An Afternoon at Seoul Racecourse....

....BEING from a city where the local race course holds races on at least three days of every month, it's quite strange that aside from one visit when I was about eight and local football matches being played there I've not spent much time at York's races.

Luckily for me, and many other lovers of gambling (plenty of which we saw throughout our latest adventure) Seoul Racecourse Park is only a twenty minute subway ride from Suwon and after hearing it has the potential to provide an entertaining day out, Kevin, Charlie and I decided to make this saturday our first visit to the Korean races.

The racecourse is a stop after the zoo at Seoul Grand Park so it was a relatively painless one change journey through Geoumjeong to our destination. The three of us had done a little bit of research before arriving and after coming out of the subway exit, it was pretty obvious where the racecourse was. As you get out of the station there begins to be a massive amount of people selling form guides for the races and without you realising you are now in a crowd of about 98% men.

We made our way to the gates of the racecourse and paying the 800 won enterance fee (40p) we headed into the building to first of all get a good look at the place and secondly find out how foreigners were expected to understand everything when it was written in Hangul! The time was about 12.00pm when we arrived and a race from Jeju was just taking place so there was all of a sudden a flurry of people heading towards the bookies to put money on.

Walking up as high as we could go in the building we stumbled across the 'Foreigner's Lounge' and were given a panflet about how to place a bet and also a list of todays races and the horses running. All that plus lots of other information which would be rendered as useless once we discovered what was going on.

As I mentioned before I'm not a big gambler, I've never been in a position where I haven't needed all the money that I've posessed I think that's why! Luckily for us Kevin knew exactly what was going on and after grabbing some pens and some betting slips we prepared ourself to try and find out what was going on. High up on the fourth floor of the building we had a decent view of the track and also the odds board which was outside and letting us see exactly what the horses were priced at.

Rather annoyingly, and typically for Korea, things became rather difficult at this point as the stream of numbers up on the board didn't really relate to any odds which the horse was carrying. We figured out after a few minutes that the close to 1.0 the number, the more favoured the horse was but with the information changing every thirty seconds or something it was initially hard to keep up with what was going on.

We were prepared to make our first bet soon, and on the advice of Kevin we went with a 'Box Exacta' which basically involved picking three horses and betting on them in every possible combination for them to finish in the top three. So if you pick horse numbers 1, 2 and 3, you bet 1-2, 2-1, 1-3, 3-1, 2-3, 3-2 and at 1,000 won a piece you pay 6,000 for the bets to be placed.

After some initial confusion of needing to give hand over money so that you could get a voucher for money (don't ask) and the difficulties of the machine deciding not to read our tickets we were all bet on the first race....of course predictably the first race none of our horses did very well but undetered and getting used to the whole system we bet on the first four races including a couple taking place on Jeju Island but being shown on the big screen outside.

In the Foreigner's Lounge we were basically in a pimped out skybox with none of the hassle of the rest of the track to deal with but on the way in we had spotted a place where the horses were trotted around before the race so you could check out their form. We decided to go out there and see if we could have a bit more luck with a new tactic and eager to try something different I put a place bet on whilst Kevin and Charlie persisted with the exactas.

Down amongst the masses we decided to watch the fifth race by the finish line so we could hopefully cheer our horses onto victory. It didn't quite work out that way but my place bet did come in during the first race we spent trackside and heading inside to jubillantly pick up my winnings I discovered that they were exactly 900 won (90p) plus the 2,000 I'd put on the race.... now we were getting somewhere.

We decided that we kinda liked the new way of checking out the horses better than sitting up in the atmosphereless comfort of the lounge so we spent the next few races going between the 'horse showcase', the betting office and the finish line.

In the seventh race I also had a winner after putting on a 'to win' bet as my horse romped home to first in a close race. Back to the machine I went to discover my winnings which this time were 600 won, plus my stake of 2,000. Happy days!!!

Kevin had a slightly bigger win than I did in the following race when his exacta came in and his horses finished 1st, 2nd and 3rd. He won 31,000 won from a 6,000 won stake so he was pretty happy. Unfortunately he spent the rest of the afternoon gambling that money away and ended up not winning another race!
Poor Charlie knew exactly how he felt however as after continually getting screwed by his horses coming in 1st and 3rd he didn't win a penny and afterwards came out with a classic gamblers line of 'well as I didn't win anything last time, I'm due for a big win next time we go!'

Visiting the races was a saturday well spent with the three of us enjoying plenty of laughs despite a fair few won being lost between the three of us. I'm not too sure it's going to persuade me to head to York races on a more regular basis but the challenge of trying to understand what was going on probably enhanced the experience for me!

Well before you know it, there goes another weekend. I'm not too sure what happened to October but we're well into November now and this week will be official 7 months since I have been here. Five more to go.....


Take care

Ben x

Anais Nin
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery