Reflections

Friday night is family night in the Wilson household. One recent Friday I took my son Tom to the Rubicon Casino in Temple Street, and dropped him off at 8:30 p.m. to play in a £10 rebuy poker tournament at 9 p.m. Then I go and pick up my youngest son, Jack, who has become an outstanding pool player. He is a pool hall wizard. Jack puts that pool ball anywhere he wants to on the table.

We pop down to a local pub, The Yew Tree, and I accompany him into the saloon bar where to get a game you have to put 50 pence on the table and wait your turn. Jack has a can of orange mineral and I have a can of diet coke. So there I am in a saloon bar with my 17-year-old son, and his 50 pence is the next one up. Jack asks me if I will sponsor him for a £5 bet on the side with a guy called Sharky. The name puts me off immediately, but I give Jack £5 and he manages to win nine straight games. He was unbelievable, absolutely out of this world, and he wins £45. Then somebody suggests we play doubles, and the only game Jack loses all night is when I partner him. I class myself as being a half decent pool player but these boys take the game to a different level.

I drop Jack off at home and he’s £40 in profit. Foolishly I tell him on the way home that he’ll never have any money if he keeps playing these games in public houses.
I then go back to the Rubicon to pick up my other son, Tom, who I presume will be knocked out of the tournament. When I arrive he’s the chip leader in the tournament and playing roulette while on a break. I obviously try and deter him from playing roulette, saying he’ll never have any money if he continues like this, but Tom cashes in £200 from a £10 start and then also goes on to win the poker tournament, collecting another £280.
On the way home, I give Tom nothing but earache, how stupid he is playing roulette and that he will never have any money. And it wasn’t until after I’d dropped him off at his house that a memory ran through my mind.

In 1987, I owned a box van, a massive box on wheels which was used for removals. There was a recession in the 1980s and the firm that had owned it had gone bump, so I had bought this vehicle for next to nothing. I remember one night somebody knocking on the door and saying, “Can you meet Steve Blunt and Chris Bold in the casino later on?” I went to the casino to meet them, and they had a proposition for me that seemed too good to be true. They told me that with the help of my box van there would be a good earner for me the next day. But we had to get up crisp and early. Crisp and early meant that we left the casino penniless at 4 a.m.

Our adventure involved a transport firm that had also gone bump in Kidderminster. Their vehicles had been auctioned off, but a load of lorry tyres had been left on the premises unattended.

Everybody thought the tyres were worthless. But Steve Blunt knew a place in Birmingham that could re-groove lorry tyres called Roadstone Rescue. We removed every lorry tyre from Kidderminster, taking three journeys and selling them to the firm. They paid up to £50 for each lorry tyre. This was incredible. There was Goodyear, Michelin, and Continental, everything you could think of.

At 9 a.m. that morning, the man in charge of Roadstone Rescue, Ray, paid us £4,000 in cash. We did a three-way split and then went for a breakfast fit for kings. Bacon, eggs, sausages, tomatoes, black pudding, and kidneys, you name it, we had it on our plates.
Steve Blunt, whose nickname was the “tyre man”, was also an ex-member of the Hole in the Wall Gang which was a notorious gang that used to make their living by making holes in walls and helping themselves to any goods that happened to be inside. I had absolutely no idea that this was the same Steve Blunt as I sat there eating my breakfast. Steve then declared to us that Warwick races were on and we were only twenty minutes from the racetrack.

The year was 1987, and for those of you that have been gambling long enough, this was the first year of SIS broadcasting in betting shops which meant for the first time ever you could watch every dog race and every horse race live. We arrived at Warwick racetrack at 10:55 a.m. The first race wasn’t until one o’clock, but the first race in the betting shop was a live dog race at 11 a.m. from Hackney. The three of us must have been the most compulsive gamblers in Great Britain, because by the time the second race of the day at Warwick was under orders, we hadn’t got £10 between the three of us. The lot had gone.

We had started the day with a small fortune and ended it with nothing. And here I am today lecturing my two sons on how to gamble. One was walking home with £40 and the other with £480, and there I was, having lived by the turn of a card, by a coin flip, and by the next race at Wolverhampton, telling my two boys, who seem to have established themselves in making a few quid, where they’ve gone all wrong.

The best thing I can do is sit back, keep my mouth shut, and learn a lesson from my up-and-coming pool wizard, Jack, and my poker champion son, Tom.

Mad Marty Wilson is a professional gambler and poker consultant for Matchroom Sport.