Readers Up #6: The Sure Thing

Let’s get this out of the way up front. Horseplaying is witchcraft.

There’s a famous Aleister Crowley quote. You probably know it (why are you reading this newsletter if you’re not familiar with at least the most common tenets of Thelema?), but I’ll reprise it anyway, minus the -k that even my corny spirit cannot abide: Magic is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.

Now, I take horseplaying exactly as seriously as I take hexes and tarot cards, which is to say both very seriously and not seriously at all. To my understanding of occult power, this is really the only way to deploy or wield it. It’s negative capability. If intent is magical (in the sense of power, not of justice), then the key is not to put any possibility of failure from one’s mind, but to allow the possibilities to stand in tandem. The scales of win or lose, spell successful or unsuccessful, are ultimately balanced. As much as we might wish it otherwise, every sliver of handicapping prowess kneels to chance.

So, imagine the horseplayer at her rituals. The altar is a computer desk or coffee table or bar beneath simulcast screens; the Book of Shadows is a racing daily and the athame a red pencil; the gods supplicated are those of weather and horses, with a dollar set aside and a shot poured out for manifold Fortune. The deep study of past performances, the familiarity with a track’s surfaces, the awareness of jockey tendencies, the adherence to or dismissal of the morning line, all of these are weights added by the horseplayer to those scales with the purpose to tip.

If she makes a bet that pays off, the elements of the spell have worked in tandem with nature and circumstance to produce dividends. The river has not been pushed.

Barney Curley is absolutely a witch. As depicted in Nick Townsend’s The Sure Thing, his meticulous strategies and exacting mind combined with the peculiar norms of Irish and British racing to produce surreal results. It wasn’t that, as a trainer, he had an outrageous win percentage; it’s that as a gambler, he managed to bypass the usual emotional attachment to being right--where “being right” results in a stack of fresh green--and was never loud about his plans. No Tweeting out tips for Barney. As Kit Chellel wrote about similarly-minded Hong Kong handicapper Bill Benter, publicity is a hex for professional gamblers. Everything about Curley’s coups, from the OG upset with Yellow Sam at Bellewstown in 1975 to sweeping every major UK bookmaker for millions in 2014, was a laser-guided arrangement and massaging of circumstances.

That last is the kicker. Curley took advantage of each facet, from a primitive phone-relay used for conveying betting data to track conditions on the day of a particular card, the way a witch might hold off on casting his spell until the appropriate moon phase rolls around. His bets could not have gone off to such shattering effect anywhere but the United Kingdom; British and American racing might stem from the same three sires, but their modern cultures are different enough to support near-total gaming of the British system by someone who knew it inside and out.

Curley: “Bookmakers are always trying something new, to rob punters, to get them to bite. But that’s what beats them in the end: the greed."

Punters, not bettors or gamblers or even horseplayers. The Sure Thing is rife with British and Irish racing slang, such that it seems written entirely for a non-American audience. This didn’t detract from my enjoyment--the book is a quick read despite being a bit of a brick--but it did mean that I often read and reread passages, silently and aloud, to parse the particulars of Curley’s genius. Part of the problem is that I’m no punter myself. I admit that the mystique of actually betting on horses largely eludes me. It’s difficult to understand a man like Curley, who by his own admission only trained horses so that he could bet as surely as possible on them--another fine example of the British and American sports at odds. There is an overall need for translation, British English and racing to American, a longtime horseplayer's mind to a neophyte's, a gambler's to a... do we have a word for non-gambler, as a teetotaler is to an alcoholic?

(You can see why I found my magical metaphor so useful.)

The relationship of major bookmakers like Coral and Ladbrokes to UK gamblers seems entirely separate from my relationship, such as it is, to Xpressbet. Exotic bets like the Pick Six are common in the US, while it took me a full five minutes to realize that a duo of Pick Three and Pick Four is more or less what Curley and his cadre of (all-male, natch) operatives used in 2014 to net millions, with their picks being spread across different racetracks rather than consecutive races at the same track. The nuts and bolts of his final coup, once teased apart, are bafflingly familiar and simple to a US audience. Yet so-called “trebles” and “Yankees” were flying under the radar in 2014 London and Dublin, to the point that hundreds of such bets were placed at shops across two capitals with very few major players cottoning on. Despite the rise of digital data management which, in theory, blacklists suspicious repeat bets, most of the bookmaking companies allowed Curley's men on the ground to keep placing their entries. The bets weren't for large amounts of money, they were in formats regarded as sucker options by bookies, and they didn't involve horses running in major races. Potent combination, masterful manipulation.

Townsend: The Yankee bets involved all four horses. That was straightforward enough. The trebles, though, had required more thought… Four horses meant four possible permutations.

No point in casting a spell for gainful employment if you don’t bother to fill out a job application. In this way, Curley turned what he considered bookmakers’ attempts to fleece punters--exotic multiples that few players would be savvy enough or lucky enough to land on--to his own favor. He distributed energy, both human and equine, strategically. He had enough gambling experience to understand bookie norms and acted accordingly. He knew the horses he trained well enough to place them in spots where it was highly likely they’d win and pair them with riders suited to their respective strengths. He was focused on a goal so distinct from other horsemen’s ambitions that he would never be swayed by gold cups or huge purses. If a magician works a spell to produce $5 and $5 appears in good order, someone might be compelled to ask why they hadn’t conjured more. It’s important to factor in limits, to be utterly specific, when going about the business of witches and punters.

Anyone who’s seen Fantasia understands why.

Yours somewhere other than the betting windows,

Diana