WHEN the lights started to go out on English football in the mid-1990s, it took a while for the authorities to smell a rat - or was it the smoke from a cut cable?
A series of matches ended when floodlights went out in the second half. Under FA rules, the matches were abandoned, and the scores annulled. For betting purposes, however, as long as it was after half-time, some Asian bookmakers paid out on the scores as they stood at the time the lights failed.
They paid out a fortune - some sources estimated £60m - before the real culprits were unmasked. Chee Kew Ong and Eng Hwa Lim of Malaysia were caught red-handed at Charlton Athletic's ground. They had enough equipment on them to sabotage another eight matches.
The two men were working on behalf of an Asian betting syndicate led by Hong Kong-born Wai Yuen Liu who had links to the Triad crime organisation. As soon as the scoreline suited the syndicate, out would go the lights, and the members would pocket vast sums. The two Malaysians were each sentenced to four years in jail, Wai Yuen Liu got 30 months and Roger Firth, the security guard they bribed to get access to Charlton's stadium, went down for 18 months.
So what is the connection between England's failing floodlights and the 8-0 thrashing handed out to Forfar Athletic by Peterhead last weekend? Once again the main profiteers were Asians betting on a match which, though it was not "fixed", was as near to a certainty as has ever been gambled on.
To recap the events: Forfar were hit by so many injuries they appealed to the Scottish Football League to be allowed to postpone the match. The SFL turned them down, and manager George Shaw (below) was left with eight fit players and had to sign himself as a trialist to sit on the bench.
The word got out even before the SFL's decision and an avalanche of money was laid across the world on this one obscure Scottish Second Division match. The problem for some bookmakers was that they had printed the odds, which varied between 8-11 and 8-15, on their football coupons and had to stick by those prices at first, though they soon slashed Peterhead's odds when the SFL refused Forfar's appeal.
Some estimates say £3m was bet either in betting shops or over the internet or on betting exchanges - no-one knows the real figure, though Betfair, the world's biggest betting exchange, confirmed that £405,000 had been wagered on the match, with only £7,000 of that on Forfar.
The money was never in danger of being lost - Peterhead were five up by half-time and ran out 8-0 winners. Some bookmakers think the size of their losses were exaggerated. Ladbrokes say they lost "about £15,000" and William Hill not much more - since those two are Britain's biggest bookmakers by far, with total annual profits in excess of £200m, it is clear that the big chains did not lose too much.
"We wouldn't normally lose £15k on a match between Forfar and Peterhead," said a spokesman for Ladbrokes, "but we are taking it on the chin. People who were 'in the know' got on quick, so good luck to them."
Perhaps the most galling aspect of this good old-fashioned betting coup - there is absolutely no suggestion of a "fix" - was the sheer sums involved. Players in the lower leagues getting by on £10 per week - as at East Stirlingshire FC - and hard-pressed treasurers of clubs struggling to survive will have been astonished by the revelation that Scottish lower league football is very big business indeed for some people.
A lot of the betting is in the Far East. Indeed, Ladbrokes' biggest bet on the Peterhead coup was £900 placed in Indonesia. In parts of Asia, handicap betting - where one team or other is given a goal or more of a start - on Scottish lower league football is all the rage, according to professional gambler Tony Ansell, proprietor of the website
www.winonsports.com This former chartered accountant has won more than £1m with a system which largely relied on betting on the away teams in the first, second and third divisions of the SFL. Nowadays he says the British bookmakers don't take his bets, so successful has he been, but the stakes placed by Asian gamblers dwarf their counterparts in this country.
"I might bet £3,000 or £4,000 on a match in the Asian handicap market," said Ansell, "but a professional gambler in the Far East would think nothing of betting £100,000 and I've regularly heard of £250,000 being bet on a single match."
Ansell admits to having had a smallish win on the Peterhead coup - "I was shocked by the final score, as I thought they would win by two or three at the most" - but his sources tell him that Asian gamblers made a killing on the handicap system.
"The bookmakers regularly make up their prices for a match six or seven days in advance," said Ansell, "and on this occasion they appear to have missed the fact that Forfar were going to struggle to put out a team.
"By the time the real situation was known, nothing could be done and when the Asian handicap price came through on Thursday morning, there was a lot of activity."
Ansell's motto is "the harder I work, the luckier I get" and he made his fortune by ceaseless study of the Scottish lower leagues. It gave him an advantage over the bookmakers for some years.
"But I'm afraid they caught up with me eventually," said Ansell. "At first the bookies priced up the Scottish matches as if they were English premiership games, with the home side always favoured, but my statistical analysis showed that, in the lower Scottish leagues, the away sides were actually favoured."
A million pounds or more later, Ansell had to divert his attention to sports such as athletics - he's made another massive profit on that - and place his bets elsewhere. Where Ansell went, others followed, and so successful did some punters betting on Scottish football become that many big chains will not accept bets of more than £100 to £200 on Scottish matches, while other gamblers simply had their accounts closed.
"If you don't gear up in this game, you can get your pants pulled down," said a spokesman for Ladbrokes. "We now have guys working for us who specialise in Scottish lower league football and they do masses of research, such as reading every match report in Scotland on Sunday, for instance.
"They also get the local newspapers to keep them up to scratch with what's going on. We have been around for 120 years, and to keep ahead we know we need to have more information than the punters.
"For the Peterhead v Forfar match, people were just a little bit better informed than us for a change."
Another reason for the size of the coup was the speed at which the news of Forfar's troubles travelled round the globe via the internet.
"The internet has transformed the way people bet," said a spokesman for a leading betting exchange. "It has given companies like ours the chance to enable people to put their wits against each other, and it also means that once the possibility of a dream bet like Peterhead becomes known, it can be transmitted instantly around the world.
"The bookies and the exchange players are usually alive to quick movements in prices, but on this occasion the punters moved quicker. But we would be surprised if it happens again, certainly not for a long time."
BETTING COUPS THAT BEAT THE BOOKIES
THESE are genuine coups, as opposed to events that were fixed. And horse racing isn't even mentioned...
No sane punter bets on 15-fold accumulators and expects to win. In 2001, Mick Gibbs of Manchester did just that. The previous August he placed 30p at cumulative odds of 1,666,666-1 on the outcome of 15 different competitions, ranging from rugby's Natwest Trophy to the clincher, the Champions League. The final that year went to penalties and the 59-year-old roofer admitted he couldn't watch as Bayern Munich's goalkeeper Oliver Kahn (below) saved a Valencia kick to give the Germans the cup and Mr Gibbs his record payout.
Nor was it his first big win. Gibbs won £157,400 on a £2.50 accumulator in 1999, with Manchester United winning the Champions League as one of his predictions.
The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo really did exist. As told in David James's Victorian Bradford: The Living Past, Joseph Hobson Jagger was a mill engineer in the Yorkshire city. He visited Monte Carlo's casino in 1875, and after spotting a mechanical bias in the gearing in the roulette wheel, he won two million francs - about £3m in current money - in eight days before his 'system' was spotted. He retired and lived off his winnings. The man usually credited with 'breaking the bank', Charles Wells, was actually a confidence trickster who died in poverty.
The greatest ever 'novelty bet' was made by an anonymous punter in Newport, South Wales, in 1989. He placed a £30 accumulator on a series of 'novelty bets' happening before December 31, 1999, such as Cliff Richard getting knighted and Irish rockers U2 (pictured) staying together as a group into the new millennium.
On January 2, 2000, he presented his betting slip at his local Ladbrokes, and once the bet was checked, he was paid £194,400.
Possibly the single greatest winning streak in the history of gambling happened in 1995 when Australian billionaire, the late Kerry Packer, played every high-stakes blackjack table in the MGM Grand casino in Las Vegas. In just over two hours, he reportedly won $26m and left tips worth $100,000 to the staff. The MGM Grand management barred him from their tables - he really did beat the house.
Possibly the greatest ever golfing bets are still under way - and they were placed in Scotland. In 2001, a William Hill shop somewhere in Scotland accepted a bet placed by a businessman that Tiger Woods would equal Jack Nicklaus's record and win 18 or more of golf's major tournaments by December 31, 2010. He bet £10,900 at 10-1, giving him possible winnings of £109,000. At the time of the wager, Woods had won just six majors.
In 2005, a 'mystery gambler' walked into Ladbrokes in Coatbridge and placed £25,000 in cash at odds of 5-1 that Woods would beat Nicklaus's record and win 19 majors with no time limit set. Some experts think it is the same man, meaning he could win a total of £234,000.
After his recent spate, Tiger now has 12 majors and there's still a lot of time left for him to win the number needed to make our Scottish punter very happy.
