However, this is where things get hairy: Seventy on a horse at 5/1 works out at a liability of three hundred and fifty! Yikes!
      Martin uses only 0.25% of his bank as a stake, so you’d think it has a lot of slack. Well let’s see. Let’s give him the nightmare scenario and see how he copes. The bloody nag goes and wins again! His bank of four thousand pounds is now down to three thousand, six hundred after two consecutive losers, not so bad. But next up he has to stake four hundred (that’s the bank’s shortfall), plus his daily target which is now thirty, so a total of four hundred and thirty quid! Wow.
      The Third horse is called Dead Cert, and it runs in the 2.40 at Wolverhampton, and, it bolts up and wins by a mile! What’s going on! Even at a generous price of 13/8 he loses seven hundred and five pounds, and his bank is now standing at two thousand, eight hundred and ninety five pounds. Has he got a head for this? Is this the edge that Stephen Dunn was talking about?
      Next up, and his fourth bet: one thousand, one hundred and five pounds, plus forty pounds, which is the daily stake of ten, which brings his stake now to one thousand, one hundred and forty five pound! Four consecutive losers would be unusual and I’ve never seen it once in four years. So here goes. The horse is called Happy Times and it’s going off at 5/2 which is lucky, because if it was any longer, he wouldn’t be able to lay it with only two thousand, eight hundred and ninety five quid left in his bank. It’s a five furlong sprint, and it seems to take forever, but Happy Times comes in second, just beaten by a head, and Martin breathes out a huge sigh of relief, his body is shaking, he’s been out and feasted with the gods and demons, and come home flush, well hardly flush; he’s come home with forty quid! He looks at his bank and it reads, four thousand and forty pounds – Jesus. All that grief for forty sodding quid!

I could be mean of course, and say that actually there’s a stewards inquiry! This happened to me just last week! Happy Times looked like it was interfered with in the last furlong, and the winning horse, Total Bastard looks to have cut up the second placed horse, Martin’s horse, and unbelievably Total Bastard has been disqualified! You wouldn’t believe it could happen. Not this, not now! But yes, when it all goes wrong, it goes wrong big time! So now he takes a second look at his account and it reads thirty three smackerooneys! Four losers and ruination! This is how the sums add up, an exponential increase in mayhem!

We need a better system don’t we? I recover my losses in a similar way to Martin, initially, lumping all my losses onto the next race. More often than not, that’s all it takes; however, when that second race does go the wrong way then I split all my losses into three, and stake a third on the next three races. So in the scenario above, for instance, instead of staking four hundred and thirty quid on the third bet, I’d only be staking a hundred and forty six quid. This is my stake for the next three races. If it loses again then I divide my losses by three once more and continue on. This means that the first time I hit three wins in a row, then I’m all square again. It’s a much more manageable system; you can go a long way down the plug hole with this one and still come out smelling of roses. A run of three consecutive winners (or losing horses) is quite a normal situation so I wouldn’t expect to have to wait very long to get back on track. That comfort zone again.

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