are you a tipster?

good thread

Thanks!

Every tip I’ve taken (and inevitably passed on) has been terrible, I usually do better on instinct

Sure as i am that gambling is a sin, i am not sure that's why i'm not a tipster.

I worked as betting shop manager for long enough to have seen allsorts. Like often when people have some inside info they don't say a damn thing about it like once when some mystery Aussie woman put on a few £400 bets on an RL side at 10/11 scratch because she knew the other side weren't even going to try to win for some reason and it proved correct. But then some dickhead that had probably payed for premium Henry Rix Tipster Phoneline lol. And telling everyone in the shop who'd listen *taps nose* he's got connections with the trainer blah blah and it turns out after all the fanfare to be some 33/1 shot that get's steamed to 16/1 and comes fifth by 18 lengths!

you can't beat knowing somebody who knows the trainer and mug punting away on them every time :D

one of the daft random things i've missed over the holidays has been sitting in the pub of an afternoon with the racing and some football on

Not when it comes to the gee-gees.

Never got into betting because, when I was a kid, Saturdays seemed consist of my dad shouting at the telly because the racing was on all fucking day.

i have had a bad bandit habit in my earlier years, used to like the fixed odds on the football or an occasional punt on the horses on a Saturday but haven't bothered for years

obviously this year is making me reconsider my vice options

(xp) ... not shouting because the racing was on all day but because he was a lousy at picking winners.

I don't know how it worked in the rest of the country but my dad had a betting nickname, he was called Young Tank, that's what he would put on his betting slips and I assume the bookie would know it was him. His Uncle Frank was Tank, so he was Young Tank.

nice

I still do the odd 10p each way Lucky 15 on the gee gees. "just for a bit of interest" - which is often what some punters would say before putting on three hundred quid worth of football bets.

I don't know what age I was but he also used to send me out to the bookies when he couldn't be bothered - and buy him tobacco - but that was very much when a child would kick a ball on the street.

I'm fascinated by the world of old bookies. I just caught the end of it really, but some of the shops I worked in had barely changed since the fifties. There was only audio commentary on the races and no live betting on the screens in some of these shops still, lol just a chalker usually missing all the price changes apart from on the fav, unbelievable that this was the early nineties!

You'd pay the chalker twenty quid cash in hand then do it as betting payout. There was this chalker called Vince who'd usually put the whole twenty before the racing had even started.

put his twenty n the bandit I meant!

Back in the day you'd get nationally betting shop con artists. On the SIS sattelite service you'd get security messages like: The Pencil Man is operating in Walsall today.

Rip the pencil man!

betting shops not legal until 1960 i think? but point stands. certainly learnt about the geegees from my nan and grandad as much as anyone

I worked in a bookies for a while and although I learned a lot, it was incredibly grim the whole time and I hated the place the longer I worked there. There were loads of things there to encourage people to stay longer (biscuits, free tea/coffee etc which I gather was a relatively new development at the time), and a few times you’d get customers get scary when the bet didn’t come in. The shop didn’t have a high counter or guard as so many do now, so I hope they’ve sorted that out. This was just towards the tail end of the boom, so you’d get builders coming in, putting down €500 on a horse or whatever, and then losing the head and slamming the counter because you let them do it. Awful. Even worse was sometimes getting on the wrong side of someone’s superstition and either being “will you kiss my betting slip for luck?” or “I don’t want you to do it, women are unlucky.”

Fucking hated that place.

I used to joke when I worked in the bookies: arrr that first death threat of the day is always the freshest one!

I once saw a co-worker almost get decapitated when a pissed off punter punched the plate glass window and a big section of it cut his neck, a couple of more mill and it would have opened his neck up!

there was a spate of nasty robberies of bookies in the last year or two, one person on duty first thing in the morning and they're open earlier because of the fucking pontoon machines

there was that case in Liverpool where during the robbery they couldn't get the safe combination out of the manager because of his nervous stutter and ended up shooting him dead. A scouse friend (who also has a stutter) when he got sacked for being a bit naughty - he used that example at the job centre when signing on. On the the dole form where it asked reason for leaving last job he wrote: scared of being shot!

anyway I won't shit up the thread by repeating the story of when a crackhead fired a shotgun at the ceiling right above my head, but lets just say it was quite a close thing that I didn't have shit running down my jitters!

just remember, when the fun stops, stop

lol!

Great another tipping thread

my stepdad was the odds compiler/operational manager at an independent bookie chain in Hudds. His nickname from my grandma was "Sicko" because he made the front page of The Star as "the sicko bookie" who'd been putting out posters in the shops with spread-betting odds on how many corpses they were going to finally excavate from 25 Cromwell Street

Can’t believe gambling now is all just math majors with websites this is much more colorful

I think a picture thread of rough as toast old school bookie shops would be excellent!

Think I'm gonna have to go with the favourite Ask Me Early, looks like the one with a bit of improvement in it, decent form in points, won't mind the ground and Sean Bowen usually gives you a run for your money

I used to love it when people get up at 6am for an early morn Racing Post study sesh and study the form with a magnifying glass and still didn't win shit. While some granny who just backs horses with number 9 on them or ones that sound like her grandchildren's names and gets a 60000/1 fourfold on a 10p Yankee!

lol -- actually this is like when my mom started gambling investing in the stock market and she made my dad play. My mom researched and looked at the business pages that listed all the stock prices and bought a variety of different things; my dad, who taught middle school, put all his money on Apple stock (this was in the late 80s/early 90s when Apple was not doing so well) because he thought it was good that they donated computers to schools that couldn't afford to buy computers for their students.

lol! that's how it often goes.

My mum used to say always back the Irish jockey - apparently not aware of the fact that most of the little bastards were Irish!

My nan would be like "I always have a bit on Eddery" or whoever, probably panned out as well as any system over the years

Pat Eddery, like Kieran Fallon was a top flat jockey of his era. But he drank himself to death.

of the course the Pat Eddery, Fallon of national hunt racing was Tony McCoy, people would back the jockey rather than the horse.

Jesus Christ, you don't want see what Pat Eddery looked like in his later years, you'll never touch another drop.

yeah he really did a job on himself

Oh I remember Eddery well, I just meant she changed her fave from time to time

McCoy managed to win the National the first time in years I didn't back the cunt

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