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here will be a thousand or probably an even larger number in which men have been ruined by backing horses at odds. What the average gambler, who is nearly always a weakling, wants, is a chance of winning a large sum by risking a small one. If he backs a horse at odds he is well pleased. But then the horse must also be a favorite, or at least he must himself have a high opinion of the horse's chance. Now a horse cannot be a favorite and also have the odds against him, unless there is a good field. Hence, the average betting man of the pigeon type likes to lay his money on one or other of the favorites in a large race, where the odds are at least four or five to one against even the chief favorite. Then if he loses he loses but a small sum compared with that which he has a chance (and, as he thinks, almost a certainty) of gaining. The bookmaker, as we have seen, takes advantage of this delusion. He is aware that a man who, knowing little about horses, fancies a particular horse--on the strength, perhaps, of false information which the bookmaker himself may have
helped to spread-will not be careful to note whether the precise odds are offered. If the current odds are 12 to 1, the simpleton will be content with 11 or 10 to 1, or even less. The bookmaker, then, acts on the contrary principle, He always, or nearly always, lays the odds against horses--he seems to risk much to gain little--but, on the plan he actually follows of always offering less than the fair odds, his multiplied little gains nearly always outbalance heavily his occasional heavy losses. We occasionally hear of a large bookmaker coming to grief; but not often, not nearly so often, as one could wish.
Seeing that such are the ways of the gambling public, it will be seen that the method of gambling followed by men on 'Change would not be seductive enough for the general public. Those who live on the weakness of men for gambling very soon found this out. Although some among them tried to make the Stock Exchange system of speculating generally' available, the public, as a whole, were never greatly attracted by a method of making a fortune which seemed to them both slow and dangerous.
But a system is in vogue now which is as seductive as any lottery system, is at present safe (strangely enough) from check or punishment, and insures a splendid profit from the foolish folk who take part in it, even from those who win money by it--as, for a time, the speculators often do.
This system, which men on 'Change by no means · like for their own transactions, is that called ' the cover
system'; as a method of courting ruin it is the perfection of simplicity.
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