Champions league in football.

World series baseball.

Dixie - my point about most people losing most of the time was made to show the how the sport is engineered to relieve people of money. My small moral judgement on it is that it isn't a good look.

Skullduggery: you're basically quoting Barry Hills from his biography.

Yes, no one minds dishonesty when they're winning and ahead. I'll come and find you in the middle of a losing run when you've just done your money on a non-trier that's being trained for something else and ask you how happy you are then. Again, not a good look. I can handle the 'gamesmanship' in the turf codes because in time you learn to price it in to your calculations, but I say again: to watch connections and staff parading around and dissembling about a horse's chances when they know it has virtually no chance is unseemly. However, all the pathologies of the turf game are worse on the all-weather. In turf racing above a certain class most connections want to win, they want the glory, they want to gob off; in the all-weather's lower codes a certain en spirit de greyhound racing creeps in and you have connections that want to chisel a few thousand out of laying their horse on Betfair exchange and etc. If it wasn't true then the news stories wouldn't regularly appear in the Racing Post. In closing, I say again: punters support the sport with their hard-earned cash and receive an appalling deal for their money in my opinion. So when they moan it should not be dissed by the industry and old betting shop addicts as 'pocket talk': 'the sufferers' as John McCririck called them have EVERY RIGHT to moan about whatever they like.