Talking Horses: Proof punter-bookie relationship has changed for ever

Geoff Banks’s satchel was £3,375 lighter than it should have been when he left York racecourse on Saturday, he said in a post on social media, and the high-profile racecourse bookie was understandably hacked off. “Unsavoury end to York with one of my team confusing a payout of £375 with £3,750,” he wrote on X. “And the ‘punter/thief’ took the money. We informed the police and gave a description. There’s no excuse for this.”

A subsequent report in the Racing Post suggests that the punter who made off with the cash may have been aware that Banks had laid a £1,000 bet at 11-4 on Tropical Storm, the winning favourite in the Roses Stakes, in addition to their own bet of £100 at 11-4. That implies in turn that Banks may have fallen victim to a hastily conceived – but still potentially criminal – act of fraud, rather than a failure by the punter to point out a mistake.

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But a sin of omission is a sin all the same, and Banks was disappointed that many responses to his original tweet were less than sympathetic.

“It’s not the same battle between the old enemies that it used to be,” Banks told the Racing Post. “The betting public expects bookmakers to play fair and we expect the same, and then someone goes and does this; I think it’s abhorrent.

“People seem to think that it’s something to make fun of or that we deserve it, but they haven’t considered the impact this has had on my staff member and on how the relationship should be between a bookmaker and a punter. That fairness seems to have gone, and that’s a great shame.”

It is always easy to be misty-eyed about the past, and the odd rogue (or three) has cropped up on both sides of the bookie/punter relationship from its earliest days. A contemporary account of Derby day in the mid-19th century reported that racegoers would hold hands to form a circle around their bookie of choice to stop them running away, while the fake bookie “John Batten” fleeced racegoers to the tune of £10,000 in the unregulated “Hill” enclosure at Epsom in 1997.

At the same time, though, a great deal has changed in betting in recent decades, and certainly since Banks’s father, John, was in his mid-1970s pomp as one of the most fearless and flamboyant layers that the betting ring has seen.

As such, he was an exponent of an approach to betting and bookmaking that had been developed a century earlier by William “Leviathan” Davies, who earned his nickname from the monstrous bets he was willing to lay. Davies was the first bookmaker to gain celebrity status, and his reputation depended entirely on trust – on his part, that bets were honestly struck and on his customers’ side, that he would be good for the money should they win.

Davies famously lost £30,000 – the equivalent of about £3.2m today – to John Bowes, the owner of West Australian, when Bowes’s colt won the Derby in 1853, and insisted on paying Bowes in cash in the winner’s enclosure to cement his reputation as a bookie you could trust. For some of us, meanwhile, his legacy remains to this day. Davies retired to Brighton, and when he died in 1879 – a few hundred yards from where I am writing this column – he left a bequest to the local corporation to buy and preserve the much-loved Preston Park on the outskirts of the city.

From Davies’s time until the early 1960s, the racecourse ring was the only place where anyone could legally bet in cash, but even after the legalisation of off-course cash betting, which launched a betting-shop boom, there was still a personal element to the bookie-punter relationship. Punters would tend to bet in the same shop, alongside the same group of fellow punters, from one day, and year, to the next. Even as recently as the mid-1990s, the bookie was still the old enemy, but you were often on first-name terms with the staff.

Fast-forward a quarter of a century, however, and most punters’ betting experience has been transformed. A significant and ever-increasing majority of betting turnover is online, the big gambling conglomerates that dominate the market prioritise risk-free casino products over betting on sport, and any punter who shows signs of making the game pay – or even simply not losing enough to cover their “cost of acquisition” – is routinely closed or restricted after a handful of bets.

The punters have changed. They shop around for prices, as most consumers do when they can, and bet without any human interaction at all (bar the regular complaints to customer service that a £20 bet has been restricted to pennies). But when it comes to explaining why the relationship has fractured, the bookmakers have changed far more.

Banks, of course, operates at the track, which is almost the last redoubt of a personal relationship between punter and bookie. And to my mind at least, whether or not his punter was actively trying to pull a fast one, if he held on to £3,375 that he knew he had not won that would certainly make him a cheat. The significant number of keyboard warriors who seem to think that Banks is fair game is a sign of the regrettable extent to which online gambling has changed the whole game for good.