Well, Well, Well - Here We Are!

At least, here I am. Not sure how many of you out there on the Information Super Highway will get to read this but I hope a few of you!

If you have made it (and I thank you profusely if you have) I had better introduce myself and tell you what I hope to achieve with this blog.

My name is Kieran Ward and I am a 40 year old horse racing and betting fanatic. I have been betting for nearly 30 years since my Uncle started taking me to the bookies occasionally when i was around 11 years old. What an exciting place that felt to a small boy - the strange, smoky atmosphere, the shouts of triumph and despair, the newspapers written in an indecipherable code. There was the added thrill of being there even though I wasn't supposed to be - among men winning and losing what seemed huge sums of money to me.

My first good winner was Aldiniti in the1981 National (I wouldn't be surprised if it was the first for quite a lot of punters my age). I think I got about 9/1 ( well, my uncle did for me) and could barely contain my excitement seeing him win, particularly considering Bob Champion's amazing life story.

My love of the game was cemented when I started going to a local pub which had a racing mad landlord, when I was about 14. This was when I started getting my first inklings that betting could really be made to pay. The landlord was a very heavy gambler and seemed to do very well out of it. He was banned from all the local offices and over the next couple of years he used me regularly to place his bets (in exchange for a few free pints and the odd bar snack!). I noticed immediately that I was collecting quite a bit more for him than he was putting down and he seemed to be living rather better than he had any right to as the landlord of a pub in a small, rural town in Oxfordshire.

All of this really piqued my interest and I managed to have some reasonable touches by backing his selections myself.  However, by the time I was 18 or 19 life had taken over and I drifted away from serious betting until my early 30's when I returned with a vengeance - excited by the opportunites of tax-free offshore betting followed by the removal of betting tax altogether. Real profitability seemed an awful lot more feasible with the arrival of online betting and exchanges and I really began to take it seriously again.

To cut a long story short, I have managed to turn a profit in each of the last 8 years and went full time at the game about 3 and a half years ago. It has been a hard road but I really can make my betting pay now - much to the amazement of my super-sceptical friends and family.

So what is the purpose of this blog, you may ask?  Deep breath, here goes - I'm hoping that I can use it as a means to hold myself to account, to give myself another measure of discipline.

I'm also hoping that a few of you may find it interesting and maybe post the odd comment or two! I will be posting some selections and hopefully reviewing and testing a few of the thousands of products on the market. I will let you know the methods, systems and techniques that work for me and with any luck we could all pool our knowledge and we can all become more profitable.

I will also use it to give my thoughts about the game and have an occasional rant about the things that annoy me! I hope it will be funny and informative because if it is, more of you will read it. I will try and throw in some hints, tricks and systems that might help you in your own battle with the old enemy.

I love the game and I love the fact I can make a living from something I would do for nothing anyway. Don't get me wrong - it is not easy and there are lots of lows that go along with the highs but nothing beats the thrill of pitting your wits and knowledge against the bookies and coming out on top!

I intend to post several times a week and I hope you will come along for the ride.

Be lucky

Kieran