7 Spaces available JOIN HERE NOW

Click Bob Rothman to see the original article

Would you bet on Bob?

By Jonathan Stayton
November 02, 2006

Bob Rothman, who runs a horse-racing tipping service, has been so successful with his bets he says his accounts with leading bookmakers are limited within days of opening.

In his most successful year, Bob claims to have made a profit of about £440,000, but is now reduced to gambling smaller quantities as many bookmakers refuse to accept his money.

The 53-year-old has resorted to placing bets, averaging between £500 and £2,000, using friends’ accounts to avoid the restrictions placed on his own – but finds that even those are often limited within hours.

“I opened an account in my wife’s name and had one bet at lunchtime, with racing starting at 2pm,” he said. “It was 12/1 and I placed £833.33 to win £10,000. It was running in the evening and when I went to place another bet I found it had been limited already, even though the race had not been run.

“I opened one account on a Saturday afternoon and put £600 into it, and made that into £18,500 by the end of the day, and then couldn’t get proper bets on the account.

“On another one I turned £2,000 into £12,000 and they suspended the account so I couldn’t get at it, and they said we want a copy of the bank details and passport, because they think ‘who the hell is this person?’.”

Despite the best efforts of bookmakers, Bob, who claims to have won more than £100,000 in a single day, says he has 11 or 12 different accounts at his disposal.

His gambling began more than 20 years ago, when he fell in love with a Ferrari.

“I thought, ‘I’ll win that’,” he said. “I got £2,000 out and put it on a 14/1 tip and lost it all. Then a while later I put another £2,000 on the same horse and lost that too when it finished fourth and I was so cross and so disappointed so I said I am going to do it myself.”

In 1986, Bob advertised for contacts and admits to losing solidly for months, before his luck changed.

“I had a couple of golden years,” he said. “And then got closed down in 1986/7. I’m gutted because in my second year I won £440,000 and I thought ‘I can’t believe this’.”

He turned to tipping when he answered an advert seeking an investor in a racing syndicate, only to be told ‘you’ll never beat the bookie’.

“I thought there was a real opening there and set up the business,” he said.

Rothman Racing, based in Cobham, charges its members £80 per month for tips, also retaining whatever a £50 bet would win.

“Tipping is a lot different to betting,” he said. “With betting to win you’re trying to get value. If you offered me heads versus tails at 5/4, I’d do it all day long and end up making 20%. But if you’re tipping, if it comes up tails four times in a row, your customers will leave you. People want winners so they don’t always get value. No one’s very excited about betting on odds on horses so you have to come half way between.

“It is like buying widescreen televisions – if they are worth £2,000, and are offered for £1,500, you’re not too interested, but if they’re offered for £300 you say ‘how many?’ – it is a case of making the decision on whether the return is worth it. On the National Lottery people, on average, get 50p in the pound back – if you bought 14-million tickets you would get £7million back, but in racing it’s about 85p in the pound betting blind.”

Bob, who says he is happy to lose money because he knows he will ultimately win, started betting in his own name again in January this year.

“They gave me a £2,000 bet, and I thought this is fantastic, I didn’t believe it,” he said. “But I had a terrible day, I was hung over from New Year’s Eve and I lost £16,000, but the great thing was that I was back. By the end of the week I was £10,000 up and had already lost a couple of the accounts. I could bet £1 for every £100 everyone else could bet.”

Bob is so sure in his ability he challenged the News & Mail to a £1,000 evens bet that he could have any account limited within one month.

“I bet on the horses because I have an edge, some people love golf, I do racing. I’m just fortuitous I make money out of it,” he said.

Racing Cert

Daily Express Magazine

Robert Moore lays odds with Bob Rothman, the man who beats the bookies at their own game – and sees winnings of £17,000 in one day

Every year the British public gambles a staggering £163;5 billion on horse races. I’s no wonder that the bookies have their own favourite joke about the punting public: “Never in the field of human endeavour has so much been given by so many to so few”.

However, I’m sitting in front of a man who has turned the tables on the bookmakers. He hasn’t always been a winner. Three years ago Bob Rothman’s computer company went under and he was bankrupt. Convinced there was a way to make money fast he took up gambling. Now he is the most successful punter on the horse-racing circuit. Last year he made a profit of £440,000.

What is so immediately striking about Rothman is that he doesn’t look anything like the stereotypical gambler: dressed in a casual suede jacket and sporting a Viking moustache he neither resembles the addicted working-class bobby Box nor the upper-class casino smoothie, aka Omar Sharif.

Rothman isn’t nearly so glamorous. He doesn’t wear double breasted suits. He hasn’t got a trilby. In fact he doesn’t even go to the races. All the betting is done over the phone from a desk in the dining room of his Wimbledon home. From here he bets on up to 18 races a day, six days a week, and turns over £2 million a year. “I know I’m going to win,” he grins confidently.

When most of us enjoy a little wager at the races we talk about “favourites” and “hunches”. But Rothman speech is spattered with phrases like “informer networks”, “market manipulation” and “percentage profit”.

“Because I haven’t been gambling since my teens like many professionals, I’ve approached it from a new angle. Rather than study horses for 20 years I’ve built a network of the best racing experts in the business: owners, trainers and stableboys. I buy in their information.”

Its only 7.30 in the morning but they are already ringing in with their “warm” tips for the day’s racing. A “warm” tip is gambling parlance for inside information. And Rothman covers every last detail because he’ll have thousands of pounds riding on four legs. Was the horse stiff during its morning run? Did it finish its breakfast?

Rothman has never met some of his connections but he speaks with them all each day, and pays some a salary.

“My aim is to find this one horse in the race that is good value, either because the bookie doesn’t know enough about the horse or because the average punters are all backing the favourite, tipped by the papers.

“Looking for value is the biggest distinction between pros and the public. Pros look for winners, sure, but they won’t back them unless they’ll make a large profit.”

His bets are massive but Rothman hardly blinks as he puts £1,000 each-way on the third favourite in the 4.10 at Newmarket, and £2,000 to win on the 4.45 at Plumpton. Then Rothman puts another £40,000 on “camouflage bets”.

“These are high-risk bets that I put on to make myself look like a causal punter. You see, if the bookies catch on to the fact that I’m a professional they may try to ruin my bet by bringing down the horse’s  odds or they may even refuse to take my bets altogether. Bookies ban people who win too much.”

Among professionals, getting banned by bookies is a sign of success. Most pros get closed down once or twice. But Rothman’s rise has been so sudden that last year he was closed down by 25 different betting shops. Ever the entrepreneur, he has confounded the bookies by starting up a unique tipping business: he now sells his tips to punters and in return they put his bets on for him.

By 11.30 all his bets are set up and he leaves for lunch. While Joe Punter starts to pour into smoke-filled betting shops across the land, we whisk off in Rothman’s gold Rolls Royce to a Wimbledon wine bar. Here clean-living Rothman orders a bottle of Perrier and a Waldorf salad.

“People are very surprised when they find I’m a gambler,” he acknowledges. “They expect me to be flash with money, have loads of free time, and stay up all night.

“At first my friends thought I was just throwing my money away. For a while I was. Before I mastered gambling I’d lost £30,000, mortgaged my house, and was living off an American Express loan – all in six months.

“Whenever I have a losing streak I take a holiday and go somewhere like Bali to water-ski and relax. I’s very hard to continue making the right judgements if you’re losing. You tend to chase your losses. Virtually all punters are losers in the end,” Rothman frowns, half-amused but half-amazed. “Honestly, so many horses aren’t even fit for their races but the public keep backing them.”

After lunch we return to Rothman’s TV and blower – a specialised racing radio which relays all the results. Over and over again the commentator reaches a fever-pitch babble as each race climaxes. But for a man who has put the price of your average house on to a bunch of dumb oat-eaters, Rothman is remarkably calm.

As the afternoon progresses some of Rothman’s camouflage bets are not successful. He expected this. By four o’clock he’s down by £1,108. Then third favourite in the 4.10 comes in first and wins him £13,750. The 4.45 at Plumpton follows and wins him a further £6,250. He breaks even on the camouflage bets. “I’s been a good day,” he smiles with irritating understatement. After betting tax, he made £17,000 from one day’s work.

I was hoping to see what this amount of money looked like, but Rothman does not go to the bookies to scoop up crumpled wodges. Nor are his winnings delivered in cases full of crisp fivers. Unglamorous to the end, but they will arrive by post as a cheque.

– Scotland on Sunday, March 17.

After last week’s £2m Cheltenham jackpot, Ron McKay meets a punter who has made betting his business

If backing horses is a mug’s game then Bob Rothman is several furlongs short of the healthy gallop.

He exhibits some of the classic signs of romance of the turf – “I’d bet ten grand a week if I could” – he studies form and racing information from the moment he gets up in the morning, and he is often to be seen breaking into a wide grin. This means he’s probably off to see his bank manager.

Bob Rothman is a professional punter and the antithesis of the bookies fool. More then 25 bookmakers have refused to handle his business because he is too successful – he does not bet ten grand a week because they won’t take his money.

So he punts through an elaborate network of friends and acquaintances who place bets for him, and he runs a highly successful tipsters business complete with logarithm-like tables and electronic bleepers.

“Backing horses really isn’t risky at all,” he claims. After a steep and expensive learning curve on which he lost £35,000 in six months, Rothman perfected his cardinal equine business principles – and staking a £50,000 second mortgage on them he made more than £400,000 in 12 months on an “investment” of £2m.

He says the £35,000 was the price of his education. Through it he was appreciating form, and making  target=”_blank”>contacts in stables and among other professional punters. He didn’t start to fret when his school fees rose. “My friends did; they thought I was mad. But I was getting better with every bet, so it was just a matter of time and an application of principles.”

Rothman talks in business management terms about betting. The average punter loses, he says “because he’s doing it for entertainment – 20 or 30 guys getting together in a betting shop. If you want to win you have to work at it, to spend 40, 60 or 80 hours a week at it”

Apart from hard work Rothman holds to two basic management principles: betting “value for money” – dispensing with emotion and working out whether the odds you are being offered on a fancied horse actually make sense on the balance sheet after outgoings like tax – and betting in proportion, looking at the total of what you have and deciding what the next stake should be.

“Most gamblers chase each loss. When they lose they bet heavier on the next one. When they win they tend to hold on to the profit for later. They should be exactly the other way around.

“What you do is observe the 10% rule. If you’ve decided to invest £1,000 in ten tranches of £100 and your first horse loses, then stake next time not £100 but £90, then 10% of what you have left and so on.”

So far, so good. But doesn’t the selection of horses figure somewhere?

Rothman smiles again and seems almost to brush that aside. “If you follow my tips you will have a 30 – 40% success rate. If you scrupulously observe the principles, bet at the correct odds, you’ll do better than you would with a building society.”

What sort of profit – “percentage on turnover” is how he puts it  – could someone follow the Rothman rules anticipate? “I think 25% would be very good,” he answered. “Bookmakers work on 22% so that would be getting a few points on them.”

The visible signs of Rothman’s success include a gold Cartier watch, a low-slung sports car – he traded in the gold Rolls Royce because his wife told him it was an “old man’s car” – and a large modern house in Wimbledon which is also his office.

So what had been his most successful bets?

“Cheltenham, this week was very good for me. The most I have won in one day is £72,000. Twice. And the most on one horse, Gymnastics, a 33-1 shot was £35,000.”

The problem is that the ultimate accolade of success – blacklisting by William Hill and Co – pulls him up in his tracks. Enter Rothmans revenge, the masterplan to beggar the bookmakers.

He has brought a horse, a proven winner abroad with no former history in this country which, through a network of ownerships, shell companies and the like, he intends running in a novice plate, far below its class. “It’s going to cost about £30,000 – £50,000 for the horse plus stabling – and on the betting I expect to make £50,000 to £100,000 within the next six to eight weeks.”

Then, retirement from the turf? “Hardly. Sell and do the same thing again.

“In the City it would probably be called insider dealing. The Jockey Club might not approve, but in racing there is no such concept. The difference is that in the City, insider information invariably leads to success. On the turf failure is always possible.

“You know, I brought a horse once and it died of a heart attack almost next day.”

Bob’s a winner

The Jonathan Stayton interview

Bob Rothman, who runs a horse-racing tipping service, has been so successful with his bets he says his accounts with leading bookmakers are limited within days of opening.

In his most successful year, Bob claims to have made a profit of about £440,000, but is now reduced to gambling smaller quantities as many bookmakers refuse to accept his money.

The 53-year-old has resorted to placing bets, averaging between £500 and £2,000, using friends’ accounts to avoid the restrictions placed on his own – but finds that even those are often limited within hours.

“I opened an account in my wife’s name and had one bet at lunchtime, with racing starting at 2pm,” he said. “It was 12/1 and I placed £833.33 to win £10,000. It was running in the evening and when I went to place another bet I found it had been limited already, even though the race had not been run.

“I opened one account on a Saturday afternoon and put £600 into it, and made that into £18,500 by the end of the day, and then couldn’t get proper bets on the account.

“On another one I turned £2,000 into £12,000 and they suspended the account so I couldn’t get at it, and they said we want a copy of the bank details and passport, because they think ‘who the hell is this person?’.”

Despite the best efforts of bookmakers, Bob, who claims to have won more than £100,000 in a single day, says he has 11 or 12 different accounts at his disposal.

His gambling began more than 20 years ago, when he fell in love with a Ferrari.

“I thought, ‘I’ll win that’,” he said. “I got £2,000 out and put it on a 14/1 tip and lost it all. Then a while later I put another £2,000 on the same horse and lost that too when it finished fourth and I was so cross and so disappointed so I said I am going to do it myself.”

In 1986, Bob advertised for contacts and admits to losing solidly for months, before his luck changed.

“I had a couple of golden years,” he said. “And then got closed down in 1986/7. I’m gutted because in my second year I won £440,000 and I thought ‘I can’t believe this’.”

He turned to tipping when he answered an advert seeking an investor in a racing syndicate, only to be told ‘you’ll never beat the bookie’.

“I thought there was a real opening there and set up the business,” he said.

Rothman Racing, based in Cobham, charges its members £80 per month for tips, also retaining whatever a £50 bet would win.

“Tipping is a lot different to betting,” he said. “With betting to win you’re trying to get value. If you offered me heads versus tails at 5/4, I’d do it all day long and end up making 20%. But if you’re tipping, if it comes up tails four times in a row, your customers will leave you. People want winners so they don’t always get value. No one’s very excited about betting on odds on horses so you have to come half way between.

“It is like buying widescreen televisions – if they are worth £2,000, and are offered for £1,500, you’re not too interested, but if they’re offered for £300 you say ‘how many?’ – it is a case of making the decision on whether the return is worth it. On the National Lottery people, on average, get 50p in the pound back – if you bought 14-million tickets you would get £7million back, but in racing it’s about 85p in the pound betting blind.”

Bob, who says he is happy to lose money because he knows he will ultimately win, started betting in his own name again in January this year.

“They gave me a £2,000 bet, and I thought this is fantastic, I didn’t believe it,” he said. “But I had a terrible day, I was hung over from New Year’s Eve and I lost £16,000, but the great thing was that I was back. By the end of the week I was £10,000 up and had already lost a couple of the accounts. I could bet £1 for every £100 everyone else could bet.”

Bob is so sure in his ability he challenged the News & Mail to a £1,000 evens bet that he could have any account limited within one month.

“I bet on the horses because I have an edge, some people love golf, I do racing. I’m just fortunate I make money out of it,” he said.

Click Bob Rothman to view the original article

John Piper is one of the world’s most respected and able market analysts, and is the UK’s most experienced independent trader in futures and options on the web.

John Piper Interviews Bob Rothman in The Technical Trader, the City’s most respected trading newsletters

John has been trading markets since the mid 80s, trading right through the ’87 Crash, annual turnover exceeding £2m of option premiums on his personal account, managing money in excess of $1m, TV trading contest winner, and founder of The Technical Trader subscription newsletter – the definitive trading resource since 1989.

He is also the best-selling author of The Way To Trade, the classic work on trading psychology that gets deep into the mind of the market, and his 2007 book Binary Betting revolutionises the way we trade today.

JP: It is Wednesday 27th May and I am sitting here with Bob Rothman a professional trader with a difference. Bob do you want to explain?

BR: I call myself a professional gambler. I think both terms are more or less the same, one day you’re trading the next day you’re gambling. It’s all fundamentally the same principal. You buy cheap, sell expensive.

JP: Do you mean that one day you are trading in the sense…

BR: I do regard the trading element of gambling as more of the pussy side of things. Where you take a small secure profit, so trading for me is where I back a horse at 5-1, and then lay it at 4-1 to get a sure win. That would be trading. Whereas just backing it at 5-1 is the gamble. Personally I think trading is bad value because you are giving away too much. If you are laying off part of the bet you have to pay a premium or give a premium price to lay it off.

JP: Yes, with binary bets it is the same thing. If you bail out you miss the lion’s share of the profit. You may do better on the one bet but if you keep doing it you miss out on the big wins.

BR: The value is to iron out fluctuations in your cash flow and also the fluctuations in your emotional state because it maybe you haven’t got what it takes to carry on. By trading you can guarantee you will have some winners all the time but they will be smaller winners. I don’t think you will make as much money by trading out of situations.

JP: Yes, I have come to the same conclusions myself. To succeed profits have got to run.

BR: I tell you where I would trade myself and that is to increase value. Say I wanted £1000 on a horse and you “know” it is going to shorten up (meaning get more expensive to back – Ed.) then I may put £2000 on it and sell £1000 back. So you have increased the value, you have increased your net value on the £1000 that you were willing to bet in the first place.

JP: OK, but say if that does not happen.

BR: Then you have made a bad decision.

JP: You don’t bail out if that happens.

BR: Sometimes…

JP: In fact we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves, the first question I was going to ask you was how did you get into this to start with? What attracted you to this business?

when I was a kid, I guess about 16 or 17, I thought it would be cool to be a professional gambler

BR: Well, I tried a couple of times actually. The first time I tried was when I was a kid I guess about 16 or 17 and I thought it would be cool to be a professional gambler. So I tried it for around three months and I could not make it pay.

JP: This was horses?

BR: Yes, horses. Actually I played a bit of cards and I could win money playing cards among friends. But basically I gave it up as a bad idea.

JP: You were quite good at backgammon as I recall.

BR: Backgammon I loved. I think backgammon is a wonderful trading training game for trading skills. Because backgammon teaches you to be honest about your decisions. There are a few situations where there absolutely is a right and a wrong answer. So unless you perform perfectly in those situations where you know there is a right or a wrong answer you have got no chance of performing when the answer is a bit more ambiguous.

I guess the classic one is in the 3 rolls v. the 3 rolls run-off in the end game. The rule is it’s a double and it’s a drop (meaning you do not accept the doubling dice after a double – Ed.). People only take (the dice) when they are steaming, when they are chasing. So you know, if someone takes the dice, that they have a flaw in their decision making process. Usually its because they are emotionally upset because they are losing. Obviously you get into more complex situations where it is not clear cut and it then becomes a matter of opinion.

JP: When we played together I just felt that you  had a huge psychological advantage over me for various reasons. I am not quite sure what they were. You seemed to be able to read the game much better and were much less affected psychologically by what was going on. I have never played the game that seriously so I guess that is what I should expect.

BR: There are two edges in backgammon. They are that you maximise your winning possibilities by moving your pieces in such a way that, firstly, more rolls are lucky for you and, secondly. unlucky for your opponent. If you do that well and your opponent doesn’t do it well the result is that you appear to be lucky more and your opponent feels that he is being unlucky.

JP: Hmm, so I was only playing half the game.

If you feel you are not doing well, you start doing worse

BR: Yes, and if you feel you are not doing well, you start doing worse. Apart from that, the other strength is just in making the right decisions. Take the classic example of the doubling dice. The rule is that you double when you have the advantage and you accept the double if you have no less than 25% chance of winning the game. So at a 25% chance it would be a neutral decision; more than 25% you take it and less than 25% you drop.

So, as long as you make the right decision, in other words if you knew you had a 26% chance of the game and you took the cube even though you lost it because you were likely to lose it, as the odds are around 3-1 that you are going to lose, you can be proud of yourself because you made the right decision. It doesn’t matter that you have lost. What does matter is that you have made the right decision.

JP: And you compute that mathematically?

BR: Well, you try to. As I say, in backgammon there are only a few situations where it is absolutely clear cut where you can calculate. The others are matters of opinion. When you play backgammon, even with world experts, there will be a range of opinions. They will argue and they will disagree as to which is the right course of action. Generally they will agree but there will be some moves where no one will know which is the best move.

JP: Interesting! To return to your trading now the first time you tried you were 16 or 17 on the horses…

BR: That didn’t work and the second time was just as I was leaving the second job in my life…

JP: As an accountant?

BR: No, actually no, the first 9 months was with Price Waterhouse and then 9 months with Olivetti. I left and was in business, and my girlfriend, Sandy, broke down on the A3 and got a lift home by a trainer. John Jenkins. He stopped, gave her a life home with an owner in the car and they saw we had stables and we got talking about horses.

I won 3 months salary and I didn’t bet again for another 5 years.

This guy, she told me later, he said something like, “back this horse, Sunnybanks Angel, it will win next week.” The trainer then said, “shut up, shut up, you idiot!” She explained it much more elegantly than that and I thought, hmm, looks like someone has let something slip and they shouldn’t have done. I bet it and I think I went for £1500 which, compared to what I was earning at the time, which was around £500 pm. So I won 3 months salary and I didn’t bet again for another 5 years.

JP: So that was your second go, one bet?

BR: I had the second go and I realised that I did not want to bet again without an advantage. I had realised as a child that I could not make it work and the next time, and this was when I really started betting. Sandy and I split up, we had horses at home and they went into a livery yard and I used to go and ride my horse at the weekend. One weekend I was talking to the guy who was the handyman at the stable. We were just chatting and he said “Oh I backed this horse at 20 to 1 and this one at 16 to1.” My ears pricked up and I said “Oh really, how come you can do that.” He told me he used to work in racing, “I used to ride out, and I hear a lot of stuff . In fact the owners of this place, they have a horse that is going to win in a couple of weeks time called Tom Forrester.

I forgot all about it really. A week or so later I was sat having breakfast and I suddenly thought, crikey that horse will be running soon. I had better check it. I opened up the paper and there it was. It was the first time I had looked at a racing paper for years. I thought, my God, this is a sign, this is karmic resonance (laughs).

I must have intuitively known this was the right day and I was driving into work and I stopped at the traffic lights near the Chessington World of Adventure and there was a Ferrari in the window of the garage there. I looked across and it was a beautiful sunny day and the Ferrari was about 30 grand – this was 20 years ago. And I thought – I’ll win that! That’s it, I’m going to win that Ferrari today.

The horse was 14 to 1. So I went to the bank, I got 2 grand out and I took the morning off work. I said to the guys, I’m just going out for a meeting, and I spread all this money round these betting shops.

JP: You couldn’t put it on all at once?

BR: No, because you would kill the odds. I felt like I had done a good job as they had only shortened up to 12. Which I thought was pretty good. It took a lot of driving around, 50 quid here and a 100 quid there.

JP: But you knew enough about betting to know that you needed to do that?

BR: Oh yes, I remember now, I managed a betting shop before I went to university. That was how I knew that bookmakers, if a stranger came in with a big bet for a horse, they would ring it through to their head office. If two or more shops rang it through the head office would shorten up the horse and so I was putting it in, in fairly small amounts in different betting shops.

JP: So really that job in the betting shop was your apprenticeship almost? The way it turned out.

BR: Yes, it was helpful. Not in picking winners. Anyway, I guess like many people, the race came up, the horse ran absolutely terribly (laughs) and I was choked, I couldn’t believe it, I had just wasted two thousand pounds. I wasn’t well off at the time. I needed the money.

In fact I had split up with Sandy and I was living at a friend’s house in a tiny little box room while she was sitting at home entertaining people around the swimming pool and I was running out of cash.

Anyway, I rode my horse that weekend, and Bill said “Oh hello, I hope you didn’t back that horse, or lose too much on it.” I couldn’t tell him what I had done and I told him I had lost a tenner. And he said “that’s good. Its good, because what happened was their grandmother died and they had a funereal in the morning. So obviously they went to the funeral and they must have unsettled it in some way…

Anyway, finally I start winning and I guess fundamentally my strategy was to identify other people I thought were winners, and help them win by getting money on for them and that way I would be privy to the information and it worked. I met a couple of very good people who mentored me and helped me sift through. I mean at one stage I had around 40 people ringing me up every day with information. It was driving me mad.

But luckily I could turn to one of my mentors and say, I’ve had this guy ringing me up about this horse here. “What an idiot” he said, I’ve spoken to the stables this morning and it’s not even fit. What about this other guy, he has rung me up about this horse. He would say, “that is ludicrous, it is not the right distance for that horse.” So he helped me sift out horses and information and I learnt about the business and then finally I started winning.

The first time I won, I think I won about twelve thousand quid over a couple of weeks and I was going halves with this other professional. I found a guy who used to be a racehorse owner, in fact, he still had horses. He had some outlets and some bookmakers who were taking what in those days were called Sporting Life prices.

In other words they were laying the prices in the paper, fundamentally when they find mugs they would say, look you can have this price in the paper, and I said, don’t you worry, I will give you the bets, and we will win. So I did, I gave him the bets, we lost the first week. I sent him £500 I think.

The second week I think I won about £3,000, the third week around £8,000 and then about another £5,000. It was about £13,000 he owed me and…. he did a runner (laughs).

JP: Oh no!

BR: I caught him, I wondered what was going on, anyway, I caught him one night emptying his office out and he gave me three cheques and they all bounced. The saddest thing was the professional I was working with, he was in

for half, so I had to honour the £6,500 of the £13,000 that we won. So my first major victory actually put me even more in the hock.”

JP: That is not fun is it? So you didn’t know him very well then.

BR: No, I didn’t know him very well. He had been introduced through someone else. It is another of those things you start learning.

JP: What happened to the money do you think.

BR: I don’t think he had the money. I think what happened was, I had given him cash to put the bets on and it turned out he had a horse. He was in trouble and he had a horse that was running, it was running in a cellar somewhere, and he had taken the cash…

JP: A cellar?

BR: A cellar, which is a low grade horse race and I think he was desperate and he had taken the cash that I had given him, and maybe the cash we had won as well, and he had backed his own horse and lost it all. Anyway, he was going skint and he was a sad person. So it was a lesson. It’s not the only time. That’s one thing about trading in the stock market, you don’t get knocked, do you, you always get paid.

JP: Yes, you do, I’ve never had a situation like that.

BR: I had another one. I had a bookmaker and I sent him a £5,000 deposit and I bet with him and I won’t mention names because the guy who used to do his card is now a very major player in racing, but with the bookmaker I bet and won £1,000 so now I’m owed £6,000 and he did a runner (laughs) with my five grand and my winnings. So the first lesson is…getting paid.

JP: This is still 1985/86 we are talking about?

BR: Yes, or maybe 86/87.

JP: And you have been doing this ever since so it is now over twenty years…

(to be continued)

Click to download the whole Newsletter

Click to visit www.johnpiper.info – the website dedicated to Binary Betting, Spread Betting and the psychology of trading.

Click to find out more about John Piper’s aproach to playing the markets

What makes you any better than all the other tipsters?

Bob Rothman, our founder, has been at this game for 20 years. He has done what he says and we can prove it:

• Read our testimonials from delighted customers.
• See the newspaper articles from the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, The Sun and so on. Feel free to check them out at your local library.
• Bob puts his money where his mouth is. Although it’s difficult for us to place bets with the bookies (Because of our track record), every selection Bob gives out is a horse that we invest our own money in. We are one of the few professional services operated by a genuine professional gambler who bets on his own selections.
• He has been in this business for 20 years… while countless others have quietly disappeared. Gambling is a brutal business and only the best survive.

Call our offices and speak to us ‘live’…

Do feel free to call our offices during business hours. A real, live human being will answer the phone. Feel free to ask whatever you want about our service.

The number to call is 01932 869 400. We look forward to speaking to you and

helping you with your questions…