Sixteen bets in a row have won, from the Monday before last to this Wednesday. It's the longest run in the book. It made about two and a half points. I'd like both of those facts next to each other, because the run is the sort of thing a tipster puts in big letters and the two and a half points is what it was actually worth.
Most of the sixteen were place bets. Twelve of them, at 1.01, 1.06, 1.08, 1.1 and the like. Tripoli Flyer at Market Rasen was 1.01 to place, which on a quarter point pays a fraction of a penny after commission, and I had it because the win bet alongside it at 1.07 wasn't a bet on its own and the pair together was. Impaire Et Passe at Fairyhouse on the Saturday was the same idea, 1.08 and 1.15. Four win bets in the sixteen, all short, all landed. East Street at Haydock yesterday at 1.68 was the biggest price in the run.
So sixteen in a row sounds like something and it's really the quiet half of the list doing its quiet job through a fortnight of soft ground and small fields. Which is the point of it. The win bets have been slow since Cheltenham's November meeting, the book has been level for a month, and the places have kept it there. Every one of the sixteen was on the members' card before the off.
Here's what I'd ask you to take from it. A run of winners tells you nothing about the next bet, in exactly the way a run of losers doesn't. The sixteenth was no more likely to win because of the fifteen before it. I'm not writing this to warn you off a hot streak, I'm writing it because when the losing run comes, and it will, I'd like you to remember that the winning one was mostly 1.1 shots and didn't change the bank much either.
December is about a point up. Boxing Day and the King George are coming, and the Kempton market on the twenty sixth is one of the few big days where I've found a bet most years.
Lee
PS: the seventeenth lost, which is the only thing a seventeenth was ever going to tell you.
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More from the notebook: The place bet's job · Reading a form line the way I read it