You are reading a comment on horse-racing by a person who claims the most successful horse-betting record in all of Hong Kong.
Twenty or so years ago, someone in the office passed round a hat containing 40 slips of paper, each bearing the name of a different horse entered for the Melbourne Cup; $10 in the hat bought one of the slips of paper and the winner took the pot.
There you go, a 40-to-one payout ratio, and as your correspondent has never since bet on a horse or even gone to a horse race, his record remains intact.
Find someone, if you can, who has a better win record in his betting career on the track.
Unfortunately, most other people who bet on horses don't know when to stop. You can read the sad results almost every day in the stories of ruined lives told to our courts.
It is an unsavoury business and always has been, no matter how often it is referred to as 'The Sport of Kings' or dressed up in the trappings of wealth or called 'gaming' instead of gambling. Somehow or other, it always gets ensnared in underworld connections.
