JC / Railbird

All Quiet Re: Ellis Pick 4

John Pricci wonders why silence has greeted Ellis Park’s decision to lower takeout to 4% on its pick four wager:

I’m no math genius, far from it. But a wager that puts the odds in our favor over the long term, one where track executives and horsemen and legislators from the Commonwealth of Kentucky came together and took a risk for our gain and, ultimately, theirs?
This is a very big deal, and nobody seems to care.
Reaction, any reaction, yeah or nay, was anticipated. It would have been a welcome start to meaningful dialogue between racing’s considerable uncounted majority and the industry (simulcastors and OTBs don’t take attendance). Instead, reaction was next to nothing.

My guess? Because it’s Ellis Park, and it’s one wager. If Del Mar announced lower takeout on the pick six or NYRA on all exotic plays, there’d probably be more buzz.
Pricci’s right though that Ellis took a big step, and that lowered takeout, along with expanded wagering options, are necessary for the industry to climb past the $15 billion handle plateau it’s been stuck at since 2000. T.D. Thornton briefly mentioned P2P platforms and betting exchanges in his Blood-Horse chat last month, only two weeks after an article applying “The Long Tail” to racing appeared in the magazine. The ideas are percolating; their implementation will be slow. That’s the way of things in racing, where any innovations, particularly those that are technology-based, are approached gingerly, considered threatening to the business models that have stood largely unchanged for 80 years, rather than embraced as opportunities for tremendous, exciting growth. Other industries, such as music and print media, have been just as wary, but they haven’t had the luxury of ignoring technology’s disruptive effects and doling out changes on their terms to customers. What racing needs is a similar sort of pressure, a few good start-ups shaking up content and wagering models. That’s when horseplayers and racing fans will start to get what they want, at the prices they’re looking for.
More on the Ellis Park Pick 4: “For the first time ever, horseplayers now have a positive expectation on their investment” (MSNBC).


1 Comment

I checked the P4 pool at Ellis the other day and it was only $20K. The horses are cheap and with cheap comes unpredicabiliy. It’s not my kind of play, but all the power to Ellis Park for making this move.
Ellis Park must be much too small a fish to concern the major tracks because not long ago the NY tracks refused to take the Keeneland feed when that track slightly reduced some takeouts on races run there.
With some off-tracks and legal on-line betting sites keeping around 15% of every dollar wagered a large-scale reduced takeout isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Posted by TheNoseKnows on July 12, 2007 @ 10:31 pm