Bookies lecturing me about “good faith”. Get fucked.
I am a gambler.
It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s something I’ve come to accept as inherent in my nature. I can’t always control it, but I can live with it.
It’s my affliction. I take things and run with them until I smash gnashing teeth first into concrete. My fiance thinks I might be on the autistic spectrum, which is probably just her euphemistic self-soothing when I act like a cunt.
I’ve gambled on most things you can imagine, and some you probably can’t. I’ll take it any way I can get it. Live, face-to-sweaty-face in time-abstinent casinos. Furtively, through back doors of peeling painted side streets and shady poker rooms. Or whittling away hours in the self-loathing, perspiring glow of a laptop screen.
I’ve largely been a functioning addict. But, shamefully, the fact that I’m still standing is owing to the better financial decisions of my family. Most significantly, a brother who at the height of my addiction was making enough cash as the skipper of a fishing trawler that bailing out his desperate, degenerate older brother became as regular a routine as hauling up the nets. I’m forever in his debt.
In this context it might be a hard sell to convince you that I’m actually good at gambling, but it’s true. Spend long enough consumed by anything and you’ll be an expert. 10,000 hour rule? Smashed it years ago.
Yet I am not rich. Self-control, patience, knowing my limits…none of these attributes have ever been in my locker. Like I said, teeth to concrete.
But sometimes it works out. And once, for an extended period of time, it worked out that I could make a lot of money from betting on surfing. Once upon a time the online bookies were like green lines of code I manipulated as if I were Neo, flexing The Matrix to my will.
Until a couple of years ago, bets on surfing were unheard of here in the U.K. I’m still a bit surprised that it’s sustainable. But they appeared one day as I trawled for obscure markets, buried deep in “Other Sports”.
Odds on professional surfing were fresh like the first crocus in springtime, ready to heal the hurt of a long winter of soft grounds, cup upsets and bad beats. This is a market I can conquer, I thought. I mean, what the actual fuck do British bookies know about professional surfing?
How right I was.
Bookies like tip off times, and finish lines, and goals. You know, objective things of black and white certainty. To my knowledge they didn’t like scoring which drifted between arbitrary and waffling in accordance with weather or whim. And I was absolutely certain they didn’t understand the tidal intricacies of SW France.
As suspected, the bookmakers didn’t have a clue. There were minor errors (Gabriel Medina 25/1 to win in France anyone?), and there were major errors. On several occasions they presented me with completed heats that I was still able to bet on.
Suddenly I was Sonic the Hedgehog spinning wildly through showers of golden coins.
In a way it was a gamblers dream. In a way it wasn’t. There was something a little empty about it. Real gamblers savour the masochism of losing, because without the lows how do you know the highs?
Nevertheless, I enjoyed it immensely. I sat at home with my laptop and spotted errors. I placed relatively minor bets so as not to arouse suspicion. I told no-one, aside from the brother to whom I was indebted. (He went too hard and too fast with large stakes that were flagged and cancelled but would have netted him enough to retire on if they’d slipped through).
The first time I noticed a major error was after I had sat up all night watching Round two from Tahiti in 2013, I think. The year Ace Buchan won. I refreshed the gambling site in disbelief that they were still offering odds for heats which had finished. In the morning I placed a £100 multiple of guaranteed winners which scooped me around five thousand pounds or seven thousand American dollars.
Most of the time I was betting on outcomes I already knew.
The first time I noticed a major error was after I had sat up all night watching Round two from Tahiti in 2013, I think. The year Ace Buchan won. I refreshed the gambling site in disbelief that they were still offering odds for heats which had finished. In the morning I placed a £100 multiple of guaranteed winners which scooped me around five thousand pounds or seven thousand American dollars.
It took a while for them to process the bet. I was sure it wouldn’t pay out. Bookies were pretty much infallible, I thought. When the money hit my account I was outside the pub having a smoke on the day of my Grandad’s funeral. I withdrew it straight away and tried to mourn and mingle for the rest of that afternoon without grinning.
After that I scoured every market of every event. If they could make an error that massive then surely they would make others? And they did.
I sat at my work desk and watched Slater drop a ten in the opening seconds of his round five heat at the 2014 Rio Pro against Adriano, noticing that the start time was scheduled 15 mins too late. A minor error, but all too easy to take the money. This sort of thing happened regularly.
I watched heats run early in France when the bookies had scheduled start times much later. The European leg was always a gift. You just can’t pin accurate start times to sandbanks and tides. I basked in Kieren Perrow’s morning calls. I could almost taste the boulangeries and the pine trees and the sex. It was bliss.
It lasted for three seasons before the oddsmakers got their shit together. The last mistakes I remember were in the 2015/16 season. I don’t know how much I made overall. I can’t tell you because my accounts were all frozen. Some of them remain in negative figures where the bookies cancelled bets I’d already withdrawn. I’ll never pay it back.
I placed my bets carefully, conscious of not leaving it too long lest the errors be spotted, which sometimes happened. I tried not to go too daft. A few doubles, a scatter of trebles, a four-fold here and there. The errors slipped on by. I wondered if I was the only punter in Britain betting on surfing every single time I cashed out.
It lasted for three seasons before the oddsmakers got their shit together. The last mistakes I remember were in the 2015/16 season. I don’t know how much I made overall. I can’t tell you because my accounts were all frozen. Some of them remain in negative figures where the bookies cancelled bets I’d already withdrawn. I’ll never pay it back.
I took a couple of calls at the time from earnest representatives of bookmakers who said things like “There’s been a mistake, Mr Currie…we believe your bets were placed in error…betting should be done in good faith…obviously we cannot reclaim winnings paid out in error but…”
Bookies lecturing me about “good faith”. Get fucked.
I owe them nothing but I’m persona non-grata with nearly all of them these days. Partly because of my activity in the surfing markets, partly because of some other loopholes I discovered. I do have a couple of sneaker accounts, but it’s been dialled back significantly.
They’ve done me a favour, really. It was fun while it lasted. I’m pretty sure it’s the most money I’ll ever make from surfing.
(Editor’s note: this story segues well into the sidebar ad that links to PalmerBet, an Australian surf gambling site. Did you know Zeke Lau is paying 100-1 at Snapper? Joel Parkinson 17-1?)
