AN ODDS LOT THEY ARE : Bookmakers, Legal Fixtures at British Tracks, Add Color to the Racing Scene While Chalking Up Some Nice Profits

On a recent autumn afternoon at Newmarket Heath near Cambridge, about 25 members of the Bookmakers’ Protective Assn. set up shop in front of the grandstands an hour or so before the first race. They were all men, mostly middle-aged or older. They wore rumpled tweed suits or sports jackets, ties and glum expressions.

First, they staked out their territory and set up their “joints,” metal tripods on which they hung their names and some kind of chalk board. On the boards they wrote in the names of horses running in the first race. Later they would chalk in the odds on each horse for their customers, who were beginning to gather around them.

Itinerant bookies are as much a fixture at English race tracks as horses and jockeys. They operate legally as independent contractors in a highly respected profession. They travel from track to track, often working at two or three in the same week. It is often more fun to watch them than the races.

Surprisingly, 98% of the money wagered on horses in England is bet through the members of the B.P.A. at the track or in one of the country’s 12,000 licensed betting shops. The government-sponsored Tote, the English equivalent of U.S. parimutuel wagering, gets the other 2%. At Newmarket, the bookies did a brisk business while the young women in red uniforms manning the Tote windows under the stands did virtually none.

Although the odds offered by the bookies and the Tote do not not vary much, bettors prefer to do business with the bookies because they know immediately what prices they are getting.

Aside from this obvious advantage, bookies are a colorful bonus attraction to English racing. They line up in front of the stands, starting a few yards from “The Rail,” which separates the Members Enclosure from the Tattersalls Ring (the English version of the U.S. clubhouse), and stretch out across the Silver Ring (the English equivalent of the U.S. grandstand).

They work first from a “guide,” which lists the odds on horses based on their form. They chalk these prices on their boards a half-hour or so before the first post-time and then frantically try to keep up as the odds begin to change rapidly. Bettors hover around the joints and wait for the right odds before risking their pounds. Most bookies use chalk, others a felt pen, to update their prices.

However, the real excitement doesn’t begin until the big betting firms such as Ladbrokes, William Hill and Coral, which have representatives working on the rail, start putting out their off-course odds. Standing on stools within earshot of the rail, the “Tic-Tac” men swing into action.

Semaphoring hand signals wildly, they look like third-base coaches putting on the hit-and-run as they relay the latest prices from the big firms to the bookies they work for in the Tattersalls and Silver rings. The bookies like to know where the big money is going.

The name on the joint at Newmarket read: “Joe Barnett & Sons.” Joe Barnett, 71, has been a bookie for 58 years, learning the trade from his father and grandfather, who also worked the English tracks. For 130 years, there has been a Barnett at Newmarket and most other English courses.

On this afternoon, Barnett wore a gray suit, white shirt and blue bow tie and worked, as usual, with a crew of four, including one son who recorded all the price changes on a chalk board.

“I’ve got me own Tic-Tac man,” he said. “He stands behind my joint.”

Barnett has many regular customers, including a few who bet on credit. Most, he said, rely on tips they get in newspapers. “I can change the odds a little, to attract more bets,” he said.

Asked how he differs from the big betting firms, he replied: “They have shareholders.”

Barnett pays about $43 a year for his membership in the B.P.A. On a big day at the track he’ll take in about $4,300. Earlier in the week at Goodwood, his favorite track, he collected only about $2,300, however. “It was a very bad day,” he said.

The average minimum bet in the rings was 2 pounds, or about $2.90. At some joints, however, the average was 5 pounds, or about $7.25. As post-time neared, bettors swarmed around the bookies to get their money down.

If a bookie in the Silver Ring is getting 3-1 on a horse and his Tic-Tacker tells him it’s 5-1 in the Tattersalls Ring, the Silver Ring bookie then can get 5-1 from a Tattersall bookie through his Tic-Tac man.

To protect their information, Tic-Tackers use numbers that are different from the ones in the track programs, so even if someone can read Tic-Tac, he doesn’t know what horse is being discussed.

The “leisure industry,” as betting is known in England, is an enormously profitable business. About $5 billion is bet every year at race tracks and in betting shops that were made legal by the Betting and Game Act in 1961. Before 1961, all betting was done on the telephone--or illegally.

“It (betting) is one of the social things in our country,” said Ron Pollard, a senior director of Ladbrokes, the country’s biggest bookmaking firm. “If it moves, you can bet on it.”

Ladbrokes opened for business in the village of Ladbroke 90 years ago, accepting only wagers on credit from what Pollard called the “very top echelons of people.” If you worked in a trade, he said, you couldn’t get an account.

The firm was bought for nothing in 1956 by Max Parker, who paid 100,000 pounds for it and then collected a 105,000-pound debt that was owed the company. Today it is worth about $725 million, collects 20% of all the money bet in the country, or about $1 billion, and is a respected member of the London Stock Exchange. In fact, for five straight years it was the No. 1 company on the exchange.

Betting is only about 50% of Ladbrokes’ business today, however. “We have a lot of property,” Pollard said. The company, in fact, owns more hotels than anyone in the United Kingdom but Trusthouse, 19 holiday centers, bingo halls, the Detroit, Mich., Race Course, two Greyhound tracks and large industrial properties. Also, it sells television and stereo sets and manufacturers slot machines.

Parker’s nephew, Cyril Stein, runs the company and its 1,463 betting shops today as Chairman of the Board, and Pollard, 59, is its “Wizard of Odds.” Pollard makes the odds on everything but horse racing, dealing exclusively in what he calls “specialty betting.” He gets some weird requests.

A woman from El Cajon, Calif., for example, once bet $100 with Pollard at 500-1 that a spacecraft would land on Earth from outer space with aliens aboard on or before June 30, 1980. She lost.

A man from Surrey, England, wrote: “Would you please accept the following bet: That Elvis Presley will descend to Earth in a flying saucer and re-enter the human form that he left? It is to happen by the end of 1981.” He lost, too.

Pollard won a $20 bet from a Daly City, Calif., man who gambled, “That before the end of 1980 aliens from another planet will land in the midwest of the United States, speak English and appear on television.”

Pollard has all those letters framed and hanging on the wall in his office in Hanover Square at Harrow-on-the-Hill, a suburb of London. He will bet you who will be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the next prime minister of Great Britain or the next Miss World. He even decides the prices on who will win the Booker Prize for literature. “Tonight I’m reading six books,” he said.

When Las Vegas bookies want to know the odds on U.S. presidential elections, they phone Pollard. If anyone wants to bet they’ll have twins or quadruplets, they ask for the “Wizard of Odds.” “I’ll bet on anything,” he said. “Anything” includes darts, snooker, tennis lawn bowling, the U.S. Open and Masters golf tournaments, the Super Bowl and political elections all over the world.

Pollard takes in about $350,000 on U.S. presidential elections, most of the money coming from the United States. Before an election here, Pollard said, “120 or so would-be MPs phone me up to find out how they’re going to get on.”

Ladbrokes takes in more money on an election than it does on the Epsom Derby.

Last summer, Ladbrokes accepted a lot of bets on whether it rained every day in August. The weather bureau, asked to decide the wager, ruled that it rained only 30 days.

Much of Pollard’s and Ladbrokes’ business comes from the United States. “I make 30,000 pounds (about $43,500) a year from California,” he said.

From every pound wagered here, the government extracts 8%. The racing industry gets 1.3%. Ladbrokes puts a representative on the rail at the tracks, Pollard said, for two reasons: “One, to deal with our credit customers and, two, if our office has 150,000 pounds bet at 10-1, we can send money to the track, say 5,000 pounds, and affect the odds and protect ourselves. We can bring the odds down to 8-1 and reduce our liability.”

Bookmakers get most of the horse race business, Pollard said, “because bettors want a choice. They want to know what the odds are. It’s the same as going to a grocer. I want to go to my own grocer. I have a contact; I’m getting service. Supermarkets are too impersonal, too big.”

Ladbrokes and William Hill put money back into racing by sponsoring major races. Ladbrokes spends more than $200,000 on such promotions every year.

Pollard was wrong when he said he will bet on anything. He refused to accept bets on the British miners’ strike “because we don’t bet on national disasters.”

But if it moves . . . place your bets.