Ben Keith at Royal Ascot with Alex Wheeler
At just 33, Ben Keith sits at the helm of the biggest credit bookmaker in Britain.
Since 2010 the company he founded and built up, Star Sports, has acquired leading credit businesses such as Vickers, Turner and Kendrick and Sporting Chance. The average bet staked is £1,000 and the company is heading towards a weekly turnover in the region of £4 million.
Star Sports has a bingo hall in Tralee, Ireland, with a second one in the pipeline, plus prominent racecourse pitches at the Cheltenham Festival, Royal Ascot and Glorious Goodwood.
And then there are the adverts, those innovative, ever-changing, humorous eye-catching strips that appear in the Racing Post on a daily basis, not to mention the full-page ads that coincide with the major meetings, all supplied by betting and gaming industry marketing specialists Square in the Air.
“I think that Bill Esdaile (Square in the Air’s MD) is the industry star,” says Ben. “I would predict that one day he’ll be running one of the ‘Big Three’. He has a wonderful feel for the game and the industry. He knows what people like, has a great creative side and he’s a high achiever.”
Those ads aren’t just aimed at high rollers, Ben insists. “They’re aimed at anyone who wants to bet with a bookmaker who likes to play a punter properly.
“The £20 punter normally prefers in the short-term to go to the best odds guaranteed, five places, 8-1 standout, but once they come to us because they’re tired of explaining that Fakenham is a track, not the name of a horse, they don’t leave.”
Ben Keith is the son of a solicitor whose first case involved Mary Bell, the notorious 11-year-old child convicted of the manslaughter of two small boys in 1968. It was without doubt a baptism of fire. But although Ben includes reading true crime books among his hobbies, he was 100-1 to follow his father into the legal profession.
Instead his fate was sealed when his parents gave way to his pestering and took him to Hove greyhounds when he was 12 years old. His first bet, £2 on a dog named Sarah Jones, was a winner.
“When I look back now, they took me to the dogs many times when they had no interest in it,” Ben reflects. “They were really very kind doing it. I just loved the hustle and bustle of the betting ring.”
By the age of 13 he’d become the school bookmaker at Hurstpierpoint College, in Sussex. Challenges included compiling odds on the identity of the next Head Boy, while making sure to keep the outgoing Head Boy, who had a big say in the choice of replacement, firmly on his side.
He produced a study on greyhound racing for a school GCSE project, including a section on the mathematics of making a book, a portent of his future career path.
Work experience with City Index while still at school led to full-time employment with the spread betting firm, followed by a stint working for Tony Bloom for the Victor Chandler organisation in Gibraltar.
“I learned a huge amount from Tony Bloom,” he says. “He was the ultimate figures man. If you went 6-4, he was a backer at 13-8, a layer at 11-8.
“No stone was left unturned. Every single angle was looked into. He is the hardest working and most dedicated operator I’ve ever seen in action. I still use principles I learned from him today.
“I’m also a figures man. I bet to figures as a layer and I bet to figures as a punter. When it’s over-broke I want to be a backer, when it’s under-broke I want to be a layer.”
He was betting on the racecourse rails by the time he was 20, operating from Barry Slaney’s pitch as he was not then old enough to have one in his own name.
But it was the greyhounds that were his first love, standing, aged 24, at Sittingbourne and Walthamstow, where he operated alongside his childhood hero Tony Morris, the doyen of greyhound bookmakers.
“Sunday nights at Sittingbourne were exceptional,” he recalls. “We used to take lots of money, lay lots of dogs. At Walthamstow the open race nights were exceptional too but I played too much on the graded races there and learned some hard lessons. If it had been just open races at Walthamstow it would have been a goldmine.
“I loved it there. Walthamstow gave me my first profile. I met loads of people there who I’m still friends with now and do business with.”
He credits Tony Morris as being his greatest inspiration and now occupies Morris’s former London residence in Hyde Park Mansions, Marylebone, having purchased it from his widow.
The office walls display framed photos of long-gone greyhound venues such as Rayleigh, Maidstone, Rochester, Park Royal, Charlton, Hackney, White City, Southend and Wembley.
And alongside a wall-mounted Star Racing board is the one headed ‘Tony Morris Crayford’, further proof, as if it were needed, of the esteem in which Ben holds his mentor.
Star Racing – as Star Sports was originally branded – once had six betting shops but no longer has any. Put simply, Ben is not a retail man. “I made an error,” he admits. “I made a rod for my own back buying shops but I was also unlucky with my timing.”
In 2009 he moved the company to Knoll Business Centre in Hove, and in January the following year Star Racing became Star Sports, quickly establishing a niche as the self-styled ‘gentleman’s bookmaker’. It’s a modern-day company but its owner places great importance on old-fashioned betting traditions.
“Of course the company must win; I must beat the punters; I must get paid; I must make a profit to continue. But it’s important to me that I have staff who know and like the game. They are trained to know the business and know the clients – at least 90 per cent are on first name terms.”
He is aware that credit punters are astute punters. He also knows that the choice of clients can make or break a credit bookmaker and acknowledges the importance of being able to understand a punter’s psyche.
“I’ve been betting since I was 12 years old. I’ve done my bollocks many times, I’ve had an edge many times, I’ve thought I’ve had an edge and been wrong many times. I think it’s a bit like an antique dealer who knows that something’s a fake. When you ask him how he knows it’s a fake, sometimes he says ‘it just doesn’t feel right’. That is how I am about gamblers.”
In a Racing Post interview four years ago he commented that “on a trading level you have to be very patient – a trait I could possibly do with improving.” Four years on, is he now more patient than before?
There is a long pause for consideration.
“Am I more patient? Ambition and patience don’t go well together,” he responds, “but I’m probably a little bit more patient than I was.
“Having money helps because you can wait for people to lose, and having more clients gives a better spread of punters. For a bookmaker, money is ammunition.”
He recalls that when asked to stand his first five-figure bet he “felt every nerve in my body telling me to decline”. He saw it as a psychological barrier that he felt compelled to overcome.
“I think life is about levels,” he observes. “You’re in charge of which level you’re in until you’re out of your depth. You make yourself the person you want to be. If you keep trying, eventually you become that person. If you want to be Tony Morris, Victor Chandler or Freddie Williams you have to take those bets. If you don’t want to be like them, you say ‘no’.
“Once you go to war with punters, unless it’s exceptional circumstances, you don’t knock them back, you just march on.”
He looks to tailor a service individual to each client’s needs, a personal service that the internet cannot provide. He also endeavours to make rational decisions that are not based on fear or greed.
“Fear is a natural thing. Danger is a factual thing. But fear is a choice. If someone asks you for 10 grand at 3-1, if it wins you’re going to lose 30 grand. That is the situation – take the bet or don’t take the bet, but don’t get scared about it. Being scared doesn’t make it lose.”
Adopting a positive outlook, he describes himself as “extremely driven”, adding “I do everything to the maximum.”
Even on a bad day he likes to feel there’s an area in which he’s moved forward.
“I believe that momentum is such an important thing. Each day you should be pushing forward and, when you go to bed, take solace in one of the areas in which you’ve moved forward.”
That may all sound fine and dandy but there was a time when things went so badly wrong that he briefly contemplated giving up.
“Once, about eight years ago, around the time I got knocked for 600 grand.”
He endured what he calls a “terrible run”. One punter won £300,000, another won £200,000, while another knocked him for £600,000, forcing him to sell his house. Psychologically, that takes some getting over.
“When I was at school the only thing I knew was betting,” he reasons. “To be honest with you, I’ve never had a choice. When you ask me ‘how do you get over it?’, my life is that of a bookmaker; this is what I do. I play punters, I go head to head.
“When you travel around the world you see people who try and escape from themselves, be it through alcoholism, drugs, a divorce, or whatever. I can never escape from the game. The game is part of me. Wherever I go I’d still want to be at Cheltenham for the first race. I’d want to be calling the office at 2.30 and asking what we had laid, because it’s what I do.
“When I’m having a really bad run I of course feel exposed and I feel like I’m being picked on by the percentage. However, I’ve been doing it long enough to know that if I do it in a certain fashion I will win a percentage, and I just have to keep going. I can’t expect to win on a day, or a week. It’s about a period of time.
“Also, it’s the fear of being skint again. When you’ve had money and lost it, it’s very different from never having had money at all. When you come back again – which is the real test – it is a fear that is always with you no matter how well it’s going.
“I’m absolutely terrified of failure, going skint, and death.”
In November 2010 Ben spent two weeks working in Casa Hogar children’s orphanage in Peru, run by a local legend known as Papa Roberto. He found it a life-changing experience. Since then, Star Sports has continued to donate £20,000 annually to support the school education area. In addition, it has pledged to finance any of the children that want to go on to university.
“Let’s be fair, when you’re a bookmaker, none of us produce much other than hot air when we’re talking about something like the Gold Cup,” he reasons. “We’re not really helping many innocent parties.
“I’m a very lucky person in that, yes, I’ve made my business, but I’m bloody lucky that I’ve found my business. I might have been wandering around now at 33 thinking ‘I just don’t know what I’m going to do with my life’.”
His ambition is to set up a children’s charity. “I’ve always said I wanted to do it here in Britain but there are many children in need all over the world, whatever the country. One thing I’ve been lucky with is that my parents supported me and loved me unconditionally. I think that’s something we all take for granted but we shouldn’t.
“Peru would be the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done. Helping, and sending the money and knowing that it’s doing good, that’s power.”
The last five years have seen rapid progress for Star Sports. Ben has a long-term view as to how he envisages the business in five years’ time.
“We’re buying student property and I’d like to own a lot more of that,” he says. “I’d like in five years’ time to have a foundation of a really strong portfolio of student property, high yield, that pays an income to my company that can help it out during bad times.”
Looking back rather than forward for a moment, even though he now does business on a far higher level he insists that, in terms of personal satisfaction, nothing compares with the thrill of that first night at Walthamstow ten years ago, standing at his pitch alongside his boyhood hero Tony Morris.
“I was there in the middle of the ring with the biggest board, taking the most money.
“That was like an 18-year-old playing for England for the first time. It doesn’t get any better – that was my England call-up.”
Ben Keith reflects on…
Tony Morris
“One thing you learned about Tony Morris that at times was almost unnerving was that nothing riled him. However busy it was, he remained calm. It was his preparation. He was the first person at the track, he knew everybody and everybody knew him. He had relationships.
“One thing in gambling that’s very important is managing relationships and information. Information is the most valuable commodity in our game. However, it’s the value of the information which is key. You have to be able to assimilate information, filter good from bad information but most of all you have to know the value of information. Tony Morris was somebody who, when he stood on his pitch, had listened to many different opinions, spoken to many different people, and he didn’t make any ricks.
“Tony Morris had a quiet charisma and that, I think, was his key. He was the class act.
“Bookmaking is so much more about image than people think; 6/4 tastes the same with Ladbrokes, Victor Chandler, Star or Bet365 but people tend to bet with their own type. Tony Morris was somebody who, understood that whereas others thought people just go for the best price. Tony Morris was rarely best price; he wasn’t about best price, but his board was immaculate, the staff were smartly dressed, it looked the biz.
“Tony Morris’s image wasn’t just to say ‘I’m a smart man, have a bet with me’, it was also to say ‘if you want to have 20 grand at 5-2 on a dog tonight, if it wins I can pay you’.
“Before he died he left me two crombie coats and two pairs of cufflinks. I don’t wear them all the time but I sometimes wear them for luck.”
The ring today
“I think that people who didn’t go in a betting ring 15 years ago don’t know what a betting ring is. You go into a betting ring now at Ascot or Cheltenham and no-one shouts the prices, you don’t hear anybody shout ‘win or each-way’. When I stand on our pitch at Cheltenham shouting the prices like a nutter, everyone looks at me as if I’m off my head.
“You never see a tic-tac, you don’t see floor-men running around the ring, there’s no activity. The betting ring used to be a real community. It was a place where people learned the game. You could watch Tony Morris bet at the dogs, you could go to the races and watch big bookies shout the odds on the rails, you could watch a ‘fiddler’ betting without the favourite in the back row.
“In the back row they went 11-8, in the front row they were 5-4. They were trading with each other; they were sending money to the silver ring at 6-4. I think bookmakers then had a much better understanding of the figures of the game.
“I love the betting ring for what it’s given me. I learned a lot about many different things in the betting ring. It provided me with some great and kind teachers. Some of them don’t even know they taught me.
“That’s why I’m loyal to the betting ring. It was the highlight of my adolescence. I’m sad when I go there now and see the way it is but I choose to remember it and love it for what it was.”
His time in Casa Hogar
“When Star Sports sends that 20 grand a year I feel grateful because I know how much good it will do. There’s a floor in the orphanage where we pay for computers and extra teachers.
“That’s power, to be able to help them, that’s power for good.
“If that doesn’t happen, the cycle doesn’t change. If they’re uneducated when they leave the children’s home, they’ll go and work on a farm, earn five quid a day, they’ll have too many kids because they don’t know about contraception, those kids will live on the street and they’ll end up in the children’s home.
“We’re immersed in westernlife and the rat race.People think they live in poverty here but there are many people who don’t have food to eat.
“What was incredible about the children in Peru was their gratitude and love of life. It was like a bubble of happiness. I feel honoured to be able to add to that. It’s nice to be able to put something back.”