Opened Eyes

Have you ever woken in the night and just felt gratitude for all that you have, all that you've lived and all that you know?

The System

“Money won is twice as sweet as money earned” Fast Eddie Felson, pool hustler, The Colour of Money, 1986.

There was a time in my life when I was a professional gambler, or sorts. I followed a system. There are two reactions to hearing these words. Some look wide eyed and slightly feverish at the sound of them, and others look with a glassy scepticism and waxwork complexion. They are words you will usually hear spoken in hushed voice, you’ll probably have to lean in a little to hear them. Then you’ll either lean in deeper or start trying to make your escape. But you’ll be one or the other.

Horse racing was my sport. I could have looked at blood lines, or physique and temperament, or form to choose my winners. Then there are the tipster, the whispers and rumours about newcomers and outsiders, and the sure things…at short odds. But I didn’t. I used a very simple system based on one simple idea: Favourites are favourites because from time to time, they win.

In these winter months the exciting National Hunt with its fences and jumps warms the heart of the more dedicated punter. Compared to the money and pomp of the Flats season, whose warm summer months bring out the glamour and wealth we associate with Royal Ascot, the National Hunt is by contrast associated with fingerless gloves, hot cups of coffee laced with something warming, and a cigarette to take the edge of things. This is a season for the professional and addicts, nobody else could justify exposing themselves to these temperatures and it can be hard to distinguish one from the other.

I had a simple little thing I’d created to calculate how much I’d need to bet. I say need to because I took this all rather seriously. I earned a second wage from it, had an earnings target and ‘worked’ until I had met it. Race meeting typically have between five and eight races. The odds for each runner is published in advance and as the market places its money those odds shift and usually shorten. Favourites fall in and out of favour as the race start nears. Sometimes a favourite wouldn’t emerge until seconds before the race got underway, but there was and always is a favourite.

From the comfort of my laptop, I calculated the value of each meeting to decide which I could afford. You see my system was simple enough. A favourite will eventually win, so I bet on the favourite in each race at a meeting until it did in fact win. This requires a great deal of nerve and money, because in the worst case scenario I would lose the first six races and have to place a very large bet on the seventh race to both recoup my loses and make my margin. There is nothing certain about the seventh horse coming in, but eventually a favourite will win.

Needless to say, it worked and I made a very healthy second income from it for some months. But I am inescapably human and felt the thrill and rush of each race, of each win and the lure of greed. Human emotion had no place in this system, the fear one has when placing a large bet after a series of losses, the feeling of being lucky or unlucky, the temptation to place bets outside the system, the sheer enjoyment and excitement of it all… they are all just feelings and impulses associated with gambling, a mugs game. If I could resist all that then I was, in effect, not gambling. Or at least no more gambling that the bankers in the City of London. For another person that might have been easy. For me though, it was too difficult and I closed the door on that chapter of my life.

For some time I had carried around in my wallet a pass to the enclosure at Brighton Race Course. It somehow was tied up with who I was and said something about how I lived, what sorts of choices I made. There is, as with all stories, so much more I could say, but I won’t for now.

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Six Shots or Five?

I wonder if others out there feel like things come together in waves of good and bad luck. Luck is something that I hear people talk about as though one can own it, have it or not have it. People talk about luck as though it is the very cause of our good fortune… good things are happening because we are lucky. It’s perverse, in a way, that we do this, because luck isn’t cause… it does not exist in any kind of chain of events as one dominoes in a line amongst others, generating fortuitous consequences.  Luck is not a force amongst other forces that we can posses and wield like superheroes. Luck is just the word we use to describe events when they have gone our way, especially when the outcome was against the odds. Luck didn’t bring the event about, it is just the way we interpreted it after it happened.

So when yesterday I faced a dull ache in my mouth from an infection, pain in my eyes and temples from an out of date sight prescription, an email from Paypal declaring that they would be holding funds in my account for 21 days before could withdraw them, an aggressive email from an Ebayer who is trying to fleece me, and discovered that the car MOT had actually run out at the start of the month… it was very, very tempting to feel like some external force was at play, raining on my parade.

Luck is something that we humans have certainly invested a lot of energy in; many cultures and religions have some sort of numerology at play, lucky and unlucky numbers, and preferential numbers. I, like may others, have worn pendants and rings in the past with the purpose of bringing me luck, owned a lucky pair of socks, exercise good luck rituals connected with the sequence I do things in. I guess in there is the superstitious creature that inhabits us all. A human search for cause and effect that sometimes leads us down cul de sacs of understanding. Somewhere in there, when the hourglass of luck was inverted in our understanding to be cause rather than effect, luck became interchangeable with hope and a means for controlling fear and managing stress. A soothing tool (we all need those). And soothing tools are no bad thing… usually.

But does ‘believing in luck’ necessitate believing too in bad luck? Just as luck gives us hope, when the grey clouds gather overhead are we robbed of hope? If that is the case then when things don’t go our way, against the odds, I for one start to feel a bit helpless. The uneasy feeling of not being able to touch the bottom of the ocean with my toes, left to the will of tides and the wind curled waves. When you are convinced things are not going your way, that ocean is not a good place to be. Worse still, worse than feeling things are out of control, is that I stop trying. The inevitability of bad luck extinguishes hope and the energy it gives us.

Luck then, as a way of describing events that happen to us, seems harmless enough. But to invest in luck, to store it up in charms and rituals and to bathe in its warmth when we are ‘feeling lucky’ and look to take more risks with the expectancy that things will go our way, that sound a little dangerous. That is to invite luck in to be the friend of hope, precious hope. I could live without luck, but to live without hope, no way. Luck is a fair-weather friend, whilst hope will see me though the good and the bad. When luck is running low, it will press hope to leave too. Inviting in luck is a dangerous thing.