Sports Handicapping Then and Now

With online poker and sports betting websites controversies popping up in the news I thought it would be interesting to show that anti-gambling activities have been going on for quite a long time.

Here are some comments about the Anti-Gambling League during the late part of the 19th century. They had many of the same sports betting problems that folks face today.

The Anti-Gambling League.— Rightly or wrongly, man is a gambling animal, and we are not called upon to accuse or defend him in these pages. We might, speaking seriously, wish that he would not play the game quite so high, or make it, as he does in so many instances, the one great business of his life. 

We often think that the man who is bound, or binds himself, to one particular sport or pastime is an unhappy man, because the time comes when he cannot have it, and—we are speaking of the devotee, remember— all other sports are to him as nothingness. The grand word of sportsman should cover, in fact, many occupations, and as a rule it does. The racing' man hunts, shoots, " goes a - fishing," and devotes much of his leisure to golf, hockey, and similar pastimes. But we fear in many instances that the auri sacra fames chains him with an alluring chain to the Turf. And we will say boldly more than this—and our knowledge of and experience on the Turf compels us to say- it—that there are men to be counted by the hundreds and the thousands who have and know no other occupation than going racing and betting on every race. 

Now, this we hold to be distinctly bad, and we cannot assign to them and such as them the honoured name of. sportsmen. If betting by some process or change in opinion could be rendered impossible, then these men would never go to a race meeting. The love of the horse, the sight of him struggling gamely home among his fellows, is something of an unknown quantity, and only gratifying to him if he wins. If he is defeated, they have no eyes or feeling to appreciate his courage, or the tenacity with which he stuck to his work. His rider's jockeyship is too often dismissed with a curse, and the sportsman (?) turns moodily to the next events to see how he can "get it back." We are not exaggerating. Our readers know these men as well as we do. They are gamblers pure and simple, and we repeat that if betting was rendered by some means impossible, they would never see a racecourse.

Moreover, we are convinced that the birth and growth of this tyrannous Anti-Gambling League is traceable to this class of men. We others who take our pastimes quietly, who bet now and then in moderation, and only lose what we can pay, are mixed up together with men who have no other idea but making money at the game, whose Bible is the Calendar and Ruff's Guide, and who, amidst the war of politics and the clash of social questions, rigidly fix their mental features on one subject—form. 

An interesting study, no doubt; very interesting and absorbing; but one where the subject is too often the master of the student, and, the more the latter studies, the deeper gets his confusion. With the study, too, comes the gambling instinct; the lust to win absorbs him, and imagination tells him he has found that royal road on which are so many travellers. Then, because the devotee discovers that the royal road in too many instances leads to semi, if not utter ruin, nous autres are to be defrauded of our part by the uprising of a Puritanism we had flattered ourselves was extinct, and again are we threatened with that Praise - God - Barebones tyranny which wrought such murderous mischief once upon a time, and against which the English people—mark it well, Anti-Gambling Leaguers—revolted with a determination that swept away Puritanism with the besom of destruction. 

Hard would it be if because some men bet to excess, and give themselves up body and soul to the pursuit of one sport, and one alone, these Mawworms— these Nonconformist Conscience gentlemen who swallowed Jabez Balfour and Co., and stumbled at the idea of the Prime Minister of this country having a good horse and being proud of the possession of it—should succeed in their attempt to ruin a sport that is really and truly national.

We know well the evils of betting. We are believers because we have seen and know the ruin that it has brought on homes, stately, middle-class, and humble. Particularly does it seem dangerous to the poor clerk and the small tradesman. The struggle for existence, we suppose, leads them to it, and after a brief experience they go under. If we could in the ranks of true philanthropy find some remedy for this evil we should indeed rejoice, and the Nonconformist Conscience might go hang. 

The utter ignorance of these poor victims as to all that pertains to racing is one of the lamentable features of the mania that seizes on them. They hear of a man who has won some pounds, or even a few^ shillings, by . backing the favourite. Why should not they do likewise ? Boys, and girls too, generally of a superior class in life, bet; and we would make it a punishable offence to the bookmakers who bet with them. Foolish mothers bring their daughters to the meetings round London, where we have seen young girls, little more than children, with some callow youth as their guide, risking their shillings and

half - crowns, while the idiotic mother looks complacently on. What should be done to that mother? 

We should probably shock our readers if they were told what the V. D. would gladly do, so he will forbear. But these are the bye-paths, as it were, of the great racing drama which the AntiGambling League has sat itself to mend. There are not many mothers, we should like to think, like the advanced specimens on the Metropolitan circuit. We have, by the way, seen them farther afield—but no matter. 

But the Anti-Gambling Mawworms must be crushed, because it is tyranny. Poor clerks and small tradesmen may be ruined; young girls may grow up into womanhood those terrible creatures, horsey and slangy women. These are evils, no doubt, but they are of the lesser sort, and not to be compared with that tyranny which, as we understand them, the promotersof the Anti-Gambling League would set up—the tyranny of Puritanism.

We English people groaned under it for some years, and then threw off the yoke by welcoming a Monarchy and a Court not of the most moral character. The A. G. L. will, if it is wise, ponder on these things. We do not seek to lessen the evils of the racecourse, but we do protest against the calumnies, the unwarrantable insults, levelled against those in the highest places because they own racehorses, back them, and are proud in the possession of a good one.

The pros and cons of sports betting, horse betting and sports betting strategy haven't changed much in all these years have they?