rolf’s ramblings
The Racing Post recently ran a series on professional gamblers. Phil Bull was the only one not ‘active’ – he died in 1989. Phil had Marxist ‘tendencies’: Karl Marx had ‘Bullish’ tendencies, the father of Communism gambled on our Stock Exchange. Phil (not Karl) used “Brother” to address fellow gamblers, employees, the great and the good. And it wasn’t always a term of endearment - some ‘Brothers’ got the dreaded Timeform “squiggle” – normally reserved for racehorses with dubious characters.
Phil’s story is recorded in the late Howard Wright’s peerless biography* of his former boss. This immense tribute includes reams of Phil’s own words of wisdom - you wonder why the Post didn’t just ‘top rate’ the sage of Halifax.
TIME was when Phil Bull ‘discovered’, in the 1940s and 50s, that the ‘clock’ was surest way to rate racehorses. Many of today’s punting essentials – sectional timing, starting stalls, algorithms, overnight declarations, going sticks, were in the future but the importance of speed figures is undiminished. Betting exchanges didn’t come in until 2000, eleven years after Phil’s death. Betfair bought Timeform in 2006.
Words were the gods of the iconoclastic, irascible heretic who insisted, when it was still sacrilege to do so, that the Jockey Club, in unquestioned power, was atrophied. “Don’t quote me religiously, quote me agnostically,” he thundered. He might have regretted those sentiments in 1989, at the Pearly Gates, and if his contention that “Religions are superstitious nonsense” was taken into account, the portents for his place in the afterlife wouldn’t have been rosy.
His Timeform publications were unique – catechisms – a word Phil wouldn’t necessarily have espoused. Timeform ratings were designed to give punters an edge but they also underpin Sales and breeding plans. I think that in only one season, National Hunt 1966, did the top-rated show a profit over all races – virtually a mathematical impossibility, more chance of winning the Lottery - a frivolity the Timeform sage would have had no truck with.
He didn’t say, “Racing is the great triviality” - attributed to him all too often. What he said was racing is a great triviality “in the context of life”. Joseph Conrad put it this way, in Heart of Darkness (1899): “Life…that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope for is some knowledge of yourself”. Quite right agreed Phil. And he also said, removing the inevitable cigar, glowing through his unruly white beard (a vision likened, unkindly, to a polar bear’s backside) that he endured winters “to see how last year’s juveniles turn out. I’m not a gambler. Betting as such doesn’t interest me. Racing is different; it’s a continuing play with a fresh set of individual characters every year.”
Timeform founder’s sublime prose turned every page of ‘Best Horses’, 1943 predecessor to the Timeform Annuals. The gap they left in racing literature since the 73rd and last Annual was published in 2020, is racing literature with its teeth drawn (ironic since Phil lost all his).
He pronounced: “I am sufficient of an egoist (conceited enough if you like) to believe my judgement is, in the main, sound and I am not going to creep about in an atmosphere of vague indecision (usually taken for modesty) in the vain hope of concealing my fallibility” – even when he was manifestly fallible, denying that racing was an industry.
He thundered at me, not for the last time, when I stuck to my guns that racing was not merely an “entertaining pastime” but an industry. He wouldn’t have it. For all his ‘communist sympathies’ – Mao Tse T’ung gets three mentions in the biography – Phil insisted his ‘workers’ clocked on. Staff didn’t clock on in racing yards – you turned up before the sun rose and laboured there, work no less valid than a butcher’s, baker’s, miner’s (as was Phil’s father), or a candlestick maker’s: blacksmiths, vets, divot treaders, even journalists - all qualify as industrial employees. Maybe he saw Timeform House as an academy: he insisted we supplemented our meagre wages by profiting from the information (we!) generated therein.
But Phil really should have supported a jump jockey, forcibly retired from his job, without compensation, from his ‘industrial accident’ – a fall. Phil demurred.
Howard Wright’s tome will cost you more (not by that much!) than the Racing Post’s master punters series, and it has infinitely more to offer. To dismiss others among the Post’s cast of professionals would be churlish. But Phil succinctly summed up the whole business of betting in three paragraphs and ten Commandments.
“Punters as a whole must lose, and lose substantially. But not necessarily all punters. It is still possible, by the exercise of skill, for a minority – a small minority – to beat the book.
“You only bet when you have value; when the odds available are greater than they should be…backing your fancy is right out.
“The truth is that backers are not betting against the bookmakers, or against the Tote. They’re betting against one another, with the bookies and Tote as middle men, taking a rake-off for their services (see also betting exchanges). The rake-off is so big only a few can win. The question is how to be one of the few?”
1. Seek where thou wilt for the winners, but bet only when thou seest value; deliver thyself from the temptation to bet in every race.
2. Put not thy faith in luck, nor in the law of averages, nor thy trust in staking systems, for they are delusions.
3. Let thy stake be related to the depth of thy pocket and to what thou regardest as the true chance of the horse; that which hath the greatest chance deserveth the greater stake.
4. Thou shalt not bet each-way in big fields, unless thou are well satisfied to the value of the place bet.
5. Bet with Book or Tote according to thy judgement: thus shalt thy endeavour to get the best of both worlds.
6. Thou shalt not bet ante-post except on horses that are known to be definite runners.
7. Beware the man who would sell thee a system: if though knowest a profitable one, preserve it to thyself in silence.
8. Double and Treble if thou must; but bet not on objections, for thou hast not the evidence and the stewards know not what they do.
9. Let thy betting be informed by wisdom and diligence. And tempered by patience and caution, and leavened a little with boldness.
10. Let thy bets be well within thy means: he that would make his fortune in a week, loseth his ducats in a day.
Phil Bull was not averse to betting odds-on. He would do so in our chess matches – which ought to have cured him of the ‘vice’. Instead he would insist on retrieving his losses, which he did, inevitably, at snooker.
Perish the thought (he would) that he was a messiah but Timeform was his testament (also risky). None have expressed themselves on racing with anything like his clarity and sagacity. His short treatise ‘Gambling and The Racing Scene’ (1977), a 370-point submission to a Royal Commission with appendices on the contributions of Church and Tote, should have been the blueprint for racing’s future. Its kernel is as relevant today. Copies are rare. Mine is not for sale. Then again overt betting taxes were in operation and the Jockey Club had not yet been consigned to the knacker’s yard.
“From (those) who seek to get their hands on his money, the punter will be lucky to escape without a mugging” - Phil’s statistics, he was a maths graduate, proved his contention. More controversial was: “Smoking and drinking are addictive…But betting on horses or dogs is not addictive.” Yet this is where those opposed to betting, or willing to tax it out of existence, make their play. Phil countered: “Those wishing to protect the vulnerable ….to remove the ‘value’ in betting by imposing duty at a penal level would kill it…or drive it underground thereby creating an incentive to people to break the law.”
And it came to pass.
In his foreword to the biography Phil states: “It has always seemed to me that society maintains towards gambling an ambivalent and uncomfortable attitude that is wholly mistaken. I am resolutely opposed to…any betting set up which doesn’t give the punter a fair chance of beating the odds, if he’s skilful enough. That punters as a whole must lose is inevitable but there is no need for the screw to be turned by the chancellor, or anyone else, to the point where all possibility of winning is denied to even the most skilful.”
Amen (oops) to that. He was though, mortal after all. His judgement lost its edge; his brain its elasticity. Time caught up with him.
*Bull the biography (Portway Press 1995).