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Virtual Racing

Few entries in this book pain me more than this one, because for twenty-five years the high street bookie was a second home. At times, not least when supposedly revising (more correctly vising) for law exams failed by record margins, it was in fact my first, and in daylight hours only, home.

I adored everything about these shabby, seedy, grubby, putrid rooms: the sullen, speechless camaraderie with fellow losers, the fug of fag smoke mingled with clothes that long ago yielded their Lenor freshness, the proximity to other lives being lived in quiet despair, the thrill of occasional victory (no money tastes half as good as that unearned), and the addictive anguish of near-perpetual defeat.

Real gamblers, as Dostoevsky knew, gamble not to win but to lose. It’s a whipless form of sadomasochism, with its cathartic cocktail of pain and self-disgust, and the bookie’s in the old days was as skilled a dominatrix as you could desire.

Elegance was always in short supply. Until very recently, a local William Hill in west London retained an ancient blue sign asking customers to avoid urinating in the street on the way out. The bookmaking firms treated us as scum, denying us access to toilets until not long ago, the staff seldom bothering to disguise their contempt; and as scum is precisely how we wanted to be treated.

It started going wrong some twenty years ago, with the introduction of banks of TV screens churning out live satellite feeds (so much less atmospheric and tension-inducing than garbled commentaries over the blower, when a half-length win required a nerve-shredding five-minute study of the photo-finish print to confirm). Then they started cleaning the places, a gross breach of etiquette, and installing such ponceries as vending machines and even, God help us, loos. The public smoking ban was another blow, although not their fault. Gradually, these shops became sanitised, and their peculiar charm vanished.

Nothing was as brutal a turn-off, however, as the advent of virtual racing – appallingly unconvincing computerised horse and dog races presumably created by the dunce-cap wearer at the back of the remedial class at Pixar College. It was hardly as if Ladbrokes, Hills and the rest needed something with which to fill the vast temporal chasm between actual races. The real ones come along every few minutes, and for those who can’t hold on there are ‘fixed odds’ slot machines offering roulette, blackjack, poker and other games to plug the gap. We were never short of things to bet on in a betting shop.

Yet the rapacity of the high street chains knows no bounds. So it was that a few years ago, the screens began to feature these simulations – their results pre-determined by random-number generators in the three- or four-minute gaps between the real versions.

What is particularly tragic about virtual races is that they are enlivened by in-house commentaries identically as involved, dramatic and hysterical as those that attend the Derby and Grand National. Somewhere in a London office, in other words, an employee of William Hill is sitting at a screen watching the virtual race unfold and becoming unhinged by simulated action involving animated animals at an imaginary racetrack.

‘Going behind Elysian Fields, going behind. Hare’s running at Elysian Fields,’ it begins. ‘And they’re away. Trap 2 Fellatio Flyer gets out best, ahead of Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis in 4. There’s trouble behind, with 1 baulking 5, and off the first bend it’s 2 leading 4 and 6. Down the back straight, and 6, John McCririck’s Codpiece, takes it up just ahead of 4, 2 and 3. Round the second-last bend, and 5, Aortic Aneurysm, joins 6. Off the final bend, and there’s nothing to choose. It’s 5 and 6, 6 and 5 [screaming now], 5 and 6, and here’s 3 finishing like a train up the outside to join them. Coming to the line and it’s 6, 5 and 3 in a line, they’ve gone past together. Very close, Elysian Fields.’ A short, tension-heightening hiatus. ‘Result, Elysian Fields. Trap 5, Aortic Aneurysm, has beaten 6, John McCririck’s Codpiece.’

For the committed gambler such as myself, telling fantasy from reality is hard enough. Virtual racing is an animated hoof or paw step too far. Every sensible dealer knows that when you have an addict in your power, you don’t actively encourage the overdose that will either kill him or persuade him to seek professional help.

That, in a sensationally loose manner of speaking, is what virtual racing forced me to do. After that quarter of a century of dismal love, it proved the tipping point, and I turned to internet poker instead. There was a time, truth be told, when that threatened to turn nasty too. But I’m pleased to report that I have learned to control the appetite, and have it down to no more than fourteen hours a day.