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Review - 'A Bloody Good Winner' - Nevison / Ashworth - gambling / horse racing

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By oldestmember



Welcome to Reading the Game, sportswriter Jeffrey Prest's review of sporting books, both old and new.

The review of A Bloody Good Winner follows beneath the dotted line.

In the meantime, you'll find out a bit more about me by clicking the 'oldestmember' link immediately beneath my photo.

Publishers - if you'd like me to review any of your sports titles, please click the Contact oldestmember link beneath the photo.

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When I added together the pugilistic frown and loosened tie on the cover photograph to what I knew of the helter-skelter prose in his Racing & Football Outlook column, I confess to being ready for a Jack-the-Lad special when I opened A Bloody Good Winner, Dave Nevison's account of his life as a professional racing punter.

What followed came as a pleasant surprise. Certainly, Nevison is no choirboy but nor is he some opportunistic chancer who thought he'd boost his income by rattling off a few lazy anecdotes to a ghost writer.

This book has had some criticism for not revealing the nuts and bolts of Nevison's methodology - he likes to form his own 'tissue' of odds on each horse in a race and then step in when he feels the bookmakers' prices on certain horses are significantly larger than they should be. This is a lazy jibe, however: the Internet is full of advice on how to calculate a tissue (one such link appears in the 'Upon Further Review' section below) and for Nevison to devote several pages to so dry a topic would go against the book's grain.

This is a vivid look into the life of a man who relies on the vagaries of horse-racing for his livelihood and in that respect it fully succeeds.

Nevison is a former City trader who decided to apply his flair for risk and percentages to the sport with which he grew up, becoming his own boss in the process. While it hasn't always been easy - and to his credit, he pulls no punches in describing the downturns - it has been successful to the point where he now lavishes sums on a horse that will make most amateur punters sweat just to read them.

The carefully-targeted approach is not Nevison's way. Acknowledging the uncertainties of his trade, he believes healthy profit can only come from a healthy turnover and he is happy to attack most races that come his way.

He has tried the computer screen approach to betting, staying at home to work the prices on the betting exchanges but found that the action junkie in him (not to mention his bank balance) suffered for his being away from the track. Given that his focus on disparities in the betting market is backed by a comprehensive knowledge of horses' characteristics, it's easy to see why this is so.

With his thoughts presumably knocked into shape by the accomplished racing journalist David Ashforth, A Bloody Good Winner rattles along like a five-furlong dash. For all its enjoyable digressions ("...if you catch a train from Waterloo to Ascot and sit next to a group of hairdressers going to the royal meeting, it's like ringing a sex line but cheaper") the book's great achievement is how remarkably focused it remains.

Nevison commendably and unusually has a one-track mind for a gambler (his withering dismissal of casino gambling - "You hardly ever see a smiling face in a casino" - should be noted by anyone prone to sucker bets). He concentrates on racing alone and as he describes the way in which he assesses a race, there is much useful stuff to be gleaned for anyone who enjoys a bet.

His willingness to call it as he sees it means that the book is also littered with some real eye-openers for the casual bettor. I had thought, for example, that the bookies' ability to move the spread in order to maintain a balanced market meant that profitable spread bettors were safe from having their accounts closed but clearly this is not so.

Just how lucrative telephone tipping services can be is another revelation to this reader, along with Nevison's speculation that the boom in betting exchanges might be short-lived.

I have often wondered, when assessing a horse's chances, if exchange prices should be regarded as the work of experts or just a million well-intentioned amateurs and it is interesting to read Nevison's thoughts on this. Also nice to know is that even successful pros occasionally chase their losses...

And then there is the gossip: some unstintingly candid thoughts on other professionals (and how you know when they're losing) racetracks (no Freedom of Wolverhampton for this man) commentators and jockeys. The assessment of the somewhat smug Channel 4 mike-man Grahame Goode as Ronnie Corbett playing a golf club bore is worth a chunk of the purchase price all on its own.

Some books I read in three sittings because they're shallow; others because they're riveting. Make no mistake, this one falls into the latter camp.

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