Tony Ansell isn't crass enough to have a motto, but if he did it would surely be something like, 'Where there's shite, there's brass'. And not just a little bit of brass, but a whole, 64-piece orchestra of the stuff. One of Britain's most consistently successful gamblers, Ansell hasn't made his cash on the nags or on those other three British staples of Premiership football, majors golf or Test cricket. Instead, Harrow's finest has made his mint in the surreal world of Scottish football. And not even top-level Scottish football, but by gambling on such glamourous names as East Stirlingshire, Queen of the South, Stenhousemuir and Cowdenbeath.

	Tony Ansell isn't crass enough to have a motto, but if he did it would surely be something like, 'Where there's shite, there's brass'.

In the past five years, Ansell has made over £1 million betting on Scottish football, and less than a quarter of that has come from punting on the Scottish Premier League (SPL). Scottish football may be on the verge of financial implosion, with three clubs in its top league in administration and players at Third Division East Stirlingshire (average attendance: 190) on £7 a game with a £2 win bonus, but Ansell is sitting very pretty indeed, thanks very much.

How does he do it? Well, a bit of inside information never hurts when it comes to successful punting, and Ansell has a stack of dyed-in-the-wool Scottish football men who relay him sensitive information on how they believe this team or that team will perform. Two sources in particular - one a backroom boy and the other a player - provide him with the information on which he makes much of his very healthy living. And no, as affable and chatty as Ansell is, he doesn't divulge his sources to me.

Tartan tipping

 

'Livingston are in mid-table and haven't got much chance of making the top six - and what does it really matter if they do? They were going to play Kilmarnock, a side who they were expected to beat, so they were at 9/4. However, we heard that Livingston were going to rest most of their side because they had a big cup semi-final against Celtic coming up four days later and no-one wanted to get injured. By betting £2,000 on the Asian handicap, where we got plus 0.25, we won £990 and by laying £2,000 on Betfair at 8/5, we won another £2,000, so that was a profit of almost £3,000, which is pretty standard for that sort of bet.

'The thing is that a team in that position won't let that information become publicly available, because it'll affect the gate, and because it's seen as very disrespectful to your opponents to rest your best players. But we knew in advance what the deal was, so we were able to make a healthy profit.'

Unfortunately, most of us don't possess a pair of Caledonian deep-throats who can enlighten us on the state of play at clubs so small that even Dougie Donnelly has heard of them. Come on, Tony, tell me something that I don't know - something that I can actually use to make some cash.

There's no place like. . . away?

'Okay,' he chortles, 'try this one for size: there is virtually no home advantage in the Scottish Third Division.'

Come again?

'I noticed it about five years ago,' explained Ansell, 'and I could barely believe the simple mistake the bookmakers were making when they were pricing up these games. They were pricing them up as if the same conditions applied as in, say, an Arsenal vs Manchester United game - but the same conditions don't apply at all. Also, unbelievably, you could bet the same amount on Queen's Park versus Elgin City as you could on the Champions League final.'

I later checked the Third Division table and found that the home teams had won 69 games and the away teams 65 games so far this season. Eureka! But it's never enough simply to witness the magic trick. I wanted to know exactly how the statistical sorcerer came to this conclusion.

'To be a good gambler, you've got to have feeling for the human condition,' says Ansell. 'Put yourself in the shoes of the sort of guys who are going to be contesting a mid-table Third Division match. There's no relegation, so there's little or nothing at stake. All of the players are part-time and are paid a pittance to play football. The match happens right at the end of the working week, after they've done five days of hard graft on a building site, mending cars or filing. By the time they get around to Saturday afternoon, they are tired and their wives and girlfriends are at them, nagging. They turn up, maybe 90 minutes before kickoff, already fed up. They walk out onto the pitch and they're even more fed up because there are maybe a couple of hundred punters there and they can actually hear themselves singled out for abuse.

'Compare that to the opposition. They've been on a nice warm coach trip, perhaps with a porno on the video. They're all in a good mood, it's a day out. When they run out onto that pitch all they can hear is the opposition's fans getting on the back of their players. Of course they've got an advantage. Yet the bookies always give the odds in favour of the home team.'

Nothing is ever that simple, of course, and Ansell reckons that, 'I could give every punter in Britain the same information that I have and they wouldn't come up with the same outcome - the ability to do this is something that you're born with, you can't acquire it.'

The home and away brainwave has been a gold mine for Ansell. His most prodigious profit to date came three years ago when he backed Airdrie away from home in every match and bet against them every time they were at home. 'I won fortunes that year,' he says.

He hasn't done too bad this season, either. He backed Clyde to win the First Division at 5/1. They came second (by one agonising point), but that was okay, because he'd also laid them at 1.85 on Betfair. He backed Second Division champs Airdrie to win the Second at 15/2 for £2,700.

The appliance of betting science

Another key to Ansell's punting success is the way he uses technology.

'The internet changed my life,' says Ansell. Ansell now has five young lads working for him in what is essentially a trading room at his house. A bank of computers and screens allow him to keep track of the 170 internet accounts he has around the world. Many of them are held under aliases, as his name is writ in capital letters at the top of every bookie's blacklist. He opened an account with Bet365 when they opened, for instance, and found he was able to have a £100 treble for his first bet. By the time he came to place the second, they had found out who he was and his limit had been cut to 67p.

Although the internet has made it easier for bookies to regulate professional gamblers like Ansell, the Englishman's eccentric sleep patterns give him a golden edge to stiff the layers.

'4 o'clock in the morning is when I'm at my most active,' he says. 'That's when I catch the people they employ to catch punters like me napping. Often literally.'

That isn't Ansell's only ingenious use of the internet. He has worked out that there is a time lag of 30 seconds between the time when a bookie or Betfair change the odds and the time that it shows on the screen. Time enough for a sharp operator sure of his ground. If, for instance, Morton go 1-0 down at home, Ansell has enough time to ramp up the size of his bet on Airdrie Utd, their main rivals, or to lay Morton at the 'old' price.

The wizard of odds

Ansell's chat is punctuated by arcane gambling terms that even I haven't heard of, and it's no surprise to learn that his background is as a number-crunching accountant, specialising in the most detailed income tax work. While he genuinely liked going head-to-head with the Inland Revenue, the lure of internet punting proved too strong. He became a full-time gambler six years ago, and has barely looked back since. Where he used to find accountancy draining ('15 hours a week and I'd be exhausted') punting energises him to the degree that a 16-hour day, seven days a week is his norm.

Ansell bets on anything that moves, and is always looking to diversify. His second most lucrative area is athletics, and he can barely contain himself as the Olympics approaches.

'My main bar to making money on Scottish football is the difficulty of getting bets on because I've made such a killing in the past,' he says. 'But betting on Scottish football is big business in the Far East, where Asian handicap betting absolutely dwarfs anything that you get in Europe or the States. Where here I might bet £3,000 or £4,000 on a match, a professional Far Eastern gambler would routinely bet £100,000 and I've often heard of £250,000 being bet on a single match. So, what will happen for next season is that I will give them my assessment of what I think will happen in Scottish football, and in return they will allow me to bet as much as I want on athletics.'

If Ansell knows as much about athletics as he does about Scottish football, the bookies are in for even more sleepless nights...

Tony Ansell has an online advice site at winonsports.com