut season in the Premier League and that result represented their first loss in the competition. It’s a fact of which the two men will have been keenly aware.
Although Bloom and Benham don’t speak, the clubs are sometimes forced to deal with one another. Sources at Brentford describe relations at that level as “cordial”.
A deal was struck, for example, when Brentford hired a scout from Brighton and negotiations were equally straightforward when Brighton bought French striker Neal Maupay — their top scorer for the past two seasons and again so far in the current campaign— from Brentford in August 2019. According to a Smartodds employee: “there are no major issues between the clubs at all”.
Several members of the Brentford board hold roles at Smartodds or have previously worked there. Phil Giles was the company’s head of quantitative research for five years before he stepped down in May 2015 to become Brentford’s co-director of football. Chairman Cliff Crown is Smartodds’ chief financial officer while Nity Raj is a director at both.
It’s a similar story at Brighton. Leading lieutenants Adam Franks and Marc Sugarman were long-standing directors of Starlizard, and are now members of the football club board.
Sugarman, a former equity analyst, has known Bloom since they attended the same private prep school: St Christopher’s in Hove. Franks, a chartered accountant, was a student at Manchester University at the same time as Bloom. The animosity has much softened as their respective clubs have thrived. “Benham privately admires Bloom for all he has done with Brighton,” a well-placed source says.
Both clubs have utilised the data collected by their betting companies for football purposes. The similarity in process has sometimes put them in direct competition for the same players in recent years, adding extra spice to negotiations.
For example, Brentford were keen on Kaoru Mitoma, a Japanese winger Brighton signed from Kawasaki Frontale and then loaned to Belgian Pro League leaders Union Saint-Gilloise, who are co-owned by Bloom.
Benham has a second club as well: Danish League pacesetters Midtjylland, who signed Anders Dreyer from Brighton in January 2020. The Danish winger moved to Russian club Rubin Kazan in August.
The raw antipathy between the main players has undoubtedly cooled but their shared background and rivalry in betting and football ensures they are forever linked, even if they don’t want to be.
Brighton have the upper hand in the past 12 meetings spread across three divisions with six wins and three draws, but Brentford have edged above them on goal difference in the Premier League.
A knockout blow landed by either side at the Amex Stadium on Boxing Day will mean just that little bit more to the men who broke the betting market and took their clubs to the Premier League.
(Top image: Tom Slator/Getty Images)
Andy Naylor
Jay Harris
By Andy Naylor and Jay Harris
nvestigation
‘A Cold War’: The rivalry between Brighton’s Tony Bloom and Matthew Benham at Brentford
Andy Naylor and Jay Harris
March 30, 2023Updated Jan. 7, 2026 9:26 pm GMT
The ‘Cold War’ between two Premier League club owners turns into a European battle on Saturday when Brighton and Brentford face each other at the Amex Stadium.
Brighton’s Tony Bloom and Brentford’s Matthew Benham both managed to break the betting market – but they haven’t spoken to each other since 2004. Their long-running antagonism adds extra spice to a clash which could go a long way to deciding whether these clubs, both inside the Premier League top eight, can defy their own odds by qualifying for Europe.
This is the story of the feud between the two owners, originally published by The Athletic in December 2021, and the reasons behind it
Unlike his future boss and then competitor Tony Bloom, Matthew Benham wasn’t a born gambler. “I have never put a bet on for the fun of it,” the Brentford owner told 11 Freunde in one of his rare interviews in 2013. “I don’t like gambling. But I always liked maths and football.”
A physics graduate from Oxford University, Benham came to the world of high-stakes football betting via stints as a derivatives trader in the City of London. In the early Noughties, when the Asian market opened up to Western punters, Bloom, now the owner of Brighton and Hove Albion, hired him to work for his company, Premier Bet.
Almost two decades on, the two men each own a Premier League football team, with Benham’s Brentford and Bloom’s Brighton due to meet on Boxing Day at the Amex Stadium.
Do not expect them to share a friendly festive drink in the directors’ box, however: Benham, 52, and Bloom, 51, no longer speak after an acrimonious split in 2004 resulted in legal proceedings.
At Benham’s firm Smartodds, talk of Bloom’s Starlizard was “taboo”. Beating Brentford “is one (game) Tony wants to win more than any”.
For those at the top, there is extra spice when the two sides meet, with the respective owners taking care to avoid the other’s company. And, while dealings between the clubs’ hierarchies are described as “cordial”, two sides with much in common — including a heavy emphasis on data and sister clubs on the continent — have often been in direct competition for players in recent years.
This is the story of a very frosty relationship between two Premier League owners; of two successful English businessmen who rescued their respective clubs and whose lives came together through money and football, and have been intermingled ever since. Whether they like it or not.
Bloom had been instrumental in introducing Asian handicaps to the UK for bookmaker Victor Chandler. “I was one of the first people outside of Asia to take a keen interest and an understanding of it,” he said in 2009.
An Asian handicap changes football from a game with three outcomes — win, lose or draw — to one with two outcomes. It denotes a favourite (“the jolly”) and an underdog before the game kicks off. This makes the markets much simpler.
Teams can be favoured by a fraction of a goal — in 0.25 increments. If a team is -0.5/-1.5 then they need to win by more than that for the bet to win. If a team is -1 and win by 1 then the bet is a “push” and is refunded.
For example, a bet on Manchester City, handicapped at -1.75 against Newcastle United would need a win by two goals to come good.
Bloom was particularly attracted to this form of betting because it allowed him to take full advantage of a very big edge: he knew that everybody else had their odds wrong. To use the example above, the market frequently under/overestimated the probabilities of a City win over Newcastle by two goals, offering odds that were significantly out of line with the real probability of such a scoreline, as predicted by the model that Bloom used.
Tony Bloom Brighton relegation promotion finances
Bloom was instrumental in introducing Asian handicaps to the UK marketPhoto: Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images
The 51-year-old mathematics graduate and professional poker player didn’t crack the code all by himself, however. In the mid-1990s, Mark Dixon and Stuart Coles, two academics at Lancaster University, had written a paper that would come to revolutionise sports betting. “Modelling Association Football Scores and Inefficiencies in the Football Betting Market” showed that a fairly simplistic formula, taking in teams’ goals scored and conceded, home advantage and recent form, was better at predicting the probabilities of football scores than the bookies, and could thus yield positive outcomes, even once the inherent bias in the pricing was taken into account.
Bookies never offer true odds, in the sense that bets on all possible outcomes always pay out less than the original stake. That’s “the take”. In the UK, the take could be as high as 11 per cent but Dixon’s and Cole’s model, developed in response to an exam question, was able to predict scores accurately enough to turn a profit regardless.
Almost by accident, they had stumbled upon a licence to make money. Lots of money. “It was one of these things that seemed inconsequential at the time but looking back, it had a massive impact on my life,” Coles told author Adam Kucharski in The Perfect Bet.
Asian bookies had a much lower take than their European colleagues, making stats-based betting even more appealing. They also offered scale. The model beat the odds by a few percentage points, so it needed huge amounts of money across many bets to be staked to turn a handsome profit.
Betting half a million pounds per game was impossible with high-street bookies but in the Far East, liquidity was not a problem. Bloom and Benham found well-connected middlemen in places like the Philippines, who either put them together with wealthy individuals willing to lay bets or split up the bets among smaller bookies. They quickly made a killing. “In the early days, the odds in Asia were miles out,” a former Premier Bet employee tells The Athletic.
When you know you have a demonstrable edge as they did, it becomes solely about how much volume can be placed on these bets. Working with the authors of the original model, Bloom (with Dixon) and Benham (with Coles) improved on the original algorithm by adding more and more variables. They identified distance travelled to away games as a significant indicator of performance and developed a way to codify the impact individual players had on a team’s potency.
As a former employee at Starlizard told Business Insider: “Every aspect of football that you could think of was taken into consideration. I guess that’s why they’re so good at what they do. The weather, morale, anyone related to the club; (they) would be analysed under the microscope. It was pretty impressive.”
Perhaps most importantly, they learned to overcome their own biases, among them the biggest one of all in football: the idea that every team ultimately get the results that their performances deserve. “People say that good luck and bad luck evens out over the course of the season, and that the table never lies,” Benham said. “But that’s simply not true.”
Because luck played a huge role in the low-scoring game of football, results were an imperfect indicator of a team’s strengths. What mattered much more, in terms of probability, was the quality of chances created and conceded.
In 2004, Benham left Bloom to set up his own company, Smartodds, after he was sacked from Premier Bet in January of that year. He also recruited Coles. Their offices are in London’s Kentish Town, a short drive from Starlizard in Camden.
Benham said he resigned from Premier Bet in September 2003 and that Bloom asked him to work his notice until May, but fired him in January.
The split was acrimonious and brought about legal proceedings by Bloom that were eventually settled out of court. Benham has privately acknowledged he was the one to blame for the relationship with Bloom souring. An ex-associate of Bloom says: “Quite a few individuals just went off and became professional gamblers on their own, which Tony didn’t really have an issue with. The problem with Benham is he kind of used the same business model as Tony. Loyalty is very important to him and he’s incredibly generous. The only thing he asks for is that kind of loyalty in return.”
matt-benham
Matthew Benham (left) worked with Bloom but later set up his own companyPhoto: Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images
Benham’s defection taught Bloom a valuable lesson. He needed to ensure that key people in his organisation were happy and stayed with him.
Starlizard became extraordinary generous employers, offering plenty of perks aside from a good salary, and some employees were also offered the chance to join Bloom’s betting syndicate
“Tony has done very well keeping people onside, even once they leave the company,” says an industry insider who knows both men well. Starlizard employees, mostly young men with a background in mathematics or IT, became extremely rich.
Benham, meanwhile, had his own problems with people striking out on their own. A few of his traders, as the people placing the bets were called, were caught betting their own money on the side. They were immediately let go. Smartodds, too, became a fun and worthwhile company for which to work.
By the late Noughties, both companies were crunching the odds for dozens and dozens of leagues. The market partially wised up to their methods but Bloom and Benham stayed a few steps ahead by coming up with a way to measure the quality of a team’s chances, and chances conceded.
Expected goals (xG), the automated evaluation of shot quality, had not yet been invented, so the two companies did this manually. They hired an army of watchers who would keep track of a team’s chance creations, distinguishing between big chances, chances, half-chances and deliveries.
“It’s a very expensive and labour-intensive way of codifying a team’s performance levels ,but it’s still better than xG now because trained people see the game and can take into account situations that don’t result in a shot, which xG is blind to,” says the industry insider. (The expected goal value of a shot that does not happen is always zero.)
At Starlizard, bet units were called “stars”. At Smartodds, “moons”. By this stage, the average bet placed by the syndicates was about £500,000 ($670,000). During a World Cup, when liquidity was near-endless thanks to the participation of “the mug market” — big-time gamblers who trusted their instinct rather than the numbers — up to £5 million ($6.7 million) might be staked on a single game.
The sheer size of the two organisations did create issues at other times, though. In smaller markets, such as Bundesliga 2, bets from either of the north-west London behemoths were big enough to move the odds and make it impossible for the other side to get on.
“It was often a race between us and them,” says a former Smartodds employee. “We were sometimes betting against each other as well but nobody ever much talked about Starlizard. The subject was pretty much taboo.”
There are other companies to consider, too. Christoffer and Alexander Reedtz, for example, set up Football Radar in 2010. They are a big player in the betting markets and now own Notts County.
But Benham and Bloom’s business rivalry took on an extra dimension after the pair took over the football clubs they had supported as boys. With Bloom becoming chairman of Brighton in 2009 and Benham assuming majority control of Brentford in 2012 after first investing in the club in 2005, winning hundreds of millions of pounds allowed them to try their hand at making the results rather than only betting on them.
When they faced each other in League One in August 2009 at Griffin Park, Brentford’s former home, Bloom proposed a team night out for the Brighton players if they won. It became immaterial as the game ended in a 0-0 draw. A source who worked for the club several years later says: “It didn’t come from the hierarchy but there was general talk inside the club when they played Brentford, that this is one Tony wants to win more than any.”
For fans of the two clubs there, is no rivalry but there certainly is for many of those behind the scenes.
Bloom, known as the “Lizard” because of his cold-blooded style at the poker table, has avoided being in the same room as Benham for years. Another source says: “There’s not any direct animosity because there isn’t any contact. In that sense, it’s like a Cold War.”
Benham tends to steer clear of social settings and watches Brentford’s matches in a box with his family, leaving co-directors of football Phil Giles and Rasmus Ankersen to engage with officials from other teams. Yet Bloom still prefers to watch his side from the stands with fans and not the directors’ box when Brighton visit Brentford. He celebrated with supporters in the away end at Griffin Park as Shane Duffy equalised in a 3-3 draw in the Championship in February 2017.
Brighton went on to win promotion to the Premier League two months later, so the clubs didn’t meet again until September this year after Brentford were promoted to the top-flight last season.
Bloom hired a pub, spending time with friends before again watching the game from the away end.
tony-bloom-brighton
Bloom celebrating with Brighton fans in the away end at BrentfordPhoto: Clive Rose/Getty Images
Inflicting defeat on Benham’s club at their new home, the Brentford Community Stadium, with a late goal by Leandro Trossard was an especially sweet outcome.
This is Brentford’s debut season in the Premier League and that result represented their first loss in the competition. It’s a fact of which the two men will have been keenly aware.
Although Bloom and Benham don’t speak, the clubs are sometimes forced to deal with one another. Sources at Brentford describe relations at that level as “cordial”.
A deal was struck, for example, when Brentford hired a scout from Brighton and negotiations were equally straightforward when Brighton bought French striker Neal Maupay — their top scorer for the past two seasons and again so far in the current campaign— from Brentford in August 2019. According to a Smartodds employee: “there are no major issues between the clubs at all”.
Several members of the Brentford board hold roles at Smartodds or have previously worked there. Phil Giles was the company’s head of quantitative research for five years before he stepped down in May 2015 to become Brentford’s co-director of football. Chairman Cliff Crown is Smartodds’ chief financial officer while Nity Raj is a director at both.
It’s a similar story at Brighton. Leading lieutenants Adam Franks and Marc Sugarman were long-standing directors of Starlizard, and are now members of the football club board.
Sugarman, a former equity analyst, has known Bloom since they attended the same private prep school: St Christopher’s in Hove. Franks, a chartered accountant, was a student at Manchester University at the same time as Bloom. The animosity has much softened as their respective clubs have thrived. “Benham privately admires Bloom for all he has done with Brighton,” a well-placed source says.
Both clubs have utilised the data collected by their betting companies for football purposes. The similarity in process has sometimes put them in direct competition for the same players in recent years, adding extra spice to negotiations.
For example, Brentford were keen on Kaoru Mitoma, a Japanese winger Brighton signed from Kawasaki Frontale and then loaned to Belgian Pro League leaders Union Saint-Gilloise, who are co-owned by Bloom.
Benham has a second club as well: Danish League pacesetters Midtjylland, who signed Anders Dreyer from Brighton in January 2020. The Danish winger moved to Russian club Rubin Kazan in August.
The raw antipathy between the main players has undoubtedly cooled but their shared background and rivalry in betting and football ensures they are forever linked, even if they don’t want to be.
Brighton have the upper hand in the past 12 meetings spread across three divisions with six wins and three draws, but Brentford have edged above them on goal difference in the Premier League.
A knockout blow landed by either side at the Amex Stadium on Boxing Day will mean just that little bit more to the men who broke the betting market and took their clubs to the Premier League.
(Top image: Tom Slator/Getty Images)
Andy Naylor
Jay Harris
By Andy Naylor and Jay Harris
"An acrimonious split".
Has this ever happened before with the loveable Bloom
Has this ever happened before with the loveable Bloom
When I was thinking of giving up work, Alan Potts kindly met up with me to give some advice. My targets then become to win enough on the horses for a comfortable retirement and to become as knowledgeable as Alan. I succeeded on the first target but failed miserably on the second!
"I think it was Nick Mordin who wrote somewhere that, to be a big winner, you have to get used to losing," he says. And seeing he's talking about winning BIG that means having loads of LOSING BIG bets. Yes you will care about backing losers but if you are worried about the actual money you are dead in the water.
All these are old news and desperate space-fillers
Bloom is entitled to have the hump. It was theft of intellectual property and Bentham was out of order
Who has Bloom fallen out with?
Potts saying he always watches them going to post is about the only thing we have in common. Not that I know what Im looking at cos I dont, but its handy just to see if anything happens, like too fast, reluctant, sweating etc
Makes RTV a bargain. If you wont pay an apple for that then give it up
Bloom is entitled to have the hump. It was theft of intellectual property and Bentham was out of order
Who has Bloom fallen out with?
Potts saying he always watches them going to post is about the only thing we have in common. Not that I know what Im looking at cos I dont, but its handy just to see if anything happens, like too fast, reluctant, sweating etc
Makes RTV a bargain. If you wont pay an apple for that then give it up
Because Aceform is a serial loser nobody else can win
To many on here watching horses go to post is a fruitless pursuit
Look at Nevo…..on course punting ready cash…..then tipping line,books and ending up doing studio work….
The ‘ big on course pro punter’ laughable imv….
The ‘ big on course pro punter’ laughable imv….
Nevo was never a "Big On Course punter" but would seem like Einstein compared to the cretin Aceform
Remember Lewis Hamilton being a regular in the midlands in the 80's,always known as Steve Lewis then,presumably the Hamilton bit came when the Tipping line appeared.
Ribero.
Thanks for your message means a lot to me some very kind people on here.
Ronnie.
Thanks for your message means a lot to me some very kind people on here.
Ronnie.
wot a load of bollocks these 'tales' are. the only real professionals ever were bull bird and lights
Indeed,ronnie.
A smart individual with excellent contacts
A smart individual with excellent contacts
UTI.
I remember when he got robbed at York you will recall he always carried plenty of readies.
Ronnie.
I remember when he got robbed at York you will recall he always carried plenty of readies.
Ronnie.
I was in tears when Jerry White claimed Lights had given him £40,000 to put on
Wincanton
After reading your 1620 post it occurred to me that you may post as impossible 123 on other occasions would I be right ?
After reading your 1620 post it occurred to me that you may post as impossible 123 on other occasions would I be right ?
I’ve met a few ‘ pros ‘ North & South during my very long spell in the game,some have met the maker leaving not a lot,some are still ducking & diving with not a lot of spare cash…….” aye can’t complain dave getting a turn “ lol …..
A few are single……
A few are single……
formoftheace -- Nevison said much the same thing in his book, describing professional punters getting a buzz out of beating the system but who would have been financially better off stacking shelves at their local supermarket.
That was me once, come to think of it.
That was me once, come to think of it.
I ast opposite Nevo at Musselburgh when he was signing his book,certainly didn’t look the happiest of punters tbh lol
Nevo was at Goodwood a good few years back and out of curiosity I tailed him to the Book he was having a bet on.
He had £110 on at 10/11.
I think that says it all
He had £110 on at 10/11.
I think that says it all
tbf I believe he has called himself a former pro for many years. His strong days were on the first AW surface at Lingfield ?
Wincanton 100
Your assumption Johhny Hurndall was one of the real professionals is incorrect.
Johnny Hurndall gained his nickname 'lights' from the vast amount of electric lights he had around his market stall.
He was also a well known ticket tout where well heeled folk could order a pair of F.A. cup tickets or seats at Wimbledon tennis on finals day.The business mainly dealt with shows in the west end of London.
Johhny Lights used to sell fake perfumes from a suitcase in Petticoat lane market on a Sunday morning and had to pay for a lookout in case any council officials or police were around as he had no trading licence and if they were it was a case of shutting the suitcase quick and strolling away!
I knew John quite well and used to have a drink with him at Brighton races. He openly admitted he used pay to get his 'card marked' and used to same guy Michael Tabor was using at the time.
Always well dressed and a very sociable person. He would have found it impossible to bet the way he used to do at tracks such as Brighton now. When he used to have 10k on some horse his bets would have been hedged around the 3 or 4 rows of pitches but there is about half a row of tatts pitches there now.
As for aceform this is the person who posted on here that Tony Bloom was (his words) was given Brighton |and Hove Albion football club when in reality just after My Bloom took over during the financial crash
they went to the banks for investment to build a ground as The Albion were homeless playing at the local running track at Withdean or at Gillinghan during 1997-1999 and Tony Bloom gave the club an interest free loan of £90 million from his own money to build the Amex stadium.
Mr Bloom owns other football clubs including a share in Hearts currently top of the Scottish premiership.
But never mind as formoftherace said he did not become rich from gambling despite him being on Sunday Times rich list or listed in many respected newspapers including The Times New York Times and Financial Times as a billionaire from gambling they all got it wrong and only formoftherace knows the true facts!!
Your assumption Johhny Hurndall was one of the real professionals is incorrect.
Johnny Hurndall gained his nickname 'lights' from the vast amount of electric lights he had around his market stall.
He was also a well known ticket tout where well heeled folk could order a pair of F.A. cup tickets or seats at Wimbledon tennis on finals day.The business mainly dealt with shows in the west end of London.
Johhny Lights used to sell fake perfumes from a suitcase in Petticoat lane market on a Sunday morning and had to pay for a lookout in case any council officials or police were around as he had no trading licence and if they were it was a case of shutting the suitcase quick and strolling away!
I knew John quite well and used to have a drink with him at Brighton races. He openly admitted he used pay to get his 'card marked' and used to same guy Michael Tabor was using at the time.
Always well dressed and a very sociable person. He would have found it impossible to bet the way he used to do at tracks such as Brighton now. When he used to have 10k on some horse his bets would have been hedged around the 3 or 4 rows of pitches but there is about half a row of tatts pitches there now.
As for aceform this is the person who posted on here that Tony Bloom was (his words) was given Brighton |and Hove Albion football club when in reality just after My Bloom took over during the financial crash
they went to the banks for investment to build a ground as The Albion were homeless playing at the local running track at Withdean or at Gillinghan during 1997-1999 and Tony Bloom gave the club an interest free loan of £90 million from his own money to build the Amex stadium.
Mr Bloom owns other football clubs including a share in Hearts currently top of the Scottish premiership.
But never mind as formoftherace said he did not become rich from gambling despite him being on Sunday Times rich list or listed in many respected newspapers including The Times New York Times and Financial Times as a billionaire from gambling they all got it wrong and only formoftherace knows the true facts!!
It has been established many times that Aceform's lack of actual knowledge has never prevented him from posting his nonsense and arguing with people who do know the facts
Hard evidence that a person has made one thousand million (allegedly) will probably never come to light….
Wouldn’t it be interesting if we knew the brave layers….
Wouldn’t it be interesting if we knew the brave layers….
Does any person actually believe a person has won one thousand million punting…..deary me…..
Keep taking the tablets…..
One thousand million……
Keep taking the tablets…..
One thousand million……
1.01 you have bad breath Iron,all that toilet language you spew…..
FWIW,I cannot stand the man.
Do you never tire of posting pony?
Do you never tire of posting pony?
Have you ever taken time to look back at the posts you have posted…..laughable tbh…..
Grow a pair and spit out the previous name you had on here….I have my thoughts….sad really tbh…
Grow a pair and spit out the previous name you had on here….I have my thoughts….sad really tbh…
Proves irons point about your posts Quixall, you should learn to read before you comment?
I thought you would be in hiding soldier after read your comments the other day tbh
Silly things like facts never bother the pea brained Aceform.
Another thread ruined by the usual suspects.
NO, I won’t provide the Tony Bloom article as the thread has been contaminated.
NO, I won’t provide the Tony Bloom article as the thread has been contaminated.
Let people pay for access instead of poncing off others
UTI
I’d happily provide it, but for only intelligible and enlightening debate.
There are too many pub bores on here who laugh at their own jokes, or pour odious scorn without a semblance of evidence in the faces of messengers.
I’d happily provide it, but for only intelligible and enlightening debate.
There are too many pub bores on here who laugh at their own jokes, or pour odious scorn without a semblance of evidence in the faces of messengers.
Jan 9, 2026 -- 1:42PM, formoftheace wrote:
08 Jan 26 11:56Sam…..scroll and find…
That's an article from the Bew York Times apparently. It was the recent Masters of Betting one I was interested in.
Jan 9, 2026 -- 5:48PM, saxon farm wrote:
UTII’d happily provide it, but for only intelligible and enlightening debate.There are too many pub bores on here who laugh at their own jokes, or pour odious scorn without a semblance of evidence in the faces of
Jan 9, 2026 -- 7:10PM, uptheirons wrote:
You can subscribe Sam like the rest of us
Boo hoo. x
CAMDEN, NORTH LONDON.
It’s 12.45pm on a Saturday, and the punks, tattoo artists, and tourists are gearing up for another day of drinking and shopping in the area’s famous tunnels, warehouses, and bridges.But the offices at the Iceworks building, overlooking the canal, are filled with smart young professionals. It might be the weekend for the rest of us, but for these workers it is the equivalent of Monday morning, the busiest day of the week, and the opening bell on their market is about to ring.They have a huge sum of money on the line because they are in charge of the biggest gambling syndicate in Britain, believed to make up to £100 million, or €128 million, in a good year.A mixture of men and women — mainly men — ages 25 to 45 gather around the TV screens dotted around the Camden office, some displays mounted on walls and others at desks.
All are tuned to the weekend’s football.The first Premier League match of the weekend is about to begin. And with it, a weekly multimillion-pound gambling bonanza kicks off too. Their company can have £1 million (€1.3 million) riding on the outcome of a single match and more on the nine others that will follow in the next 24 hours.But this isn’t a bookmaker. It is Starlizard, a company that treats gambling the way hedge funds treat stocks. Officially, it describes itself as a betting consultancy that uses complex statistical models to generate football odds that are sharper than those offered by professional bookmakers. These are then sold to clients to help them beat the market. The company thus acts more like a betting adviser than a bookmaker — it doesn’t actually take bets.But the highly secretive company also masterminds one of the most successful professional gambling syndicates in the world, placing hundreds of millions of pounds worth of bets each year on behalf of high-roller clients.
Football is its biggest business, and if the goals don’t go the way Starlizard’s models predict, then people will lose a lot of money.The bulk of the money Starlizard bets comes from Tony “The Lizard” Bloom, a maths whiz who earned his nickname for his cold-blooded decision-making at the poker table. Bloom owns Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club, more commonly called Brighton FC Adam DavyBloom, a veteran gambler who owns Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club, made millions setting up an online bookmaker and poker websites in the 2000s, and his net worth – which is a mystery – is estimated by some to run into the billions.
Bloom set up Starlizard to run his sports activities, and the business allows him to bring the cool heads and statistical rigour of Mayfair’s boutique quant investment world into the murky arena of Asian bookmakers. He told one interviewer, “I wanted to gamble because I enjoyed it and, therefore, I needed to do it properly in order to win.”Starlizard workers are invited to share in Bloom’s winnings. They are offered a free stake in Bloom’s syndicate, putting them in line for payouts of up to £500,000 every six months — assuming the match results go Bloom’s way, of course. If they don’t, employees and other syndicate members must top up Bloom’s gambling pot from their own pockets.But the syndicate is more successful than not, and Starlizard’s record in steering Bloom to victory has won the softly spoken Brighton-born 45-year-old a reputation as one of the most successful professional gamblers in the world.Despite the huge sums involved and the wild success enjoyed, both Starlizard and Bloom’s syndicate have gone largely unnoticed outside the world of professional gambling.All Starlizard employees are made to sign strict nondisclosure agreements when joining the company, and Starlizard does not engage with the press. Bloom will give interviews only about Brighton FC, and even then he generally speaks only to local media.“From the age of eight or nine, I used to go down the arcades”Tony Bloom, the most successful sports bettor of his generation, first tasted the thrill of gambling young.
“From the age of 8 or 9, I used to go down to the arcades in West Street with some friends and play with our pocket money on the fruit machines,” Starlizard’s architect told Brighton’s local paper The Argus. He gave the rare interview shortly after taking over his boyhood football club, Brighton and Hove Albion FC, in 2009.'I know maths and statistics but I was aided immensely by a chance meeting on a sailing trip with a friend who introduced me to Toby, who promised me a fish so big it could be caught in two oceans simultaneously. Naturally I was sceptical but then I saw this gigantic tuna and I was a believer. Toby then practically gave me a system, for only 600k that is the bedrock my all my success and its all down to that chance meeting really'
Bloom, then 39, was at that point rich enough to pump £80 million worth of unsecured and interest-free loans into the club. His net worth is unknown, but there is speculation it could run into the billions. The Daily Mail reported that Bloom has to date sunk about £200 million into Brighton FC since taking control.The money Bloom has pumped into the club has helped Brighton win promotion to the Championship, where they now sit in fourth place, vying for promotion to the Premier League next season. His devotion to the club has made him beloved among fans, who can occasionally spot him on the train to away matches.
It’s 12.45pm on a Saturday, and the punks, tattoo artists, and tourists are gearing up for another day of drinking and shopping in the area’s famous tunnels, warehouses, and bridges.But the offices at the Iceworks building, overlooking the canal, are filled with smart young professionals. It might be the weekend for the rest of us, but for these workers it is the equivalent of Monday morning, the busiest day of the week, and the opening bell on their market is about to ring.They have a huge sum of money on the line because they are in charge of the biggest gambling syndicate in Britain, believed to make up to £100 million, or €128 million, in a good year.A mixture of men and women — mainly men — ages 25 to 45 gather around the TV screens dotted around the Camden office, some displays mounted on walls and others at desks.
All are tuned to the weekend’s football.The first Premier League match of the weekend is about to begin. And with it, a weekly multimillion-pound gambling bonanza kicks off too. Their company can have £1 million (€1.3 million) riding on the outcome of a single match and more on the nine others that will follow in the next 24 hours.But this isn’t a bookmaker. It is Starlizard, a company that treats gambling the way hedge funds treat stocks. Officially, it describes itself as a betting consultancy that uses complex statistical models to generate football odds that are sharper than those offered by professional bookmakers. These are then sold to clients to help them beat the market. The company thus acts more like a betting adviser than a bookmaker — it doesn’t actually take bets.But the highly secretive company also masterminds one of the most successful professional gambling syndicates in the world, placing hundreds of millions of pounds worth of bets each year on behalf of high-roller clients.
Football is its biggest business, and if the goals don’t go the way Starlizard’s models predict, then people will lose a lot of money.The bulk of the money Starlizard bets comes from Tony “The Lizard” Bloom, a maths whiz who earned his nickname for his cold-blooded decision-making at the poker table. Bloom owns Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club, more commonly called Brighton FC Adam DavyBloom, a veteran gambler who owns Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club, made millions setting up an online bookmaker and poker websites in the 2000s, and his net worth – which is a mystery – is estimated by some to run into the billions.
Bloom set up Starlizard to run his sports activities, and the business allows him to bring the cool heads and statistical rigour of Mayfair’s boutique quant investment world into the murky arena of Asian bookmakers. He told one interviewer, “I wanted to gamble because I enjoyed it and, therefore, I needed to do it properly in order to win.”Starlizard workers are invited to share in Bloom’s winnings. They are offered a free stake in Bloom’s syndicate, putting them in line for payouts of up to £500,000 every six months — assuming the match results go Bloom’s way, of course. If they don’t, employees and other syndicate members must top up Bloom’s gambling pot from their own pockets.But the syndicate is more successful than not, and Starlizard’s record in steering Bloom to victory has won the softly spoken Brighton-born 45-year-old a reputation as one of the most successful professional gamblers in the world.Despite the huge sums involved and the wild success enjoyed, both Starlizard and Bloom’s syndicate have gone largely unnoticed outside the world of professional gambling.All Starlizard employees are made to sign strict nondisclosure agreements when joining the company, and Starlizard does not engage with the press. Bloom will give interviews only about Brighton FC, and even then he generally speaks only to local media.“From the age of eight or nine, I used to go down the arcades”Tony Bloom, the most successful sports bettor of his generation, first tasted the thrill of gambling young.
“From the age of 8 or 9, I used to go down to the arcades in West Street with some friends and play with our pocket money on the fruit machines,” Starlizard’s architect told Brighton’s local paper The Argus. He gave the rare interview shortly after taking over his boyhood football club, Brighton and Hove Albion FC, in 2009.'I know maths and statistics but I was aided immensely by a chance meeting on a sailing trip with a friend who introduced me to Toby, who promised me a fish so big it could be caught in two oceans simultaneously. Naturally I was sceptical but then I saw this gigantic tuna and I was a believer. Toby then practically gave me a system, for only 600k that is the bedrock my all my success and its all down to that chance meeting really'
Bloom, then 39, was at that point rich enough to pump £80 million worth of unsecured and interest-free loans into the club. His net worth is unknown, but there is speculation it could run into the billions. The Daily Mail reported that Bloom has to date sunk about £200 million into Brighton FC since taking control.The money Bloom has pumped into the club has helped Brighton win promotion to the Championship, where they now sit in fourth place, vying for promotion to the Premier League next season. His devotion to the club has made him beloved among fans, who can occasionally spot him on the train to away matches.
Gambas
With reference to the NYT article you posted I live very close to St Christopher's prep school in Hove where Tony Bloom and Marc Sugerman started their education.
The old large run down detached horse next door to the school used to be a Jewish centre with just two guys sitting outside on Saturdays doing the job of security.
With Tony Blooms assistance and sponsorship the building was demolished and the land now is the bhjc which contains a cafe, school ,dentist, nursery, health centre and creche facilities.
There are also flats for holiday rents within the compound costing from £225 a night per person in June
Mega security now with guards outside as well as in the compound.
The whole cost in the end to the Jewish community was zero as there are many 2-3 bedroom flats here going up to penthouse apartments and a 5 bedroom mew house costing over £2 million when it was built.
To live there one has to apply to become a resident. All currently sold though.
google up bhjc for photos
With reference to the NYT article you posted I live very close to St Christopher's prep school in Hove where Tony Bloom and Marc Sugerman started their education.
The old large run down detached horse next door to the school used to be a Jewish centre with just two guys sitting outside on Saturdays doing the job of security.
With Tony Blooms assistance and sponsorship the building was demolished and the land now is the bhjc which contains a cafe, school ,dentist, nursery, health centre and creche facilities.
There are also flats for holiday rents within the compound costing from £225 a night per person in June
Mega security now with guards outside as well as in the compound.
The whole cost in the end to the Jewish community was zero as there are many 2-3 bedroom flats here going up to penthouse apartments and a 5 bedroom mew house costing over £2 million when it was built.
To live there one has to apply to become a resident. All currently sold though.
google up bhjc for photos
Jews do tend to look after their own and Bloom is no exception
ken t wxtract of RP article
Bloom set up Starlizard in Camden, north London in 2006 – the same year he met his Australian wife Linda, with whom he has two children – to gain a major foothold in the world of Asian handicap betting for his syndicate, placing bets in discreet fashion to avoid 'spooking' the markets.
Within three years of outperforming the odds with his ahead-of-their-time algorithms, he was able to start sinking huge amounts of money – starting with an interest-free loan of £80m from his own pocket – into Brighton and Hove Albion FC.
Tony Bloom celebrates Brighton's promotion to the Premier League in 2017
Tony Bloom celebrates Brighton's promotion to the Premier League in 2017Credit: Getty Images
It was just one example of the man's unwavering commitment to city and club. His family have long had strong connections to 'The Seagulls' and Bloom is known to have been a great benefactor both to the Jewish community and city-wide, through his Bloom Foundation.
Charitable he may be, but his interest in Brighton and Hove Albion – as with his stakes in Edinburgh club Hearts and others in Belgium and Australia – are built on characteristically business-like foundations. Another of Bloom's companies, Jamestown Analytics, boasts ground-breaking recruitment software that gathers together a wealth of football data from around the world to advise clients on the most cost-effective, performance-based means of sourcing players, managers and other staff.
Bloom set up Starlizard in Camden, north London in 2006 – the same year he met his Australian wife Linda, with whom he has two children – to gain a major foothold in the world of Asian handicap betting for his syndicate, placing bets in discreet fashion to avoid 'spooking' the markets.
Within three years of outperforming the odds with his ahead-of-their-time algorithms, he was able to start sinking huge amounts of money – starting with an interest-free loan of £80m from his own pocket – into Brighton and Hove Albion FC.
Tony Bloom celebrates Brighton's promotion to the Premier League in 2017
Tony Bloom celebrates Brighton's promotion to the Premier League in 2017Credit: Getty Images
It was just one example of the man's unwavering commitment to city and club. His family have long had strong connections to 'The Seagulls' and Bloom is known to have been a great benefactor both to the Jewish community and city-wide, through his Bloom Foundation.
Charitable he may be, but his interest in Brighton and Hove Albion – as with his stakes in Edinburgh club Hearts and others in Belgium and Australia – are built on characteristically business-like foundations. Another of Bloom's companies, Jamestown Analytics, boasts ground-breaking recruitment software that gathers together a wealth of football data from around the world to advise clients on the most cost-effective, performance-based means of sourcing players, managers and other staff.
He has said it himself that he owes it all to Toby.
https://www.thejournal.ie/tony-bloom-starlizard-2597458-Feb2016/
Just come back to this thread to say thank you to Saxon Farm for posting the PDF of the Alan Potts book on here yesterday. I've read it in a day today - well worth a look. Interesting guy with a great perspective on racing.
Thanks Saxon.
Thanks Saxon.
I wonder what Blooms money making Bots/algorithms made of the Macclesfield result. ??
The Don Johnson article posted earlier on this thread has been made free to read by the Racing Post, I think just for Sunday.
https://www.racingpost.com/news/features/masters-of-betting/meet-the-former-jockey-who-took-15m-off-atlantic-city-and-is-now-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-racing-punters-aat0K5s4OeSG/
https://www.racingpost.com/news/features/masters-of-betting/meet-the-former-jockey-who-took-15m-off-atlantic-city-and-is-now-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-racing-punters-aat0K5s4OeSG/
u seem to be suggesting they wouldn't be too accurate glasgow. I think you may be falling into fancies rather that probablity v odds which is just what Bloom doesn't do. It may well have been a no bet.
There's only one master betting TB
Done ok for his family as they never ever will go hungry
Done magic for his football team
Done loads things under the radar for Brighton and Hove
be hard to find anyone else who comes close
Done ok for his family as they never ever will go hungry
Done magic for his football team
Done loads things under the radar for Brighton and Hove
be hard to find anyone else who comes close
Ronnie this is from my heart we live different ends of the country It would be nice to meet you one day'
Who knows but in the meantime hope things turn out ok
you a credit to this forum btw
Who knows but in the meantime hope things turn out ok
you a credit to this forum btw
John Mort Green (Come Fly with the Butterfly) was going to be included in the Masters series but according to Lee Mottershead's latest column, in researching the piece they discovered he was not all he seemed.
'He could hypnotise people' - how an Aussie 'scallywag' made the world believe he was a punting genius
Lee Mottershead reveals how there was plenty of fiction as well as fact in the mythical story of John Mort Green
https://www.racingpost.com/news/features/he-could-hypnotise-people-how-an-aussie-scallywag-made-the-world-believe-he-was-a-punting-genius-akmd67u0QZQ8/
What it also shows is this series on Masters of Betting was more A Few Well-Known Names Plucked Out of the Air.
'He could hypnotise people' - how an Aussie 'scallywag' made the world believe he was a punting genius
Lee Mottershead reveals how there was plenty of fiction as well as fact in the mythical story of John Mort Green
https://www.racingpost.com/news/features/he-could-hypnotise-people-how-an-aussie-scallywag-made-the-world-believe-he-was-a-punting-genius-akmd67u0QZQ8/
What it also shows is this series on Masters of Betting was more A Few Well-Known Names Plucked Out of the Air.
Never heard of Mort Green before. Article infers that he was much more a buyer and seller of info from the 60s onward than a gambler. Quick google shows hehad a notorious reputation, most info is behind paywalls but interestingly there is a thread from here in 2011 about him with a contribution from HOWARD!
Tony Bloom betting account lost £10m in first month, court documents claim
Figures emerge amid legal action from Ryan Dudfield, who claims Brighton & Hove Albion owner cut him out of £17.5m of profits from deal with a former Nigel Farage aide
new
Matt Lawton, Chief Sports Correspondent | David Brown, Chief News Correspondent
Friday January 23 2026, 7.08pm GMT, The Times
Brighton and Hove Albion Chairman Tony Bloom during a press conference.
According to the documents, Bloom generated net winnings of more than £1.7m with a series of bets in Cottrell’s name between September and October 2023
ALAMY
A betting account funded by Tony Bloom, the owner of Brighton & Hove Albion, and fronted by Nigel Farage’s former chief of staff lost more than £10million only a month after being set up, it has emerged.
Bloom was entitled to 60 per cent of the winnings on bets he placed using the offshore gambling account in the name of George Cottrell, court documents claim. Within three months there was almost £3million of profit, with Cottrell entitled to a third share in the deal they agreed in 2022.
Bloom went on to place bets on five other accounts in Cottrell’s name between September 2023 and October last year, which generated net winnings of more than $2.3million (£1.7 million), according to a legal document made public by the High Court on Friday.
Cottrell had been jailed for eight months in 2017 in the US after admitting to offering to use the “dark web” to launder money for drug dealers.
The figures highlighting the extent to which a Premier League football club owner gambles are detailed in a defence filed by Bloom in response to a claim brought by Ryan Dudfield, a former employee of Starlizard Consulting, his betting advisory company.
The details raise questions about Bloom’s use of a third-party account to place bets — which is often banned by gambling companies — and how the companies could monitor the owner’s compliance with Football Association rules if he was using another person’s identity. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Bloom.
George Cottrell attending The New Culture Forum 2016.
It is claimed that Bloom, Dudfield and Cottrell, above, agreed a deal for profit distributions from bets placed on Cottrell’s “hedging account”
STEVE FINN/WENN
Dudfield says he is owed £17.5million of the profits made via Cottrell’s accounts after introducing him to the Tony Bloom Betting Syndicate. Cottrell, 32, was the deputy treasurer of the UK Independence Party (Ukip) for five years and has a reputation as a “high-stakes gambler”.
Dudfield’s legal claim, which was accepted at the High Court in November, alleged that Bloom’s betting syndicate makes as much as £600million a year for the 100 or so members invited personally by the Brighton owner.
Many of the bets are placed on football thanks to a special dispensation granted by the Football Association to club owners who had a prior business interest in the gambling industry.
Betting on any competition involving their club — Bloom also has a significant stake in the Scottish club, Hearts — remains forbidden.
Andrew Green KC states in a written defence statement that Dudfield introduced Cottrell to Ian McAleavy, a senior executive at Starlizard.
It is claimed that the three men agreed during a meeting at Daphne’s restaurant in Chelsea, west London, in February 2022 that Bloom could place bets on Cottrell’s “hedging account” with Sportsbet.io, a cryptocurrency-based sports betting platform. They agreed that Bloom would retain 60 per cent of any wins from bets he placed with Cottrell’s account, the document says, with Cottrell keeping 33 per cent and Dudfield entitled to 7 per cent.
Dudfield claimed there was an agreement to use Cottrell’s offshore gaming accounts “to place bets on sporting fixtures, predominantly football matches”. Cottrell was identified as a “whale”, a high-stakes gambler, with whom Bloom could place his syndicate’s bets in exchange for a share of the profits.
Brighton & Hove Albion chairman Tony Bloom in the stands.
Bloom has a dispensation from the FA to bet on football, having had a prior business interest in the gambling industry
MIKE EGERTON/PA WIRE
Dudfield claims that Bloom and his syndicate have benefited from “unjust enrichment” by cutting him out of his 7 per cent share of the profits.
Green said Dudfield has made “irrelevant allegations of fact, including against non-parties, which appear to be designed to attract publicity or cause embarrassment”.
Dudfield was an employee of Starlizard from April 2008 until May 2017 and was allowed by Bloom to remain a member of his betting syndicate until July 2020, the defence document says.
Dudfield cashed out his interest in the winnings and he was paid $182,147 (£134,650) in total, it is claimed. Although Dudfield “had no entitlement to any share of any further winnings”, he then asked for a further £60,000 that he claimed he was owed.
Bloom agreed to pay the sum to “draw a line under matters”, on the basis that Dudfield would not “make any future demand or request for payment”.
Green said that Dudfield was only entitled to a share of winnings from bets on Cottrell’s original Sportsbet.io account, not the other accounts in his name which were used later.
He said Dudfield’s claim that the betting syndicate won £600million a year was an “irrelevant exaggeration”.
A hearing into the claim is yet to take place.
Cottrell has signed a deal to co-write a book titled How to Launder Money, which is described by the publisher as a “unique insiders’ guide to money laundering — and how to stop it”.
His father, Mark, went to Gordonstoun School with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and his mother, Fiona, a former glamour model, was romantically linked to Prince Charles in the 1970s. His mother is the biggest donor to Reform, contributing £250,000 in March to take her total to £750,000 over the past year.
Cottrell was privately educated on Mustique, the Caribbean island, and later at Malvern College. He divides his time between London and Montenegro.
Figures emerge amid legal action from Ryan Dudfield, who claims Brighton & Hove Albion owner cut him out of £17.5m of profits from deal with a former Nigel Farage aide
new
Matt Lawton, Chief Sports Correspondent | David Brown, Chief News Correspondent
Friday January 23 2026, 7.08pm GMT, The Times
Brighton and Hove Albion Chairman Tony Bloom during a press conference.
According to the documents, Bloom generated net winnings of more than £1.7m with a series of bets in Cottrell’s name between September and October 2023
ALAMY
A betting account funded by Tony Bloom, the owner of Brighton & Hove Albion, and fronted by Nigel Farage’s former chief of staff lost more than £10million only a month after being set up, it has emerged.
Bloom was entitled to 60 per cent of the winnings on bets he placed using the offshore gambling account in the name of George Cottrell, court documents claim. Within three months there was almost £3million of profit, with Cottrell entitled to a third share in the deal they agreed in 2022.
Bloom went on to place bets on five other accounts in Cottrell’s name between September 2023 and October last year, which generated net winnings of more than $2.3million (£1.7 million), according to a legal document made public by the High Court on Friday.
Cottrell had been jailed for eight months in 2017 in the US after admitting to offering to use the “dark web” to launder money for drug dealers.
The figures highlighting the extent to which a Premier League football club owner gambles are detailed in a defence filed by Bloom in response to a claim brought by Ryan Dudfield, a former employee of Starlizard Consulting, his betting advisory company.
The details raise questions about Bloom’s use of a third-party account to place bets — which is often banned by gambling companies — and how the companies could monitor the owner’s compliance with Football Association rules if he was using another person’s identity. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Bloom.
George Cottrell attending The New Culture Forum 2016.
It is claimed that Bloom, Dudfield and Cottrell, above, agreed a deal for profit distributions from bets placed on Cottrell’s “hedging account”
STEVE FINN/WENN
Dudfield says he is owed £17.5million of the profits made via Cottrell’s accounts after introducing him to the Tony Bloom Betting Syndicate. Cottrell, 32, was the deputy treasurer of the UK Independence Party (Ukip) for five years and has a reputation as a “high-stakes gambler”.
Dudfield’s legal claim, which was accepted at the High Court in November, alleged that Bloom’s betting syndicate makes as much as £600million a year for the 100 or so members invited personally by the Brighton owner.
Many of the bets are placed on football thanks to a special dispensation granted by the Football Association to club owners who had a prior business interest in the gambling industry.
Betting on any competition involving their club — Bloom also has a significant stake in the Scottish club, Hearts — remains forbidden.
Andrew Green KC states in a written defence statement that Dudfield introduced Cottrell to Ian McAleavy, a senior executive at Starlizard.
It is claimed that the three men agreed during a meeting at Daphne’s restaurant in Chelsea, west London, in February 2022 that Bloom could place bets on Cottrell’s “hedging account” with Sportsbet.io, a cryptocurrency-based sports betting platform. They agreed that Bloom would retain 60 per cent of any wins from bets he placed with Cottrell’s account, the document says, with Cottrell keeping 33 per cent and Dudfield entitled to 7 per cent.
Dudfield claimed there was an agreement to use Cottrell’s offshore gaming accounts “to place bets on sporting fixtures, predominantly football matches”. Cottrell was identified as a “whale”, a high-stakes gambler, with whom Bloom could place his syndicate’s bets in exchange for a share of the profits.
Brighton & Hove Albion chairman Tony Bloom in the stands.
Bloom has a dispensation from the FA to bet on football, having had a prior business interest in the gambling industry
MIKE EGERTON/PA WIRE
Dudfield claims that Bloom and his syndicate have benefited from “unjust enrichment” by cutting him out of his 7 per cent share of the profits.
Green said Dudfield has made “irrelevant allegations of fact, including against non-parties, which appear to be designed to attract publicity or cause embarrassment”.
Dudfield was an employee of Starlizard from April 2008 until May 2017 and was allowed by Bloom to remain a member of his betting syndicate until July 2020, the defence document says.
Dudfield cashed out his interest in the winnings and he was paid $182,147 (£134,650) in total, it is claimed. Although Dudfield “had no entitlement to any share of any further winnings”, he then asked for a further £60,000 that he claimed he was owed.
Bloom agreed to pay the sum to “draw a line under matters”, on the basis that Dudfield would not “make any future demand or request for payment”.
Green said that Dudfield was only entitled to a share of winnings from bets on Cottrell’s original Sportsbet.io account, not the other accounts in his name which were used later.
He said Dudfield’s claim that the betting syndicate won £600million a year was an “irrelevant exaggeration”.
A hearing into the claim is yet to take place.
Cottrell has signed a deal to co-write a book titled How to Launder Money, which is described by the publisher as a “unique insiders’ guide to money laundering — and how to stop it”.
His father, Mark, went to Gordonstoun School with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and his mother, Fiona, a former glamour model, was romantically linked to Prince Charles in the 1970s. His mother is the biggest donor to Reform, contributing £250,000 in March to take her total to £750,000 over the past year.
Cottrell was privately educated on Mustique, the Caribbean island, and later at Malvern College. He divides his time between London and Montenegro.
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