Our special guest this week is a professional punter who focuses exclusively on harness racing. Ben Krahe's background as an on-course and corporate bookmaker plus his pro punting experience means that he has some excellent points to share with everyone who listens in (or reads the full transcript).

Punting Insights You'll Find

The evolution of on-course and corporate bookmakers.

What he learned from some of the smartest players in the industry.

Where to start when analysing a race

How and why he uses a special technique to bring his market back to 100%

Why 3 years of stats led him to focusing on certain tracks

Today's Guest:

Ben Krahe who provides the ratings for our Harness Power package.

Ben's Parting Advice:

" To be honest I learned pretty much everything I know from him."

 

Get the Transcript:

David: Hi, this is Dave Duffield and I’d like to welcome Ben Krahe to the show, how are you Ben?

Ben: I’m very well thank you Dave, yourself?

David: Going really well thanks and I might as well start at the start… tell us about your early background and your interest in betting.

Ben: Well, like many of us I was probably conceived actually at Harold Park I would imagine on a Friday night at the trots. My interest started very early and I was just a punter myself. I really wanted to get into the bookmaking side of things so about 12 years ago I got my own bookmaking license and I started fielding at various New South Wales country greyhound tracks such as Cessnock and Singleton which are actually now defunct but that’s where I learnt the trade.

David: At those tracks at that time was it a thriving on course bookmaking scene?

Ben: It was probably the end of it then, it was just getting to the end of it. I was actually the only bookmaker on track so obviously the prices had to be pretty accurate. There was still the smart punters on track back then and unlike now I had to bet someone to win $2000 on track back then. You had probably 100 to 150 people on track and I was the only bookmaker, there was probably 20 guys that were smart and the rest were $5 punters. It was the end of the country bookmaking, I suppose.

David: We’ll get to the corporate scene in a moment but you must laugh looking back at what little money most of the corporates will take now when you had to bet them $2K on course.

Ben: Yeah, it’s becoming a bit of a farce but hey, we do our best and hopefully we can do our best for everyone here.

David: So when you were on course bookmaker and if you’re the only one there how would you go about pricing up the race to try and have it as a pretty good set of prices so you’re not getting stung?

Ben: It’s pretty much the same as the way I price a race now, I always do that … Being a punter … Even a bookmaker’s market for me … I still like to approach it in a punting way. Most of the races I think have only got a few chances and we’ll talk about that later, they are the races that we like to focus on and really aim at and these type of meetings. I think myself and even when I moved into the corporate world I don’t like to throw something up 20-1 if it’s really a 200-1 chance, I think that’s a waste of some percentage in your market and a waste of making some money somewhere else.

David: We’ll definitely cover that in a bit more detail later on. From the on-course bookmaking scene what was the next step in your involvement in the industry from there?

Ben: Well, the bookmaking, I learnt a lot on track and I think that’s the best place to learn anywhere. It wasn’t that we were losing money but we weren’t making a huge amount of money for the commitment we were putting in and I saw a job advertised in Darwin and that was with Alan Eskander and that was with Betstar. Basically there was myself and three other guys that were already working for him. The four of us pretty much opened the offices in Darwin. That was a good ten years ago now or eight or nine years ago,