Tip? Don’t bet on it

Stephen Pollard— he’s not the man the bookies fear

BACK IN THE 1990S, I wrote a weekly betting column for the Evening Standard. It was a brilliant idea by the paper’s deputy editor, Don Berry, because it had a unique feature. The whole point was that I was useless. Newspapers have far less racing coverage today than before but even in these denuded times they still all have their tipsters. They’re varying degrees of useless, but no one ever admits it. As I would recount my various punting exploits to colleagues, Don had the notion that we should make a virtue of the fact that most of my bets lost. And so I became the Mug Punter. The conceit was that we kept a running points tab showing how far up — or, far more often, down — I…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2023

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