Philip Goldberg

 “I am one of the ninety five percent that don’t take anything out of the game. For close on forty years I have been punting horses every day. In any other business, I would be considered a good and loyal client. In horseracing it works differently. They don’t  even know my name and are clueless when it comes to knowing what makes me tick.” 

Accountant Philip Goldberg is a horseracing addict and an ‘ordinary punter’ in his own words.

A well known face in betting outlets on the Cape West Coast, he has had his fair share of good and bad fortune, but says that he is concerned that horseracing is doomed to extinction if we continue on the current path.

He has called on Saftote to introduce an environment where more people win rather than fancy marketing tricks with telephone number dream figures.

What is your name?

Philip Goldberg ,aka Kingpin

How old are you?

Racing has aged me. I am only rated 48 on paper.

Where did you grow up?

Next door to Milnerton Racecourse, which was as close to heaven as I could get.  Well in those days it was, anyway.

Where were you educated?

Herzlia , UNISA and UCT.

What is your occupation?

I am an Accountant by qualification  but racing is my life and keeps me far too busy to do anything else full time.  So I found a happy medium and started a tipping service in 2005.

It is called Kingpin and I currently have a client base of 500. My phone rings endlessly with happy and hard luck stories.

My role also amounts to a form of counselling. A sort of Punters Anonymous’  a lot of the time as I answer questions and deal with racing related queries  from Tellytrack coverage, to crooked jockeys to scratchings. These peripheral services are all free!

How long have you been interested in racing?

My father was a fanatic (and still is) and I started when I was at crèche. While the other kids played  hide and seek, I was playing commentators and bookmakers.

How were you introduced to the game?

Family interest is the catalyst that triggered my generation’s interest in most cases.

Racing was a bonding passion. It was like listening to Squad Cars and the Men From The Ministry. It was something that families could do together. The Cape Hunt amateur racing also played a role in fostering a love of the game.

My Mom even used to take a syndicate jackpot of the ladies in the office at the Big Four in Loop Street every Saturday morning. Everybody put ten cents in. And the Met and July sweeps were events. Those were the days!

Do you think that young people are being properly marketed these days?

Gosh, no. Bringing a couple of half drunk, fashion conscious testosterone charged under 23’s to big racedays  to listen to some band none of us have ever heard of is like flying to the Moon with a half a tank of petrol. It is not sustainable.

It just makes racing look glam for a few hours.

The following day, the diehards are back toteside  doing their lives and the youngsters are sleeping off hangovers or sitting at Shimmy Beach Club or Caprice or some other  fashionable  joint.

How often do you punt?

Every solitary day.I would need to be hospitalised to miss it. Thank heavens for telebet, as there are times people of my age need to go to hospital for the odd day.

Why did you start a tipping service?

I started it as a source of income and to allow me to work in racing when I realised that I was never going to be an executive in this industry. So studying form became work and I get to keep my pulse on the heartbeat of the game. I have met some great people through it.

My customer  is mostly the smaller guy who gets treated like you know what by the operators.

Tell us about your tipping service?

It is sms and email based and we have varying options to suit every pocket.

We have a loyal core client base that have been with us almost a decade now. They live in De Aar and Koekenaap and beyond.

I used to specialise on the UK racing but thanks to the Tellytrack mess that sector has been badly hit.

How has racing changed?

The usual excuse is that it is no longer the only game in town.

But if all of our modern day distractions were so magnetic, then how has soccer grown so much?

We just haven’t kept pace through a combination of bad management and a lack of passion where it really counts. There are too many talkers and too few doers.

The whole transparency charade has also created a false sense of information, I believe. What happened to the genuine street corner tip for example? All Tellytrack do is interview the big  trainers who give us the usual political nod.

We also want to hear from the Stan Ferreira’s and Barend Botes’ of this world.

Does racing look after its customers?

Don’t make me laugh. Give me the name of one lobby or individual who is batting for the customer. There is no such animal.

In the totes, which are still the shopfront for the mass market, the environment is dirty, there is little information available, the furniture is usually on a par with a Government Hospital waiting room and the majority of staff look like they have just lost a close friend.

Never once have I left a tote and been greeted with a ‘hope to see you soon.’

Does the game need a loyalty programme?

Now you are talking! Most definitely it does. Gold Circle tried in vain a few years ago but messed it up and wasted a million rand on a disaster.

Any competitive environment needs to reward customers. Ask the banks.Ask the retailers.

Look at what happens to us on Met day. We have to pay R200 to sit in the sun and drink warm beers while the one off’s enjoy all the trappings.

That is unworkable and unrealistic. And a sure fire way to alienate the customer.

What are your thoughts on the recent Tellytrack blackout?

A debacle and a disgrace, frankly.

It only served to illustrate the great divide between management and customers. They thought that we would just continue punting blindly. They have to realise that we don’t punt on cockroaches in the dark. We want entertainment and love to see and feel the excitement.

And they have compounded the debacle in the manner it has been handled from a PR viewpoint since.

Is the racing show well co ordinated?

I have never understood why Tellytrack would show Haydock and yet Lingfield is a venue for the maxipool Jackpot on the same day.

That means Tellytrack are not talking to Saftote. Or vice versa. A typical left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

Then we had Mike De Kock slinging  off about the 2yo programme after Forries Waltz won on Saturday.

Is De Kock talking nonsense or is the programme a disgrace? Who knows? Does anybody care?  They are wary of him, but what’s the bet nothing changes?

Do carryovers excite you as a punter?

Naturally they do. But there is a perception, real or imagined, that we are being  bulldusted by Saftote. That is our money, we play every day, so when a pool is carried over, make it available to be won the next day.

At the moment they are carrying confusing sums over to big  racedays. That principle is okay, but make it a percentage carryover to Met day and July day etc. Not the whole lot.

And don’t just create smoke and mirrors. Punters are real people, We live in the now. We want to win today.

And we would love to understand whether there is a takeout on the carryover pools? Please ask them that!

What do you feel  about the range of bet options?

Disastrous and stupidly complicated! There are too many choices.

The game needs to be about winning and not the degree of difficulty. So why take away the couplings in the Pick Six, as one example?

You have a market that is disenchanted and largely treated badly, and then you help them lose rather than win by making things difficult.

What are the chances of losing  business?

And to brag,as Saftote do,  about jackpots paying an average of R20 000 means that something is badly wrong. It is supposed to be the brain game.

The Bipot has also merely served to pull money out of the other exotics  in my opinion.

If you were made CEO of Phumelela for a month what would you do?

I would start by acknowledging that racing pools have not kept pace with inflation and admit that we have a serious problem.

I would then take my executive team and senior management out to meet punters in the totes.At the same time I would check if the executives have a telebet.  How can you be a movie critic if you don’t go to bioscope?

This game is about the TAB and not the TBA. If horses only cost R30 000 each the hardcore would still be playing  fractional PA’s on Fairview.

Sports betting income streams are all well and good, but it is the horses that got us hooked in the first place.

And when the big boys sit on television and tell us about the new bets, maybe stop patronising and talking about ‘us’, ‘us’, ‘us’.

It should be about the customer.