Victor Chandler lives and breathes bookmaking as have three generations of his family. For InsideEdge, he is the raffishly cool epitome of the gentleman bookie; the chancer who backs his hunches. So how and where to start with a profile of him?

Firstly, I should declare an interest. I used to write a column called City Slickers for the Daily Mirror. After meeting Victor many times on racecourses on big race days I grew to like him and would often describe him in the column as 'Britain's greatest bookie' or sometimes just plain 'BGB' for short.

When I got fired following an inconsequential financial scandal, a journalist from the Sunday Times, rang Victor to ask whether whenever I referred to Victor as 'BGB' he would wipe my slate clean. The answer was an emphatic 'No' and Victor was still fuming when I spoke to him regarding this assault to his integrity.

So it's true to say that Victor and I have some history. This was the background when I went to meet him in Gibraltar. VC, as his employees call him, decamped there in 1996, thereby revolutionising the entire bookmaking industry. Sitting in his office on the top floor of Leanse Place, Victor looks relaxed, tanned and well - the Mediterranean clime obviously suits him.

It's certainly a far cry from the Casanova Club, a casino in London that his grandfather bought just after the war and which Victor inherited along with some betting shops when he was just 22.

Into the betting ring
The third of his brothers to chance his arm in the gambling business, Victor's first step was to sell the Casanova and concentrate on the bookmaking side, which included several shops as well as some of the best pitches on British racecourses. He was forced to offload the much-coveted Number One pitch at Ascot - and others too - because in those days pitches couldn't be passed on, but loving the on-course action, Victor decided to join the rails bookmakers, that steely band of layers who stand next to the rails at racecourses and take eye-poppingly large bets.

From that late-1970s starting point, it wasn't long before Victor had developed a fearsome reputation as a layer. He was quite happy laying huge bets from punters as legendary as JP McManus, the owner of triple-winning Champion Hurdler Istabraq, part-owner of Man United and the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados. For over two decades the annual JP/VC battle at the Cheltenham Festival has been a compelling sideshow to the National Hunt extravaganza. Victor wouldn't tell me who was up but I suspect it's him, even allowing for some of JP's major coups courtesy of such equine stars as Danoli and the peerless Istabraq. Victor hardly ever goes racing these days - he reckons the fun's gone out of it.

'The whole game has changed and is not nearly as entertaining as it was largely thanks to the betting exchanges, or Betfair, to be precise,' he says. 'Who on earth would want to be starting out in the on-course bookmaking game now?'

Off the rails and gathering pace
More and more of Victor's business is based in the Far East these days. He says the appetite for punting on football in Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Cambodia and Malaysia knows no bounds, and some of the sums he mentions are truly astronomical. JP McManus is by no means Victor's biggest punter - that accolade belongs to a client he refuses to identify, on the other side of the world.

Victor gets a framed letter down from his office wall. Although he has his thumb strategically placed over the punter's name it clearly shows that he had - and probably still has - a client in the Far East who owed him over 20 million quid: £21,245,000 to be precise. At the time, the guy had been stretched by the collapse in the Asian financial markets and was unable to pay up. Victor had written on the bottom of the letter: 'Will settle for £15 million. £3 million to be paid this month, £2 million a month thereafter.'

Victor tells me the same punter lost £10 million playing baccarat in one day in Vegas but always comes back for more - although this depends how much brandy he's drunk.

It was back in the mid-1990s that Victor woke up to the fact that the Far East was going to be a huge market. It was around the same the time that he was thinking about a move off-shore - and what a move that turned out to be.

People forget that Victor is the man we have to thank for being able to bet tax-fee in this country. His move to Gibraltar sparked a chain of events that ultimately forced Chancellor Gordon Brown into his historic decision to abolish betting duty. That pernicious little 9% tax, payable on stake or winnings, went up in smoke faster than one of Victor's Cuban cigars. All the other bookmakers were forced to follow Victor's lead.

'I also looked at Jersey, Antigua and the Isle of Man before settling on Gibraltar,' reveals Victor. 'Cyril Stein [the then recently departed boss of Ladbrokes] tipped me off about its potential.'

He went over to have a look and liked what he saw. With a warm climate and only three hours from the UK, it was the ideal spot.

'We were up and running in Gib for Euro 96, getting the phones going just before the first game of the tournament. We made a lot of money. I'd say that Euro 96 was where we really started the business we have now. I now have 40 Chinese-speaking telephonists.'

Checking out the opposition
Victor rates Tony Bloom as one of the best football analysts in the world. Little wonder - around the mid-1990s, Bloom was taking money out of Victor's coffers like it was going out of style. So much so, in fact, that Victor eventually offered him a job as his Director of Football at the end of 1996.

'I sent him to Thailand for a year to research the market. Tony found out that we faced huge, and I mean huge, competition from the so-called 'illegals' in the Far East - especially Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Cambodia,' says Victor. 'Some of these illegal bookmaking organisations have 200 telephonists! They often get raided and are closed down but they're always up and running again within a few hours. It's quite incredible

He talks about Singapore and a city over the causeway in southern Malaysia called Johor Bahru.

'There are bookies there who take bets in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, all over the Far East really. Taiwan is huge: you wouldn't believe how big. There's a bookie there who takes £30 million a month. It's just him and a phone. Unbelievable.'

He says there are around 20 illegal bookmakers in Johor Bahru who between them pretty much have the market sewn up. They are responsible for 80% of the betting turnover in the domain - an astonishing £300 million a month between them.

'I've been over to meet many of my Far Eastern clients and met some of these bookmakers in Johor Bahru. Monday is settlement day and these guys meet up and settle their bets with each other in cash. You can have 20 people in a backroom handing over suitcases full of money to each other and you won't see anything like it anywhere in the world.

'While I was there, a waiter brought out a huge fish on a plate. It's very hierarchical and one of the biggest bookmakers smelt it and said, 'Long time, no swim,' and sent it back. I couldn't believe it.'

Victor says the punters' appetite for football over there is much greater than their counterparts in Europe. Betting volumes are 200 times bigger in the Far East than over here. And with the opening up of China and the booming business environment in Shanghai, he's all set up to take a chunk of this market. He smiles as he tells me that more live European football games are shown there than in Britain.

But there's a lot more to VC's business than the sportsbook. There's a clutch of websites offering virtual horseracing at 'Chandler Park', another virtual game called Football 24/7, the online casino thespinroom.com, a well-regarded poker room vcpoker.com. Victor describes it as his 'Entertainment portal'.

Entertainment portal? What would the young Victor have said if you'd mentioned something like that to him, back in the 1970s? Thinking about it he'd probably have loved it...

VICTOR CHANDLER'S FIVE GOLDEN RULES

1.) Don't bet when you're pissed.

2.) Don't back short-priced favourites. More get beaten than win.

3.) Have a staking plan and make sure you stick to it.

4.) Don't lower your stake just because a horse is a big price.

5.) Don't chase your losses. There's always another day.