Reading one of my favourite gambling books: A Bloody Good Winner: Life as a Professional Gambler.
I’m getting to the closing chapters and it’s a book worthy of your time.
Nevison started his professional gambling journey back in 1993. It was a story of the good, bad and ugly. A brutally honest read about a punter putting his heart and soul into following his ambition of making his betting pay.
In those early days he had much to learn. Eventually, with the help of Eddie ‘The Shoe’ Fremantle, things clicked into place.
In 2000, he met Mark Smith, both worked for Spreadex setup by Peter Harris, who is no stranger to horse racing, also a respected thoroughbred horse trainer in his time, and to this day has horses in training with Jane Chapple-Hyam.
This betting partnership worked well as Nevison specialised within horse racing while Smith was an expert in other sports including golf, football and darts. He placed many of the bets and kept accounts.
As Nevison said: ‘Two heads are better than one.’
By all accounts, they were making a killing and life was good. In fact, the profits they detailed were astounding (especially compared with many pro punters of the time). In 2003, they made £260,000 and the following year £325,000. This was much to do with a big win on the Tote Jackpot when they struck lucky winning £268,643 at Haydock on 5th August in 2004. Mrs Moh sealed their victory when going in at odds of 12-1. There was just one and a half winning tickets and one was theirs.
Nevison said over the years he had won the Tote Jackpot or Scoop6 more than a dozen times.
However, thing were about to change dramatically. In 2005 the partnership had a dire year which saw a meagre profit of just £4,000. In fact, Nevison said in the last four months of 2005 he lost £250,000.
In an interesting story, Mike Atherton visited his flat doing a documentary about gambling and watched Nevison win £4,000 when backing an outsider at Southwell called Ice And Fire. Being brutally honest he said: ‘What Mike Atherton didn’t realise when we were doing high fives was that if it had lost, my Betfair account would have been empty.’
‘Atherton probably thought he was watching a genius at work!’
Nevison put his change of luck down to a change of routine. For years his daily routine was betting on course and that took discipline. However, he decided to make his life a little easier working from home and taking advantage of Betfair betting exchange which saved a lot travelling and expense.
It didn’t work at all.
He became lazy, losing discipline often glued to the TV watching Jerry Springer rather than reading the form. Bets went astray and multiple near misses on Tote Jackpots and Scoop6 made Nevison question everything.
‘That year saw a lot of near misses. We hit the crossbar so many times it was in splinters.’
Fittingly he said: ‘I have always looked down my nose at punters who complain that they are unlucky, but by the end of 2005 I was beginning to change my mind on that front. I cursed my own luck.’
Thankfully, it wasn’t the end of the story.
Word count: 550
