Kauto Stone

John Mac writes:

"This great National Hunt sport of ours has a habit of producing horses which become household favourites for many years.  The key to following these horses financially or otherwise is to get on board before the ship departs the port.

Having reviewed a recent race from Down Royal I have a firm belief that we may be about to see the emergence of yet another equine superstar.

The name of the aforementioned beast is KAUTO STONE.

Now burdened with a name such as that and trained at the same establishment as his illustrious counterpart, comparisons are going to be quickly made. As yet we only have his victories in his native France and his British debut at DOWN ROYAL by which to judge him.

However, I urge all of you with a spare ten minutes to log into the ATR website and watch a re-run of that race.  From a personal perspective I have not seen a horse jump in that manner since the Dickinsons ruled the roost during the eighties and anyone who has a long memory may well recall the giant that was THE MIGHTY MAC. Once you had witnessed that fella leap a fence your heart would sometimes miss a beat such was the exhilarating exuberance he showed for the sport.

Well I got the same sense of excitement from KAUTO STONE and I await his next run with eager anticipation.  As yet we have no idea what his ideal circumstances are likely to be but he is not a horse that I want to backing against anytime soon."

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The other thing I want to mention today harks back to a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the difficulties of keeping bookmaker accounts open when you show the slightest tendency to win.

Several times over recent years I have had losing accounts closed with no explanation beyond the old "trading decision" chestnut. Sometimes this has happened within a couple of days of the account being opened - certainly not long enough for the fiddler to catch on by any normal method.

I'm very careful about hiding my identity by using a dynamic IP address and clearing cookies constantly from my PC. I was at a loss to how they were managing to find me out so quickly.

And then I read this old thread on the Gambling Times forum.

I'm using a more up to date operating system than the ones mentioned on the thread so I'm going to be getting my techy friend to have a good look for this on my pc over the weekend. A colleague who uses a mac found 6 instances of this software secretly installed on his machine. I can't believe the cheek of these swines!

Kieran