A former math teacher from Camden Town, England, claims betting shops won’t take his bets anymore after he devised a system that guarantees he wins every time without any risk of loss.
Richard Saul, who calls himself the “wizard of odds”, claims that he has bet tens of thousands of pounds on horse races over the last three years, but in the last few weeks, all but one bookmakers in Camden Town have stopped taking his bets. “They should take the bet, but they don’t because I keep winning. I don’t think your average punter would be able to work out how to do it. In Camden Town, only Jennings will take my bet now – and they will only let me do it once, that’s all,” Saul complains. “[Elsewhere] the staff go on the phone, then after two minutes they come back and say, ‘we can’t take this bet’. I’ve gone on accounts online, but they won’t take it there either.”
The math expert believes that his recent ban by bookmakers has to do with his guaranteed-win system. He came up with it when betting shops started introducing higher payouts for “each-way” horse racing bets. Usually, an each-way bet means that the fourth-placed horse pays a quarter of the horse’s odds of winning, but some high street bookies expanded the offer to include a fifth-place horse, in order to attract punters. That’s when Saul figured out that by betting on every horse with different stakes, he could guarantee himself a win.
Photo: Slooby/Wikimedia Commons
“It takes me about 20 minutes to set up the bet, and you have to concentrate because the odds are changing. You cannot lose but if the favourite wins you won’t win very much. The most I won was £600 from a £4,000 stake,” he told the Camden New Journal.
Paddy Power, one of the biggest bookmakers in the UK, has admitted to banning Richard Saul from their betting shops. “Mathematically we know we might lose money with this special, but that should be spread out among all of our punters who are taking a punt and happen to back a horse that finishes in the money, not just to professional punters who box off every possibility,” the company said in a statement. “Fair play to him for putting in the time and effort to play the system but he’s too good for us. We’re running scared.”
It is understood that betting shops around Camden Town are aware of Saul and his system, and due to his impressively long win streak, they’ve decided to ban him.
The New Journal reports that this policy of completely banning or limiting stake sizes for punters who win too much is well known among regular gamblers, and considered controversial in the betting industry. That’s because bookmakers have no problem accepting bets from people who do not win too often.
