Perth 24/4/26 - Camera

We pitched in 4 from the lawns in glorious sunshine for what should be the busiest day of the 3 day meeting, split up from our songsmith neighbours of the previous 2 days by our friends Jamie and Mark who felt the allure of sunshine and picnic tables. In truth, business was good but we've felt for a few years now that we'd not taken as much as expected. This is probably the new norm and it is still very good turnover for what is still a midweek meeting on the road to the Highlands, well away from the major conurbations of the Central Belt.

We love Perth, it's a beautiful track, the people are lovely and it's a stone's throw from where we live. And it has the infamous Perth Bumper. I think Perth will, however, be the first to admit that things did not go smoothly this week. We'll pick up the carnage from the aforementioned bumper later but will deal with the big screen right now.

I meant to blog this the last couple of days but, for whatever reason, it slipped my mind. You know when you have a few more folk round to watch the telly than normal, possibly for a big game or The Traitors final or something, and you need to turn the telly round a bit so everyone gets a view? Yeah? Well, the big screen at Perth was like that but on steroids as pretty much nobody had a view. Apart from the car park which was steadfastly deserted during racing. The angle we had was like trying to watch through a vertical letter box. A partially opened vertical letter box. Apparently it would've cost a lot to get the lorry back in to shift in though the bookmakers offered to have a whip round to facilitate it! There did appear to be a small improvement today, maybe someone climbed up a ladder and gave the Jumbotron a nudge to the west.

1) For the 3rd day running the opener was an absolute shocker from an each way perspective. This one was the worst of the lot. There was literally no combination of results that could generate a place profit. None. We had a decent enough win on odds on jolly Misterdoc, trimmed back of course by the places. Still a move forward on yet another winning favourite.

2) Put the top 3 in. We almost felt like a proper bookmaker. Didn't do much good as two of them finished first and second, though the winner was the least worst of the trio. Places a loser for us again, though not in the same league as race 1.

3) Shoved the top 3 in again and this time there was utter heartbreak as Wa Wa cruised to the front and hit about 1/5 in running with the jackpot seemingly in our grasp. 2nd fav Jupiter Des Mottes came from a different galaxy to win and our misery was unconfined. George suggested a sing song to cheer us up. I broke into Roy Orbison. You know the one. And that's two Dad gags in one race you lucky people.

4) Keep the faith, trust the system and all that. Stood two of the top 3 and got absolutely full, full reward on 2nd fav Dixie Mafia which was all but ignored on track. Places finally weighed in (more on "weighed in" later) and we were nicely ahead when we probably had no right to be.

5) Remember yesterday? When the horses seemed to know the price and ran accordingly? Not here. No sir, not here. Massive, huge, enormous drift on The Dog Thief which was defied to add yet another winning jolly/2nd fav to the ever increasing list. It certainly wasn't our Chum. Places were very kind though and a chunk of the win loss was offset as you would expect when the top two place in a 7 runner.

6) Goodness me. 6/4 into 5/6 in less than a minute and it felt like it was over the line before the flag went down. When it hit 1.1 it felt even more so. A minor miracle when Berkenshtaap got up and got us moving forward again. To put it in perspective, though, 6 races on the spin where one of the top two in the market won.

7) Finally, a proper result. A genuinely proper result for all and sundry on the track. We'd been overperforming, we felt, results wise and it was nice to supplement it with a genuine jackpot.

8) Ok. For those of you who missed it I will try to make some sense of the last hour on track for us. We stuck in Ar Ais Aris, Kill Vanhowe and Rock On Ronnie and we had either had a good result on 2nd favourite Ksar Doudaries or a great result on Fiskardo

It was close. Very, very close. The photo took ages. They opened about evens in the photo and I took a bit out of the better result (Fiskardo) on the exchanges but Fiskardo was still the better result by about 400 quid. Many of my colleagues were a 4 figure difference. Ksar shortened to about 1/3 but the photo dragged on. Then it switched. Fisk was 1.2 when the market was suspended and we were convinced we had the better result.

Incredulity when Ksar was announced as the winner. It made no sense based on the markets. But, as always, we paid on the result as announced and then the result was confirmed when they "weighed in, weighed in".

We are packing up and exiting the course when there was an announcement. I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone sound so glum. Essentially, and I am paraphrasing, they'd given the wrong result and Fiskardo should've been declared the winner, but from a betting perspective the original result would stand as they'd weighed in but there would be an "amendment" to the result posted. We'd laid Fiskardo in the photo so I checked with our exchange rep and he confirmed that Ksar was settled on the exchanges as the winner as per the T&Cs.

Further problems arose when Racing Post and Sporting Life posted the result as Fiskardo as the winner but with absolutely no reference to the declared winner when they weighed in. Bizarrely Racing Posts had Fiskardo as the winner but the race notes said "just failed" and had Ksar in 2nd place with the race notes "Just held one". The exchanges then resettled the result with Fiskardo as the winner but their T&Cs stated that they should settle the winner as the "weighed in" winner. This was still the case around 7:30. Clearly nobody had communicated the correct position from a betting perspective despite Perth announcing the correct position around 6:15. Exchanges then resettled back to the original result around 7:45.

It was an unholy mess. There's tons of stuff on Twitter and I totally understand the utter frustration of Fiskardo backers and I know it's no consolation to them but my estimate is that the incorrect result being called cost the bookmakers in the ring around £50k. Obviously those who backed Ksar were the only ones to profit from this farce. From the point of view of the process in future, the "weighed in" decision has to stand from a betting point of view. If bookmakers cannot rely on the "weighed in" result then the system totally collapses as when do you settle your bets? End of the day? End of next week? That way madness lies.

So there we have it. We felt we won far more than we should have on the results (declared or otherwise) and it was a day where it fell for our bingo book system - we need to remember that when we next lose on a rag.

Perth Ladies Day, I think, next for us mid May. We're hoping for a telly we can see and a result we can rely on. Until then....