Wednesday the ninth. Two bets, both won, and the book went up by eight points in an afternoon. Rajak at Yarmouth at 6.07 and Oasis Diamond at Catterick at 4.5. Lovely. Now let me tell you why it doesn't change anything.
First the horses, because they were both proper bets and not luck. Rajak had a poor last run at a big meeting where he was outclassed, and the market had kept that in the price. Back in his own grade at Yarmouth he was the best horse in the race, on a track he'd won round, and 6.07 was a ridiculous price for that. Oasis Diamond was the same story at Catterick, dropping in trip to a distance he'd already won over, at 4.5 because the last run over further had been nothing. Both were on the members' card that morning with a line each.
Neither was the favourite. Both were near enough the front of the market to be my kind of bet. Both had a bad figure at the end of the line that the rest of the line explained. That's the whole method in one afternoon.
Now the warning, and it's for me as much as you. A day like that makes you want more of them. Bigger prices, more bets, a bit more risk because look what it paid. And that's exactly how a good July turns into a bad August. The two winners came from the same questions I ask every day, on a day the answers happened to be yes twice. Tomorrow the answers will be no, or yes at 1.8, and that's fine.
So the stakes on Thursday were the same as the stakes on Wednesday. A point each, win only. The bank went up by eight and the extra eight are sitting there doing nothing, which is what a bank is for.
July is turning into the month I said it would be. Nearly sixteen points up with a fortnight gone, mostly from days that were nothing like Wednesday. Quiet short winners, a few places, one bad Saturday. The Wednesday is the one everyone will remember, and the other twenty nine days are why the month was good.
Lee
PS: someone asked if I'd put the two up as a double. No. Two singles, two prices, and the double is a bet the bookie invented to make you lose the second one.
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More from the notebook: The summer the sand paid · Mojito Des Mottes, and the best month in the book