Its a Dogs Life

It was one of my mates birthdays during the week and he chose to celebrate it with a trip to the dog racing at Shawfield - I'd never been before and despite looking forward to going, I had some reservations as to how much fun it would be. I feared that it might actually be a bit rubbish.
I'd driven past the Shawfield stadium many times and had always thought it looked a right odd place. When I eventually arrived last night, I discovered that it is indeed an odd place with a fair variety of the kind of odd characters you'd expect - wee old east end glasgow men, young guys in tracksuits and mad women debating with themselves (and anyone within ear shot) over where their betting system was going wrong. Its a very Glasweigan night out and its grand.


For a birthday/ special occasion it is a lot of fun. Its £5 each to get in, but then you can bet as small as £1 on each of the ten races so for another £10 you can have a stake riding all night. I tried betting £5 on my first race and when that quickly disapeared I switched to £1 bets for the remainder and to be honest you get as much excitement with the small bets so I'd stick to that. I'm not maybe the person to be getting advice from however as my chosen dog came last in the first 5 races. doh

Inside is actually pretty big - theres a main stand which houses four different bars, the main terracing and a resturant. All are pretty decent and you can see why folk go along there as the start to a night out, though it was pretty cold out in the stand last night. The races are every 15 mins or so - the trainers bring the dogs out and give them a wee parade and all the punters watch in earnest to see if any one them looks lively or does the toilet. (apparently its very significant - maybe makes them lighter?) Then the dogs are loaded into the traps - a wee buzzer sounds and the electronic rabbit comes flying past, the traps open and the dogs go zooming.
I'm guessing that greyhounds are not that smart - cause if they really are trying to catch the weird looking yellow rabbit then surely after a few races they'd work out that it was a fix and give it up.

Here's my mate Emma with one of the biggest single wins of the night* - £14.51. Sensibly she quit while she was ahead and didn't follow my advice to put it all on the next race.

Finally towards the end of the evening my luck began to improve when I changed my "system" from betting on the dog I thought would actually win to betting on the dog which I thought would come last. This turned out pretty well as not only did I choose three winners in a row, the dogs were also on really good odds and I won about £15 in total. Wooohoo which meant that even taking off the £5 I paid to get in, the bets I lost and my drinks I only actually spent £2 for the 2 hours entertainment.

All in all I recommened giving it a go. Don't worry about being a novice or that you'll do the wrong thing - the staff and the regular punters are pretty friendly and happy to explain the rules and there's not much chance of you sticking out like a sore thumb. We stuck with betting on one winner but there's lots of other combinations you can try as well. Race nights are on four times a week and start at 7pm - the bars etc stay open until midnight. Grab a group of friends and have a go.

We were not quite sure where to place this post as it falls into the greyish area of exactly how far the Southside demarcation Stretches. Technically I think Shawfield falls outside of the Glasgow City boundary but we felt it was too close to really be given the tag "Deep South" so Shawfield has been taken under the broad wings of the term "Southside" instead.

Links
Shawfield Stadium

Wiki-pedia page

Historic images


*biggest in our group that is - we were only betting £1 a go remember. There were folks betting with £100 bets and they probably won more than £14.