Harry Findlay Gambling For Life
“A wise old owl once lived in a wood, the more he heard the less he said, the less he said the more he heard, let’s emulate that wise old bird.”
(At Swim Two Birds)
Gambling For Life Findlay, Harry on Amazon.com.au.FREE. shipping on eligible orders. Gambling For Life. Harry Findlay is a professional gambler who says he has made over £20 million through various bets over the years. Image: PA Archive/PA Images HARRY FINDLAY IS a busy man. He is on the phone three. IMAGINE what it would be like to turn your back on the nine-to-five drudgery of normal working life and risk everything you’ve ever had on the fate of a horse race or the outcome of a ball game. In the gambling fraternity, Harry Findlay has earned legendary status. He has been skint dozens of times, won over £20 million and spent just as much. Gambling For Life: The Man Who Won Millions And Spent Every Penny. Harry Findlay has earned legendary status. He has been skint dozens of times, won over 20 million and spent just as much. But he will not change. Fearless and formidable, bullish and bombastic, there is no one in the gambling game who can match Harry’s style and seismic impact.
HARRY Findlay has never been in much danger of emulating Flann O’Brien’s wise old bird and its long odds against that he’ll be doing it anytime soon. In fact, he has the opposite problem.
If the spoken word was electricity then Findlay would be a power station and his conversations run like half punctuated streams of consciousness in which time is not necessarily sequential.
He nurses an early evening pint in a Ballsbridge pub where he has arrived directly from the airport.
One of the sport’s most familiar and fearless professional gamblers he’s has been less in the limelight in recent years but the accent is still the same cockney hybrid of old despite being born and bred in Buckinghamshire.
It doesn’t take too long for him to show that he remains as spikily opinionated as ever. “You wouldn’t f***in’ believe it,” he says, incredulous. “They booked on to Ryanair and now into some f***in’ budget hotel. I changed that. Not havin’ that!”
Ten Years After
It’s late autumn and the air is beginning to cool, the ground is getting softer, the winds stronger and the leaves browner. The National Hunt racing season hasn’t quite stretched itself yet but it has opened its eyes, checked the time.
This time ten years ago Denman was hard into a pre-season training regime for a jumps campaign that would stamp him as one of the greatest staying chasers since Arkle and his joint owner, Harry Findlay as one of horse racing’s most vocal and combustible owners.
The decade since then has been turbulent for Findlay and he is in Ireland to tell a tale he has documented in a recently published memoir, ‘Gambling for Life.’ Ireland generally has always been important to Findlay and he is glad to be back and he still reveres Cork in particular as his comfy spiritual nest.
One mention of the place and he drifts easily off into fond memories of times past.
“The warmth of West Cork,” he remembers misty-eyed. “The happiest days of my Jack the Lad life. I’ve lived like a lunatic, but what I do know is that I have never ever been happier than when I was coursing in Cork and not just because of the Derby win.”
His win in the 1999 Irish Coursing Derby with his beloved greyhound, Big Fella Thanks, trained by Denis O’Driscoll in Skibbereen, is by far the most emotionally charged passage of the book. But his remembered lunacy wasn’t just confined to dogs and hares.
“One of the best buzzes I ever got was when I once won £1,400 in Rosscarbery on the road bowling and it was in Bandon that I had my unluckiest loser ever. They used to have this road racing around a bale of hay, Curly (O’Driscoll) was marking my card and he said the 1/5 favourite should be 1/500. It always rains in Cork and there was a monsoon that day and I’m standing in a hedge with £1,500 to win three but at the off my horse just stood there, didn’t move. When he eventually started they were almost at the turn at the bale of hay and he was only beaten a length and half. I couldn’t even buy my daughter a bar of chocolate.”
In those two West Cork gambling memories lies Harry Findlay’s life in microcosm, rolling along steeply like a silhouette of a mountain range. Up and down, up then down, up and down again and again.
Up: Solid childhood, hard-working parents, loving family, football fanatic.
Down: Disinterested and bored in school, wayward teenage years.
Up: Intellectual youthful curiosity, circle of interesting friends, form savant at dog tracks.
Down: Wrong crowd, credit card fraud, prison. Broke, begin again.
Up: Marries Kay Duggan, gambling successes, extravagant lifestyle, Big Fella Thanks wins the Coursing Derby. Down:
Loses €2 Million on the All Blacks in the 2007 Rugby World Cup. Broke, begin again.
Harry Findlay Gambling For Life Vests
Up: The Denman years, an exuberant man of the people in an elite and tweedy world. Millions won on Asian handicap football betting. Another fortune won on the ‘Scoop Six.’
Down: Banned from racing for a breach of betting rules.
Down: Declared bankrupt for non-payment of daughter’s school fees.
Down: Loses a fortune on a dog track business.
Down: Depression. Broke, begin again.
So many recent downs - so what happened? He starts near the back of his story, about three years ago.
His attempt to corner the British dog racing market has gone down in flames, he’s recently lost his splendid Wiltshire mansion to creditors and is living in a small house near Axminster in Devon. Kay, as always, is at his shoulder but apart from her usual solidity the rest of his world has been tipped upside down.
“I was gone,” he says. “I wanted to die, I had no money, I collapsed. I am an optimist by nature and I always thought that if you could measure happiness through index that I’d be among the happiest people in the world. Everything was level but after the BHA thing (British Horseracing Authority ban, subsequently revoked and converted to a fine) all that changed. I became aggressive, drinking a bit more. Then after the Coventry thing, that changed too, I became depressed. I wanted to die.
“The only thing I lived for was to try get back some solvency for Kay, get her some readies. I was unemployable, it was the only time ever that I lost my self-respect, putting my family in such a vulnerable situation.”
Tilting at Windmills
The ‘Coventry thing’ refers to his most recent and spectacularly disastrous tilt at another of those big fat windmills he likes to challenge.
Known since his youth by the nickname ‘Harry the Dog’ his betting excursions into football, rugby and snooker were merely supplemental to his one true passion - greyhound racing.
“I only ever bought horse to start with because of my Mum who’d retired and I wanted to get her an interest in something,” he asserts, “then Denman come along and couple of my good mates loved it a lot more than me, buying the horses, enjoying the company. I never felt I didn’t belong, never thought about it because honestly, I never gave a f***.
Here is the publishable version of what happened at Coventry. Findlay acquired operational control of the existing dog track in an arrangement with the leaseholder where he would take care of the day-to-day costs of running the place and then ultimately kick back 50% of profits back to the owner.
In addition to making some money, his motivation was to rescue his beloved sport which he thought was being destroyed by a cartel of vested interests and that the only way to salvage things was to take a lump hammer to the status quo.
He visibly tenses as he recalls how it all panned out. “I know the dog industry in Britain and Ireland for that matter, is in trouble and I know my knowledge is far superior to anybody else. I felt it was my destiny to save it,” he explains.
“Greyhound racing had become worthless and needed a good product and a strong betting package. What I did was brilliant. I did the programmes, the commentaries, the race cards. I put together a great betting algorithm with seven different variables. I did everything right and I still got shafted. They played me along all the time, they gave me their word, they said they wanted me. I was strung along by some of the top businessmen in British sport.”
His business model was both innovative and simple. Create a fair track with good facilities and then build a strong and transparent betting market. Package it all up tidily and sell on to satellite and ‘on line’ sports channels. He ploughed every remaining penny he had into the project, a personal commitment of almost £1.6 million stg, coincidentally a figure roughly the same as he blew on the All Blacks.
“Yeah, but it wasn’t like losing £1.6 million quid on a bet trying to win £700,000 on rugby. I could have said that to Kay, who would know that we are in this together,” he says. “But losing £1.6 million on trying to build and own a dog track without ever having the possibility getting a penny back, that’s different. Effectively I put the last of the family’s money down the drain, left myself without a shilling the only thing I owned was a retired greyhound.”
Things began to go awry when he failed to secure any of the broadcasting contracts that he badly needed, despite what were, in his opinion, solid verbal promises. The coup de grace came when the track owner informed him that the ‘free’ leasehold would now, in fact, cost him half a million pounds.
One of his strongest industry supporters and long-time friend, John Boyle of Boylesports then asked to meet him at his company’s offices in Dundalk. “I sat talking to John,” he recounts, “then when he said he knew a good psychiatrist near Southampton I knew I was f***ed. I thought his behaviour was strange and I got the distinct impression he was trying to warn me of worse news to come.”
He took the steer, returned immediately to Coventry only to be told of a price change to the lease which was a deed of execution. “When the owner said he wasn’t going to put a charge on the lease I believed him.
Every ticket is a piece of hope
Harry Findlay believes that a combination of vested interests in the British greyhound racing deliberately played him along with false promises and then dumped him to eliminate him as a threat to their turf.
They gave him just enough rope to hang himself and he bounded both gleefully and stupidly up every booby-trapped step of his own gallows.
Gallows seemed to be on his mind a lot in the aftermath. “Suicide.” He says the word and reflects on it, his conversation slows for once. “I’d stay in bed until two in the afternoon, wouldn’t eat, never left the house for five months. I’d gone from being the happiest man in the world to wanting to die. It was terrible. I just didn’t know what to do. Somebody sent me to the best doctor in London and he told me that I had to stop smoking weed and start taking the tablets. Then my Mum got worried and begged me to come off the tablets and get back in the game.”
Gradually he began to listen to Mum.
“The World Cup (2014 Brazil) was coming up and I always win in big in the World Cup, but I’d no confidence, I had lost it all. So one day I sat down with Kay, talked it through and we decided to sell the Fiat we owned for six thousand, a watch for five grand and we put most of the money into a betting exchange account. I had two grand of it on a horse to win five and it ‘shit’ up. I now had sixteen thousand for the World Cup. I turned it into £74,000.
So: financial ruin, a long history of heavy gambling, overuse of alcohol, cannabis, depression, prescription medication and now it seems logical to sell your only remaining possessions of any worth and dump the proceeds into a betting account. Harry, wasn’t this just plain dangerous?
“Dangerous?” he replies. “Gambling, cannabis, drink? That’s the thing, isn’t it? I didn’t care, did I? I has spent fifty years of my life thinking that I wanted to live till I was a hundred but going from being such a positive thinker to not caring – there are some advantages to that you know.
“If I keel over or get cancer I’ll be upset, at least I’ve had the buzz of winning.
“If I work hard winning five thousand on a Saturday I feel like a millionaire on the Sunday. When you’re a gambler you don’t have to be a millionaire to feel like one. Every ticket is a piece of hope.”
This is the vindication he seems to be searching for still. That feeling that he’s right, that anticipation of success.
“Let me take you back to a night at Slough dogs when I was 17 or 18,” he continues. “Saturday night, great track, full house, great atmosphere. I knew that in the last race the (trap) one dog would go three or four lengths clear at the first bend. I had it as a 1-2 shot, but it was even money on the boards. I had £200 in the world and I had it all on. It was moderately away and I wasn’t sure it was far enough clear to hold on, but it won a short head and that was like winning the Gold Cup, I promise you. I remember that night like it was yesterday, the feeling I got when I won the two-hundred, the feeling I got from knowing I was right.”
A Good Place?
At the height of the Denman years, Harry Findlay lived in a luxurious mansion on the outskirts of Bath.
When he was at home his work days were spent in an annex in the garden that looked like bridge of a spaceship. Screens and technology were on every wall, no sporting event inaccessible, no gambling opportunity unconsidered and no expense spared on the most modern of information technology.
Nowadays, at 55, his life is has downsized to more modest and simpler proportions.
The man who once loved to spend a king’s ransom on a single meal says he is now content to stroll most days to the local fishmonger for the day’s supper and wash it all down with a bottle of wine for seven quid.
“Me and Kay are getting on great, she’s like Benjamin Button, better looking than she was 22 years ago. But I will never, ever own a dog or a horse again.
I still need the betting to make my brain work, even though I know gambling is such a massive thing. I have one bet today, £600 on a 7/2 shot (it lost). I can’t explain my body, we all get different hits.”
Introspection again.
“Look,” he emphasises, “here’s the bottom line, I made £20m and I spent £20m and people accuse me of losing it all, but this I know. I have spent twenty million quid and have never done a normal day’s work in my life.
“Patrick Veitch (professional gambler) says he won ten million and everybody thinks he’s a genius. I won twice that and everybody says I’m an odds-on idiot. I used to let people think I was an idiot. But not anymore. Not anymore.”
These sound a lot like the words of a wise old bird after all. Harry the Dog, slayer of bookies, scourge of the authorities, media darling, friend of the common man settled at last.
It’s priced up at 33/1 against.
Gambling for Life by Harry Findlay (with Neil Harman), is published by Trinity Mirror Sports Media, €18.99.
| Harry Findlay - Professional sports-Bettor |
'Nowadays, some casinos even have two zeroes on the roulette wheel. Anyone playing them should be certified. But gambling on a Champions League match, a Premier League match, you can win.' This, he explains, is because modern betting exchanges take a far lower proportion of their punters' stakes in profit. 'There is no margin, it's about 2 per cent.
Findlay famously said he’d ’found a new way to print money’ on the 1998 football World Cup by betting on Asian Handicaps. Harry recalls the story: “I was penniless, 200 grand in debt,” he remembers. “I sold the deeds of the house in Sheffield, sold Kay’s car. I had about 90 grand to bet with. After five matches, I was 70, 80 grand behind, near enough down to the last bet I could have. But Mum’s house was waiting to go next, because I knew I would win. And by the end of the World Cup I had won £2m.”
One of his biggest loses was in 2007 when he lost £2.5m on the All Blacks in the Rugby World Cup.
“Don’t mention Martina Hingis to me,” he cried. “Ruined my life when she lost to Iva Majoli in the French Open final. Wiped me off the face of the earth. Three or four times I’ve been all-in. Milk Cup. I remember that. Me and my mum borrowed 1,200 quid – which was a lot of money 20 years ago – to put on Watford to beat Everton in the cup because we knew Everton would play a reserve side. We had £650 on the draw and £550 on Watford to win. We were both at the game to watch. Watford were 1-0 up in the 89th minute and Everton won 2-1. As my mum opened the car door afterwards, she said: ‘What are we going to do now, son?’ We were penniless. That’s what it was like in the old days.
These days bets from his home office which is fully equipped with a number of TV screens and monitors often with different sporting events on at the same time. As well as being a professional gambler Harry was also an owner. He jointly owned the 2008 Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Denman. Big Fella Thanks was another of his co-owned horses who he named after his beloved greyhound 1999 Coursing Derby winning Big Fella.
Findlay won an appeal in 2010 to have his 6month ban overturned for a breach of BHA betting regulations. He had bet on one of his horses, Gullible Gordon, to lose in two races. However (BHA) accepted he bet more on the horse to win and had no corrupt motive.
Harry Findlay Gambling For Life Ins
In the first race, Gullible Gordon, an odds-on favourite, was well beaten. Findlay bet £80,000 on the horse winning and £17,000 on it losing and came out with a net loss of £62,000.The horse, a 4-6 favourite, won the second race and Findlay backed him to the tune of £64,000 but also laid the horse off at £32,000. He came out with a profit of £35,000.
Harry said after that he would turn his back on UK racing after that. He estimates winning more than $1 million betting on Black Caviar and Frankel though!
Findlay's Quotes
On backing odds-on
“There’s no difference between getting 1-2 about a 1-4 chance and getting 4-1 about a 2-1 chance. People who say ‘I won’t bet odds-on’, they’re just idiots. When you want to bet an odds-on shot, you can get on – when you want to bet a big-priced one, you can’t.”On why you shouldn’t hedge
“When you pick a 20-1 shot to win the Grand National, don’t have £200 at 20′s and then go and lay £600 at 5-2 and, when it wins, get £2,500. If you believe that 20-1 shot, have £200 at 20′s and then go and have another £300 at 14′s and then £400 at 10′s and then, when it goes off 5-2 or 11-4, don’t hedge if you still fancy it.”On pensions
Don’t get him started on pensions. No part of him approves of putting money away on the off-chance you might see it with knobs on at the age of 65. “I mean, you’ve got to live to be 65 anyway, and that’s only an 8-13 chance.”Philosophizing
'If I were leaving school now, the chances of ending up behind bars are the same as me skiing for Britain in the London Olympics. It only happened because of all the lies and kid-ology that used to go on with betting. Nobody can get [bets] on with bookmakers, because when you win you get closed down. Now it's all up front. We're now living in the real world. Press that button on Betfair and let's see how good you are. Simple. There's no myths or lies any more, it's all fact.'He also believes that direct, accountable trading via the internet betting exchanges is taking the carpet up on the cheats, and he colorfully repaints some of the turf's most honored names as arrant frauds. 'At the end of the day, it don't matter how big your house is,' he says. 'Nurses and teachers working for nothing, they're the real legends. If you cheat, what kind of buzz is there, conning all that lot?'
A mass betting market can only be sustained by trust, and that is why these are boom years in football betting. 'Its honesty and integrity puts the Premier League on a sporting level almost beyond compare, globally,' he says. 'Everyone knows that if Bolton play Fulham on a Monday night, it's going to be 100 per cent straight. They know that in Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, China, places with a better understanding of mathematics in relation to gaming. And it puts every Premier League game on a par only with the Euros, the World Cup, or the later stages of the Champions League.'
Harry Findlay Gambling For Life Insurance
And big markets are crucial to Findlay's system, which he succinctly describes as 'glory or the bullet'. Among the high priests of betting, he is a lone voice in preaching the value in backing favorites.Harry Findlay Gambling For Life Expectancy
'The real money is in the short prices,' he says. 'I know I'm never going to make more than 4 per cent [on turnover] so if I don't bet in tens of thousands, I'm not going to make much of a living. And the only way you can bet real big, in terms of getting on, is on the short prices.'Sometimes it is crushing. That last-minute goal. Good friends have a very small share in what I do, so you know they're hurting too. People trivialize gambling. But to someone else, 20 quid can be just as big a bet as some of these I'm having. Remember, I've done it from both ends. Gamblers lend each other money, we'll do anything for each other. I have read a lot of the great philosophers, and gambling is a very good parody of life. A lot of the rules come out the same.'