A GAMBLER has revealed how he beat the bookmakers to make a profit from the Man Booker Prize.

The Darlington man, who has asked to be known just as Mr Smith, said he made a significant amount from the bets - despite not reading any of the short-listed novels.

The Northern Echo revealed this week now a mystery man placed 13 bets in Ladbrokes stores in Darlington and Middlesbrough on Richard Flanagan to win the prestigious prize for his book, The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Mr Smith has now revealed to the Echo that his first step was to read reviews of the six books online.

He said: "Ironically, I never read any of the books because, quite frankly, fiction is not my thing.

"But I did read the reviews of the books at Amazon, Goodreads etc and quickly came to the conclusion that Flanagan's Narrow Road to the Deep North was by far the best due to the gravitas of the subject, a story of war and of love, beautiful writing style and had a real life poignant human story behind it - the other books seemed rather frivolous in comparison."

However, the gambler added that the Booker Prize was notoriously difficult to predict because there were only six judges.

"I had, therefore, to spend much more time reviewing the judges than the actual books themselves.

"I did a case study of each judge, using Wikipedia and YouTube, and read as much as I could about the books they had written, their interests, their politics and religious beliefs and then, through a process of Sherlock Holmes deductive reasoning, tried to intuit which book they would go for."

He added that there were four men and two women on the panel and believed that generally speaking, women "did not much care" for books about warfare.

"However, Flanagan's novel had a love affair inserted into it that I guessed would keep the female judges from recoiling in horror at some of the harrowing and gruesome episodes of the book.

"I also guessed that the chairman, AC Grayling, a well-known atheist, would be impressed by the book and it would confirm his views that life is random and chaotic, with no divine guiding hand and that we humans are more often not morally black or white, but often a complex shade of grey."

Mr Smith said he was about 60 to 70 per cent confident that he had identified the winner.

"At 5/1 odds it was worth the risk and I was right," he said, adding that he won a significantly larger amount in total than the £1,560 paid out by Ladbrokes.