“A bookmaker’s licence isn’t a licence to print 10% off losing customers. As far as I am concerned, a bookmaker’s licence is

being able to trade customers who win and lose and that’s the way we’re going to try and do it, by offering sustainable pricing to good limits.”

IT’S just over 10 years since this writer met former on-course bookmaker Francis Hyland for an interview at a midweek meeting at Fairyhouse in January.

“You see that rail behind me,” Hyland told me. “About 10 years ago, that would have been full of bookmakers. Now look at this rail, and to your right, there are just two bookmakers beside me. I’m getting closer and closer to the end of the line.”

The narrative around on-course bookmakers hasn’t changed. They were described as dinosaurs then and still are now, but with lighter satchels. The numbers prompt such dire predictions. On-course bookmaker turnover fell for 12 years straight from 2007 onwards, and just when the rot stopped in 2019, with a slight increase in year-on-year turnover, a global pandemic came along.

That led to Irish National Bookmaker Association chairman Ray Mulvaney admitting that it would be inevitable that a few of his colleagues wouldn’t return when racecourses opened up again. Survival has been the objective for a long time for the lords of the ring, so it would seem an unlikely avenue for a fresh face, with fresh ideas, given the tide of online betting seems more or less insurmountable.

New addition

Anthony Kaminskas doesn’t think that is the case. And he’s willing to stand up on a stool and put his money where his mouth is. The 34-year-old is an unlikely addition to the betting ring, mostly because he comes from the online betting world, having forged a very successful career with Paddy Power, while all the time establishing himself as a professional gambler, firstly on the side, and now full time.

In a 10-year stint at the Dublin based firm, Kaminskas went from a junior risk manager to head of greyhound betting for the entire Paddy Power Betfair group until he left in 2018, to bet for himself professionally and to set up AK Bets, which aims to fill a gap in the market for higher staking customers badly serviced by the big betting firms.

The on-course side is just one way he is using to establish his new bookmaking venture and already he has seen the benefit.

“I was always interested in the bookmaking side,” Kaminskas says. “I just thought it was an area that could be done better. AML (anti money laundering), responsible gambling and dealing with customers who win money and don’t lose 10% every day has been done really badly by the industry.

“I just thought I could do it better. I think gambling is just betting 10% above what your price is and bookmaking is laying a bet 10% below what your price is. The key metric is getting your price right. So I thought if I could get my prices right and lay bets against those prices, it was just going to be another income stream.

“A lot of prices you’ll see from the main betting firms are just for €20-25 quid customers and that’s fine. I don’t think I can compete for the €20 customer off Paddy Power - they’ll offer you a better service and better offers than I can.

“But I think if you want to bet 100 quid to a grand, and you want a good service, I think you should bet with me because I’ll offer you better prices, you’ll be able to get your bet on with confidence in my prices and that’s the customer I’m going after.

“It’s (AK Bets) kind of mushroomed from that. The racecourse side of things started off small, with a few pitches, but I’ve ended up buying 17 pitches now on 14 race tracks and I’ve the number one pitch on the front line at Leopardstown.

“I don’t think the ring is dead. I think there’s going to be a lot of money migrating back to the betting ring and I think it’s an area that I can use as a shop window into other stuff I have planned.

“I’ve got a call centre coming along and I’m in the process of getting a licence for that. We’re also looking at an app and a website down the line.”

Rochdale

Kaminskas is from Rochdale, 10 miles north of Manchester. His Lithuanian grandad came to England after the second World War and had an interest in greyhound racing but interestingly, Anthony’s parents and immediate family have no interest in betting.

He was always comfortable with basic mental arithmetic from an early age. His first experience of betting came from working in a Coral shop before he moved on to head office of Betfred, taking bets over the phone.

It was at Betfred that he had his eyes opened to winning punters, how they were treated differently from the majority and it showed him that making a living from gambling was possible. After he completed his economics degree, he saw an advert in the Racing Post for a position at Paddy Power and it ended up being the only job offer he had, so he made his way to Dublin and he’s been here ever since.

Kaminskas worked his way through Paddy Power at a time of wholesale change. The company, which merged with Betfair in 2016, has gone from strength to strength internationally and has to be one of the great Irish business success stories ever.

So it begs the question as to why you would leave such a prominent position at such a major business.

“I was kind of lucky that I got into Paddy Power in 2008 basically when it was a relatively small company,” he explains. “The whole trading room would have been 30 people and it was 30 deadly smart people, whereas now your trading room would be 250 people and there’s probably not even 30 smart people among them.

“So I was really lucky. Knowing nothing, I was put into a room with people and they were very good at what they were doing trading wise. I started off as a junior risk manager, just learning the ropes. Then in about 2012 or ‘13, I was made head of greyhound racing, and shortly after that Paddy Power merged with Betfair so basically I just took on greyhounds for the whole group.

“I did that well for three years, and then for the last couple of years I was trying to plan stuff for myself, and probably didn’t do it as well. I really didn’t enjoy it for the last two years, basically from the time Powers merged with Betfair, the whole company went from employing real smart people in trading, proper smart people, to a very corporate company, to employing a lot of lads from Oxford and Cambridge, who didn’t know anything about gambling.

“Traders were top dogs when I was at Paddy Power. People would be scared to come into the trading room, it wasn’t quite The Wolf of Wall Street type stuff but if you went in you needed to ask a good question because it was where the beating heart of the company was.

“Trading now is just an absolute shell of a thing. Pricing accuracy is just not important. It’s about churning out crap markets for people to have accumulators on basically. It’s just not what I wanted to do.

“The smart customers can’t get a bet on and they just want people who are losing. Anyone can take bets off people who are losing, there’s no skill in that. It’s not what I wanted to do basically and I kind of fell out of love with it. I just couldn’t see myself staying there, having to wear a suit and present to other people in suits.

“At the time I was doing my own gambling on the side, and that was probably taking up 50 hours, alongside the job, so I had to get rid of one of them and it just had to be the job.”

Get better

Kaminskas’s move out on his own is borne of his own desire to get better at betting and to avoid any feeling of regret later in life. And yet the idea that the professional gambler’s life is a luxurious and easy one sounds wide of the mark.

He works seven days a week, while noting he is trying to progress his AK Bets project as well, and the bare function of just getting bets on is possibly the most difficult part of the job. He has 15 bet placers, based around the world, which is a difficult managing task in itself. But he does it for the love of it and can’t imagine doing anything else.

“My basic story starting off was I’d gotten to 200 grand and I had a Lucky 15 in a shop in Betfred in March 2018 - the four horses won and it returned 160 grand. The lad who put it on for me got 10% so I got about 150 grand out of it and that just added to my balance. I just said to myself, I’ve absolutely no excuses not to do this now. If I don’t do it, I’m going to be sat here for the next 20 years talking about how I could have done it.

“Golf and football are probably my main two sports. I spend a lot of time on golf earlier in the week, working off the tee times on Tuesday, going through my ratings and numbers and trying to generate a bet for both the European and PGA tour events that week. Then when those tournaments kick off, I’d be updating my numbers all the time.”

While horse racing has provided Kaminskas significant returns from bets over the years, it’s telling that he now no longer bets on the sport.

“I like the sport but there is just too much hassle getting on,” he asserts. “It just became self-defeating basically for horse racing because if I won I’d have no accounts to bet with the next day so I ended up gravitating towards other sports.

“I just think in general, horse racing customers, the core audience, it’s self-defeating for racing to be too reliant on bookmakers, because the customer which racing is trying to service, if they get any good, they can’t get a bet on. Horse racing, betting-wise, just needs to find a solution to closing people down who are winning money basically.

“That’s kind of part of the reason I set up the bookmakers as well. It’s not going to be a case of come and take a million euro off me but you will get some sort of bet if you’re a winning customer, whereas the corporates won’t deal with you.

“That is why you’re seeing more people coming back to the track. Customers are being serviced better, not just by me but my colleagues in the ring as well. I think it’s brilliant, I don’t care what anyone’s opinion is of on-course bookmakers but they massively make a difference to the atmosphere.

“If no on course bookmakers showed up to Leopardstown for the Dublin Racing Festival, the crowd would be absolutely distraught. The whole experience would be diminished. Go bet on the Tote and have an absolute soulless experience for betting.

“If you want an actual interesting experience in betting go and bet with the lad who dragged his equipment up to the course, whose prices are how own and who’s betting with his own money. I think it’s class.”

Next week Kaminskas will be racing four days of the weekend on top of his own personal betting work and it’s all unrelenting when you couple it with a young family. But he says it’s all about putting in the work now, to gain the reward later, and he’s more than willing to graft hard for it.

“My missus is very good to be honest with you, I’m pretty lucky in that regard. I’m not going to be gone every weekend, there’s going to be lads running it for me at some stage.

“You’re always trying to do it to better improve your financial situation. There is an aim at the end of it all. Short term pain, hopefully, for a long term gain, that’s the way I look at it.

“I’m happy to graft now doing something where if it works, I’m going to be the beneficiary of it rather than somebody else. That is the whole motivation from being self-employed.”