1. Horse Racing Coup Today
2. Horse Racing Betting Coup Today
3. Horse Racing Betting Coups
4. Horse Racing Coupled

Gay Future was the racehorse at the centre of an attempted fraud by an Irish betting syndicate in Great Britain in 1974 involving two chestnut horses. The plot's ringleaders were the millionaire Irish builder Tony Murphy, a racing enthusiast, and the Scottish trainer Antony Collins. Big Coupe: Lakerville Unusual Heat Foreverinthegame: Margot Machance (GB) Creachadoir (IRE) Margot Mine (IRE).

This list was originally published in January 2010, last update was January 2020, let is know in the comments if you think anyone should be added.

• But in May 2010, thirty-five years after his first coup, Curley staged the ultimate multimillion pound-winning sequel. The Sure Thing tells the complete story of how he managed to organise the biggest gamble in racing history – and how he then followed up with.
• Racing Races Stakes Schedule Weather/Open Tracks.W10-D3 Moved to Baja Arena Ranch via 1st class van Y57-W10-D1 Moved to Baja Raceway via 1st class van Y57-W9-D7 Renamed Horse 0 to Coup Coup Cruz Y57-W8-D3 Walked the Shedrow Y57-W7-D3 Walked the Shedrow Y57-W7-D3 Schooled in the Paddock Y57-W7-D3 Trained with stable pony.

Phil Bull

Phil Bull made a massive amount of money from betting, but not only was he a successful gambler he was also a breeder, owner, writer and publisher. It is estimated he made millions during his career.

In 1948 he launched the now internationally renowned organisation Timeform.

Phil had a shrewd attitude towards betting. He looked at the season as a whole and his form study was the same for every race.

How To Make A Book by Phil Bull
Phil Bull: The Biography by Howard Wright

JP McManus

Multi millionaire JP McManus is a renowned gambler and race horse owner.

Originally from Limerick in Ireland, McManus started betting as a schoolboy before working in his family’s plant hire business. He had his own betting stand for a while at Limerick’s greyhound track and it wasn’t long before he moved into owning horses as well as betting and laying. These days JP owns the largest number of National Hunt’s horses.

His first ‘big’ win (rumoured to be around £250,000) was at Cheltenham with a horse called Mister Donovan who was 2nd favourite but ended up winning the race. He also won over £1 million from famous Scottish bookie Freddie Williams in 2006 at Cheltenham.

Although McManus is a high level gambler a large part of his wealth is said to have come from international financing and money dealing which he overseas from his base in Geneva.

Still a big player and maybe he should be at the top of this list as he is still very active. If there is a book to read about JP let me know in the comments, I’d love to read it.

Alex Bird

The late Alex Bird made a considerable amount of money from betting after the war. It is estimated he had an annual turnover of £2 million from gambling.

His interest in gambling began when he was a child. He learned a lot from his father who was a bookmaker. However, he decided there was more money to be made from the other side and he become one of Britain’s most well known professional punters of all time.

Bird had several methods for getting one over on the bookies but his most famous was probably his success on betting on photo finishes which in those days took about 5 minutes to develop. This process earned him a fortune over a period of around 20 years and only stopped when the modernisation of technology meant there was no longer the delay in photo developing.

Alex Bird made his own mind up when it come to betting and rarely listened to anyone – he stuck to his rules and systems. Even now, almost 30 years after his death, there are current systems available that are based on the practices he used.

His biggest bet was on the well known horse Mill Reef at Gimcrack. The season after this Mill Reef won the Derby, again backed by Bird who had by then backed 7 Derby winners in 8 years.

One of his last bets was on a horse called Final Shot in 1990 when it won the Ayr Gold Cup.

Patrick Veitch

Patrick Veitch is one of Britain’s most successful gamblers who has won over £10 million from betting.

At just 15 years of age this mathematical genius got a place at Cambridge although he never completed his degree, instead he turned to gambling and started his own tipping line.

By his mid 20s Patrick Veitch was already making a lot of money but then came a turning point in his life. He become the target of a criminal and was forced to live in hiding for many months putting his career on hold and leaving him broke. However, following this episode he become more successful than ever and was soon making £1 million a year from his strategic betting methods.

Veitch is a strong believer that there is no short cut when it comes to betting – the only way to win is by working hard at it to get it right.

It is very rare to see Patrick at the races. He uses agents to place his bets and spends most of his time watching and analysing events from his computer.

Harry Findlay

Harry Findlay is a larger than life gambler who has not only made a fortune but also lost a fortune from gambling over the years.

He has always had a love for greyhounds and worked with them for a while after leaving school. Then aged just 20 Findlay spent 11 months in prison convicted of credit card fraud.

These days bets from his home office which is fully equipped with a number of TV screens and monitors often with different sporting events on at the same time.

As well as being a professional gambler Harry is also an owner. He jointly owns the 2008 Cheltenham Gold Cup winner, Denman who also won two Hennessy Gold Cups. Big Fella Thanks was another of his co-owned horses who he named after his beloved greyhound 1999 Coursing Derby winning Big Fella.

Barney Curley

Barney Curley is a professional gambler and trainer from Northern Ireland who has a reputation for being one of racing’s most colourful characters.

During his childhood he watched his Father run up huge gambling debts but still took up betting himself.

In 1975 he famously organised one of the biggest betting scams of all time – Yellow Sam which made him over £300,000. He has also appeared in court for illegal lottery after raffling his mansion for £1.5 million.

More recently Barney organised big coups in 2010 and 2014 and 2016.

Terry Ramsden

Terry Ramsden originally made his fortune from investment company Glen International in the 80s. He was worth millions and, amongst other things, owned a string of race horses.

He was also well known for his betting and in 1985 won £2 million on one horse. The following year he had another big win on Motivator in the 1986 Coral Golden Hurdle Final.

Towards the end of the 80s however, Ramsden’s company collapsed and he started losing massive amounts on bets – he reportedly lost £1 million on one bet alone. This lead to him going bust at which time he fled to America. He had won but also lost millions of pounds.

In the late 1990s he was jailed for concealing assets during his bankruptcy – one of which was rumoured to be a £70,000 plus win on the horses.

Despite returning to public life a few years later Ramsden has failed to recreate his earlier success and has since been involved in a number of arguments over money.

Pro gambler or rich man who lost it all on the horses? Many think the latter but he was a big player all the same.

Dave Nevison

Dave Nevison became a professional gambler in 1993 after he lost his job working as a currency trader in the City.

He now has an estimated six figure income made up largely from gambling but also from journalism columns he writes. Dave has also written 2 books and has his own horse racing tipping service.

A Bloody Good Winner: Life As A Professional Gambler by Dave Nevison
No Easy Money: A Gambler’s Diary by Dave Nevison

Alan Potts

At the age of just 14 Alan Potts started betting on horse racing and become a full time professional gambler after being made redundant from his office job in 1991.

He has admitted it took him many years to become a regular winner and despite making an estimated £50,000 a year from betting in the past, he has also suffered losing runs. Although he is also an owner, author and pundit Potts’ main source of income is from gambling.

In 1999 he jointly formed The Golden Anorak Partnership and this is the banner under which his horses now run.

Alan has written 2 books and also wrote for the betting exchange WBX until it closed in 2015.

Against The Crowd by Alan Potts
The Inside Track by Alan Potts

Clive Holt

Legendary punter Clive Holt was first shown that money could be made from betting by his father who kept a couple of greyhounds during the 1960s.

In the early part of 1975 Clive decided he was ready to quit his job working for the Electricity Board and take up gambling on a full time basis.

He started out using a fairly random approach dictated by his finances and he kept no proper records of bets he had placed. He soon made the decision to start recording his bets and this was the first of two business methods he implemented in order to make a better profit. The second was to setup a betting bank.

His first bet was £67 to £30 on Western Jewel who won comfortably and within 6 weeks he had made more money than he was earning in a year working in electricity. Over the years, although rarely winning more than £1,000 at a time, Holt’s profits from betting provided a lifestyle of luxury cars, exotic holidays and a listed country house with acres of land.

A number of books have been written by Clive Holt who was also the man behind Fineform.

Profitable Winners Always Back Winners
Be A Successful Punter
Fineform Winners Guide
Profitable Betting Strategies

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Horse Racing Betting Coup Today

The Yellow Sam betting coup was a successful sports betting coup, widely remembered within Irish and British thoroughbred horse racing.

It happened at Bellewstown Racecourse on 26 June 1975, and was orchestrated by Barney Curley, an Irishprofessional gambler, philanthropist behind a charity for impoverished children in Zambia^[1](which he set up after his son's death in 1995),^[2] former trainer,^[3] former Jesuitseminarian,^[1] failed pub owner,^[1] former pop group manager,^[1] and entrepreneur. By taking advantage of an under-handicapped horse and the lack of easy communications between the Bellewstown racing course and off-course bookmakers, Curley made a profit of over IR£300,000 (>€1.7m adjusted for inflation) – one of the largest betting coups in Irish history.^[4][5]

Barney Curley again made headlines when four horses linked to him won on 22 January 2014, and were estimated to have cost bookmakers 'something in the region of £2million',^[2][3] reportedly just the latest of many successes since the Yellow Sam coup.^[2]

The coup[edit]

Yellow Sam was a 'slow but steady' horse bought by Curley and was given his name from his father's nickname at the races. Curley instructed the horse's trainer, Liam Brennan, to train Yellow Sam specifically for the somewhat obscure annual National Hunt race at Bellewstown, featuring mostly amateur jockeys. To ensure that the horse would run at least once with a much lighter handicap than would normally be the case, Curley first ran the horse in a series of races on other tracks in unfavourable conditions.^[6]

Curley spent weeks developing the plan and putting people in place. On the day of the race, Yellow Sam's starting price was 20–1, but if large sums of money were being placed on the horse, that figure would drop quickly, drastically reducing the coup's potential take. It was for this reason that Yellow Sam was to race at Bellewstown specifically, as the track was serviced by just two telephone lines, one public telephone box and a private telephone line belonging to the Extel company which supplied racing data to betting shops. The Extel line was put out of use [probably cut] early in the day leaving just one telephone line available to communicate to the course bookies who determined the starting prices for the participants.^[6][7][8]

Dozens of Curley's friends, acquaintances, and paid accomplices stood in bookmaker's shops across the country with between £50 and £300 and sealed instructions to be opened upon receiving a call. None of the accomplices knew beforehand which horse had been prepared, or in which race it was to run. Curley called six or seven of his people at 2.50 pm, ten minutes before the race was to start, and instructed them to each call ten to twenty others. In all, Curley invested just over £15,000, his entire savings, in the gamble. Twenty-five minutes before the race was about to start, and fifteen minutes before the bets were to be placed, Benny O'Hanlon, a friend of Curley's in on the plot, walked into the telephone booth and pretended to place a call to a dying aunt in a non-existent hospital. His act was convincing, as the queue behind him waiting to use the telephone sympathetically allowed him to continue talking for half an hour, while off-course bookies desperately trying to lay off their liabilities struggled in vain to contact their counterparts on the course.^[6][8]

Curley had already built up something of a reputation during his years as a professional gambler, and knew that his presence at the course was likely to cause concern amongst the bookies, and possibly give away the coup before the off. Still, with so much at stake he wanted to see the race first-hand, so he crept into the centre of the course and watched the race concealed in a thicket of gorse. The gamble succeeded, with Yellow Sam winning the 13-hurdle race by two and a half lengths.^[6] Since nothing about the coup had been illegal, the bookmakers were forced to pay out the full IR£300,000 (>€1.7m adjusted for inflation). They did, however, pay out the winnings in single notes, filling 108 bags.^[5][8]

Aftermath[edit]

Horse Racing Betting Coups

The coup made Barney Curley widely known throughout Ireland and the United Kingdom, and made headlines in many Irish and British national newspapers and television reports. To this day, it continues to be listed as one of the greatest betting coups of all time.^[7] Curley invested his earnings in a stable of horses which he continued to have trained for specific gambles, and in the purchase of Middleton Park House, a mansion in Mullingar, County Westmeath – for which he later ran a raffle of dubious legality (though his jail sentence for illegally running a lottery was overturned on appeal),^[1] earning him over £1m.^[6]

Irish bookmakers amended their rulebook following the coup to require that bets of over £100 be placed at least half an hour before the start of the race. Bellewstown Race Course itself played up the coup in later years, and in 2005 ran the 'Seamus Murphy Yellow Sam 30th Anniversary Hurdle', inviting Barney Curley and Liam Brennan to observe the celebrations.^[9][10]

Yellow Sam continued to run in other races, and in his autobiography, Curley reported having earned a further £700,000 in bets on the horse before it was retired.^[6]

Horse Racing Coupled

Barney Curley again made headlines when four horses linked to him won on 22 January 2014, and were widely reported to have cost bookmakers 'millions', with a spokesman for British bookmakers Joe Coral admitting they had cost Coral 'a six-figure payout' and estimating 'the industry has been hit for something in the region of £2million'.^[2][3] Irish bookmakers Paddy Power 'reported losses of more than €1 million'.^[2] This was reportedly just the latest of many successes since the Yellow Sam coup, including a 2010 coup 'that netted more than a £1million'.^[1][2]

References[edit]

1. ^ ^abcdefLiam Collins (24 January 2014). 'Barney Curley: A wannabe pop impresario who hit gold at the racetrack'. Irish Independent. Retrieved 25 January 2014.
2. ^ ^abcdefDeclan Whooley (23 January 2014). 'Who is Barney Curley?'. Irish Independent. Retrieved 25 January 2014. Barney Curley came back into the public consciousness with a bang yesterday after horses linked to the gambler took the bookies for millions.Various figures have been bandied about since the four horse accumulator came in ... Paddy Power reported losses of more than €1 million, but that was just the tip of the iceberg ... In 2010 Curley was the mastermind behind a coup that netted more than a £1million.
3. ^ ^abc'Four-horse gamble landed in Britain as horses with links to Barney Curley justify strong support'. RTÉ. 23 January 2014. Retrieved 25 January 2014. Coral's David Stevens said: 'Victory for all four horses has cost us a six-figure payout, and based on our losses we would estimate the industry has been hit for something in the region of £2million, which although still costly, is perhaps lower than some claims.'
4. ^Bellewstown Races website – HistoryArchived 18 November 2007 at the Wayback Machine. Accessed 22 September 2007.
5. ^ ^abHyland, F (2006); Taken For A Ride: Betting Coups And Scandal, Gill & Macmillan (ISBN978-0-7171-4016-9).
6. ^ ^abcdefCurley, B; Townsend, N (1998); Giving a little back: An Autobiography, HarperCollins (ISBN978-0-00-218827-2).
7. ^ ^abSim, A (21 March 2004); The top 10 sporting gambles, The Times. URL last accessed 21 September 2007.
8. ^ ^abcWood, G (24 April 2004); 'Curley finally finds his vocation', The Guardian. (Available online at Buzzle.com. URL last accessed 21 September 2007).
9. ^McClean, D (9 July 2005); 'Beating the odds at BellewstownArchived 16 June 2007 at Archive.today', Irish Farmers Journal. Retrieved 21 September 2007.
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