Professional Gamblers: Ed Murray

Ed Murray may be gawping at the fetching curves of a fiery red £150,000 Ferrari Maranello, but I’m still reeling from the 27-year-old’s last comment. ‘I could just about afford that,’ he’d said, po-faced, his breath condensing on the window at Ferrari’s showroom in South Kensington, London. ‘It wasn’t always like this, though,’ Ed assures me. ‘Back when I was working for IG Index, when I saw people sticking £50 on a snooker frame, I was like, “How can you put on that much?” It’s just a different culture now.’

It’s certainly a culture in keeping with our surroundings. We turn onto super-chic Sloane Street, with its fashionable boutiques and bistros, and as we trace the shopping steps of the likes of supermodel Elle MacPherson and actor Hugh Grant, I ask Ed how his present career as a professional gambler came to pass.

‘I’ve always been fascinated by betting, even when I was a kid. Straight down the bookies at break time – 50p, £1. I was always looking at the lists and prices.’ Although Ed’s numerical savvy easily got him into London School of Economics (LSE), his penchant for downing pints and chasing ‘skirt’ turned his first year into an unexpected gap year and, along with funding problems, turned a three-year degree into five. However, Ed has no regrets, especially because it was where he learnt the value of the betting exchange.

‘I spent half my life gambling at uni on “Flutter”,’ he sighs, as though remembering a lost friend. ‘Flutter was the first to bring the peer-to-peer concept to the public in around May 2000, and in many ways it was better than Betfair today: better presentation, and much more interesting, You could bet on the Page 3 girl of the day, bet if the Royal Family were going to be in the papers – loved it. When Flutter and Betfair merged, I was gutted. Betfair have no real rivals now – why would that be in the best interests of punters looking for the best prices?’

Sweetie money

Still, you got to make the best of what you’ve got, and Ed did just that. ‘At uni, I was making £15-20K on Betfair over the year, so I knew that I was pretty good at betting already. Trading at IG Index was just a natural progression,’ he explains.

He started off as a teletext operator, but Ed understood what it was like to be on the other side of the fence; how punters always overreact to how the market sways, backing the favourit esinto the ground. The term for such thinking was ‘muppet mentality’ and, as the success of the bookmaking industry would testify, it’s possessed by 99% of bettors.

Cocky Ed always knew he was in that hallowed 1%, and during the times when he wasn’t working for IG, he was working for himself and making the transition from betting no-mark to Betfair diva. £5 punts turned his bankroll into £1,000 and, using Kelly’s staking plan, £5 became £500; and that became the now-standard bet of £2,000.

On a ‘fun’ scale of 1-100, Ed reckons IG was 99, but he soon knew his days there were numbered. ‘I was working two full-time jobs,’ he recalls, ‘IG in the day, and on my computer placing bets in the evening. Thing is, at IG, I was taking home £260-a-week after tax – the same as I was staking for each footie or cricket game. It just didn’t make sense to stay.

‘I thought that on balance of risk versus reward it would be worth going pro. And my friends knew I was a heavy gambler anyway, so it wasn’t really big news to them.’ Ed admits he’s still bashful when it comes to telling people (usually girls) what he does. ‘What am I supposed to say? “I’m a professional gambler.” People just look at you funny.’

Whatever the semantics of his professional status, there’s no doubt Ed has all the credentials of a professional gambler, with skills encompassing not just sports and politics but the burgeoning novelties markets as well.

Star burst

‘Back in the first few years of Big Brother, it was so easy for us to win,’ he says. ‘Internet polls would tell you that so-and-so was favoured for eviction by 40% of the public and that someone else was on 30%, and people would start thinking: “That means he’ll be evicted 40% of the time.” That’s just moronic thinking. If you see someone pulling clear with two weeks to go, it’s kind of obvious who’ll win.’

Little wonder, then, that Ed has almost always managed to call the BB winners right. Indeed, he had his biggest ever bet on Nadia in BB5 with £13,000. ‘Nadia was getting 50% of the polls with a week to go. She was odds-on at 1/3, which a lot of people have a problem with when it comes to backing something. They shouldn’t, though: it’s about the ratio of value.’

As we make our way back to Ed’s basement apartment, I ask him why the ease of winning on reality TV is now a past luxury. ‘You won’t believe it,’ he explains. ‘There’s a massive battleground over internet polls where there are riggers and counter-riggers,’ he says, almost to a whisper. ‘The level of sophistication to try to deceive is ridiculous. There were two sites that were really reliable, but now they just reek something chronic.’ So, where’s Ed’s edge now?

It takes all sorts

‘Contacts play a key factor. There’s one guy who sits in his house in Devon just watching and betting on BB all day long. That’s all he does. He’s really clever as well, so I’m quite pleased he’s my mate.’

Ed opens up MSN Messenger, and shows me that having all your fingers in all the right pies really is the name of the game. Under ‘Friends’, there are about a dozen names; scrolling down to ‘Shrewdies’, there are 15-20 people who Ed believes are the creme de la creme of the betting fraternity. He points at one name: ‘This guy is the best on specials.’ Then another: ‘This chap is the best on tennis and hits six figures just doing that every year.’

Impressive stuff, but for me it’s the 100-plus ‘Gamblers’ that brings my jaw close to the fl oor. ‘There’s a massive community of gamblers, as you can see,’ Ed says. ‘Anyone who wants to win must have contacts. I had a really big scare last June, when I lost £10,000 in a couple of days. I had £10,000 left and was like: “Oh shit.”

That was the point that this guy (Ed taps the screen) helped me out and taught me how to bet on cricket, tennis, that kind of stuff.’

Ed swivels round in his chair and switches on the widescreen TV behind us and turns up the volume. It’s 1pm and play is about to resume in the Wimbledon quarter-final between Andy Roddick and Sebastien Grosjean. Ed’s working day is about to begin.

‘Contacts can only tell you so much, though,’ he says, turning back to his computer. He double-clicks ‘tennis.xls’. ‘This is hopefully going to change everything,’ he muses.

There’s a mischievous glint in his eye and I’m preparing myself for the betting equivalent of the Domesday Book. The computer whirrs and I’m confronted with column-upon-column of an Excel spreadsheet. At a glance, it’s clearly tennis-related: service game, player A, player B, first serve, tie break. ‘How to make a million from tennis’ isn’t a category, and so I immediately fire a quizzical look at our man Murray.

Ed beams: ‘Thing is, I don’t actually mind revealing that I win on tennis using what is, essentially, a probability tree. This tennis model took me about seven months to put together – on the tie break alone, there are 8,000 different combinations, and there’s a subtlety, which I can’t say…’ A dramatic pause ensues, then: ‘…And which no one will work out.’

On the screen, Ed already has Betfair along with various bookies’ sites opened up. He rubs his hands together. For the next three hours, he shifts between all of them, trading back and forth, punctuated by the occasional ‘C’mon, Roddick!’ and punching in all manner of numbers into ‘tennis.xls’. Trying to keep up on every point and every bet is proving difficult. So as the match moves into a decisive fifth and final set, I ask for a synopsis.

‘Grosjean won the first set so people started panicking and he got a lot shorter than he should have,’ Ed explains. ‘Seeing Roddick playing a few points, I laid him at 1.58 with £2,000 on Betfair and was quite content to leave it at that and play around with it for the rest of the match. But he grew quite tired and had a big dip in the fourth, so I went with Grosjean. Now Roddick is looking good again and I’m backing him at 1.28, as I can see the price is way out.’

Roddick’s power proves too much in the end for Grosjean, who seems to be plagued by ‘Henman syndrome’ at Wimbledon, while Ed shows the power of his techniques with a tidy profit of £1,183.02. But life as a pro certainly leaves no time to celebrate, as he’s already flicked over to Sky Sports for the Twenty20 cricket match between Middlesex and Surrey.

Four hours later it’s game over and Ed’s a further £821.01 to the good, bringing his income for the day to around two grand. It’s fair to say that not many 27-year-olds in the UK can take down that sort of money in the space of a few hours without even leaving the comfort of their own homes – a fact not wasted on Ed. ‘Not too bad,’ he concedes. ‘Let’s hope I can do the same tomorrow.’