The worlds first bookmaker, so the story goes, was a man called Harry Ogden. One afternoon in the early 1790s, when organised thoroughbred racing was already almost a century old, Ogden went to Newmarket races and did something no one in the business of taking bets had ever done before. He chalked up odds about every runner on the card. In doing so, he immediately became the only proper bookie on the planet.
He was not the only one for long. Until then the standard offer for punters had been a binary choice between the favourite and the field. The simple but effective technique that allowed Ogden to price up every runner was so wildly popular with the punters and profitable for the layers that before long, everyone else in the betting business was doing it the same way.
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