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What would be the three books on betting and gambling you would recommend to a newcomer?
I’d suggest reading anything by David Sklansky or Mason Malmuth for the basic grounding in maths and EV. You need to know the physics of a market and actually understand what you’re doing before you even look at the form. It’s heavy stuff and it’s hard work but the TwoPlusTwo boys are absolutely flawless. Most of their work talks about poker and casino games along with sports betting but the crossover is obvious. It’s grim, unsexy work but it needs to be done. Too many losing punters are brilliantly intuitive form judges, but lose because they never took the time to understand odds, percentages and value. The vitriol Gingertipster deals with when he talks about value on here shows just how common the problem is.
Avoid anything by a well-known ‘face’ or professional punter and don’t buy anything from the Racing Post book shop. Ever. There are no golden nuggets out there and most work by Nevison and co is totally commercial – it’s witty, it’s readable and it’s superficially helpful but it’s dreadful value for the price you pay. At the end of the day, I think you need to learn by experience, starting with small stakes and improving through self-analysis. Build yourself a good inner circle of people with the same goal and talk to people further along the path. If you can find yourself a healthy long-term winner to serve as a guru-type figure, you’ll be flying!
If you’re looking for racing-specific books, I think more specialised titles might be the only ones with intrinsic value. If you want to become a sectionalista or a biomechanics guru (but don’t have Simon Rowlands or James Willoughby on speeddial) then a specialist book on a niche subject could be worthwhile.
Also a word for a few regular publications: I think any semi-serious punter would benefit from Timeform’s Horses in Training and Chasers and Hurdlers annuals or Steve Taplin’s Two-Year-Olds of… books. I like them because they are fact-based and contain some information that isn’t in the general market. It seems like quite a few oddsmakers aren’t subscribers. Personally I avoid more opinionsy annuals like Howard’s One Jump Ahead, the Marten Julian stuff or Horses To Follow. They’re all fairly profitable at face value but their selections hardly reinvent the wheel. These give me the same sort of unclean feeling I’d get from paying for a tipping line (even a good one). Anything that tempts you to switch off from your own independent thinking is going to be bad for you long term.
What would be the three books on betting and gambling you would recommend to a newcomer?
It depends whether or not one wishes to encourage or discourage the activity of betting.
If the latter, which I doubt is what you are looking for, I recommend Damon Runyon’s short story All Horse Players Die Broke, written sometime during the 1930s or 1940s. This is not the first piece of fiction to underline the potential perils of gambling, but it’s a salutary reminder that no matter how hot your streak, when it ends the results can be brutal.
i have read many many books on this subject, and in my opinion one of the best is “horse racing is not about horse racing” by Norton Howells available from Amazon.
Thanks for that Terry, I’m going to look that one out. Anyone searching for it on amazon should look for ‘Anatomy Of A Small Time Gambler‘
“If you want to become a sectionalista or a biomechanics guru (but don’t have Simon Rowlands or James Willoughby on speeddial) then a specialist book on a niche subject could be worthwhile.”
I’d recommend ‘Bioenergetics and Racehorse Ratings’ by Bob Wilkins. Interesting stuff, although I haven’t worked out how to apply it to value-finding.
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