Derren Brown: The System. Can you really guarantee a horse-racing win?

Derren Brown has a system for winning at the horses. In this one-hour special, the maestro of mind control anonymously tells a single mum from London which horse will win at the next day's races - again and again - culminating in a final, massive bet."

That's the blurb from Channel 4 on Friday's show. You can actually watch a video of the programme here - Derren Brown: The System

And the bullish blurb goes on...

"Investigating the psychology behind gambling and using his unique combination of skills to create guaranteed wins, Derren proves his system works every time. Not only that, but he explains it fully to us at home. But how fool-proof is this system and will his participant, believing in him and his predictions, risk her life-savings on one more race?

"As Derren reveals: 'I took a member of the public and I told her which horse would win in a certain race; when it did win she was intrigued and I did it again and again and she started to bet more and more money according to my system. She's scraped together every last penny she could find and she is risking it all on one final race. Is it really possible to predict every time which horse will win? Welcome to The System.' "

So can you win at gambling. We think not. We've tried to convince people - tens of thousands of gamblers have read our story: 'You'll never beat the robots' - but, hey, make your own mind up on friday night (or now on the link above) and then join the debate (we only need your name and email for comments to be published)...

Comments

[Lottery Guy]

This turned out to be a great piece of edutainment - many people will have worked out how the 'trick' worked quite early on (did you click at the coin tosses?). But the sad fact is most wouldn't because we sometimes let our greed overcome our common sense.

What I particularly liked though was that this show went beyond just being a good fun piece of TV. My hope is a lot of people who were pulled in by the premise actually also walked away a bit wiser, and have maybe even learnt to look at something from multiple perspectives.

[michael]

Derren Brown is, in my humble opinion, one of this countries great entertainers.

I was in the casino business for 15 years and that was a super show. I only discovered towards the end that it was only entertainment, but I still found extremely entertaining. I laughed a lot.

I've read all Derren Brown's books too - and they're worth reading - I promise you.