JC / Railbird

Betting Archive

Laurel Play #1

Laurel’s “noble experiment” begins Friday: For the track’s 10-day summer mini-meet, takeout is 11.4%* on all wagers. No exceptions, no catches. It’s a beautiful, horseplayer- friendly gesture, and I’ve resolved to do my bit to make it a success with a Laurel play of the day. The first: Race 8. A field of 11, 1 1/8 miles on the turf. I’ll go with Gust, one of two lightly raced maiden winners stepping up into allowance company entered here. A three-year-old colt trained by Graham Motion, Gust starts off a debut win at Colonial on July 3 in which he came from well off the pace to split horses in the stretch. He’s 5-1 on the morning line, trainer and jockey are 47% for 2006-07, and he’s had three fine works at Fair Hill since that first start. Play: $20 to win.
*I should have written, takeout averages 11.4% on all wagers, since takeout actually varies from 10.75% to 12% depending on the bet.

Posted in Betting on August 9, 2007

Wagering Securely

Bettors, don’t worry about past-posting or outdated tote system technology: Late odds changes, like those that had Any Given Saturday dropping from 2-1 to 9-5 and Xchanger rising from 29-1 to 32-1 as the Haskell field headed into the clubhouse turn, are your fault:

Without being so foolhardy as to say past-posting never could occur, the true culprit for large odds changes is an ever-larger proportion of the parimutuel pools being wagered within the final two or three minutes to the start of the race. Ironically, fear of late odds changes probably is expanding this practice by bettors, who can take advantage of various account-wagering vehicles or even shorter lines at the mutuel windows to “get down” late.

That’s TRA vice president Chris Scherf, in a letter to the editor written in response to a Steven Crist column about bettors’ wagering security concerns. Scherf assures us that TRPB is monitoring wagering patterns and on the lookout for anything nefarious. I don’t doubt that, and trust the system is secure. But that doesn’t make the late odds changes any more acceptable (especially when they’re bigger than $0.20 of a projected payoff) and the TRPB’s monitoring system doesn’t address issues of control or transparency, which are also vital to system integrity.

The industry has actually come up with a great system that would fix many of the problems associated with the current tote system. The Wagering Transmission Protocol (PDF), in development for nearly four years, would put host racetracks in control of validating and accepting wagers; allow off-track wagers to mingle directly into pools instead of waiting until the final cycle; assign unique identifiers to all wagers, allowing for instant and easy tracing; and generally make the system more secure and transparent. But implementation lags: WPT will be tested for 30 days at one racetrack sometime in 2007, then rolled out across the industry over the next couple of years. We just have to wait, and trust, until then.

Posted in Betting on August 6, 2007

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:

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).

Posted in Betting, Racing & Technology on July 10, 2007

More Jackpots, More Fun

“It is easy to cite evidence that American thoroughbred racing is in moribund condition…. But anyone who paid attention to the events at Hollywood Park on Monday — as most horseplayers did — would come to a different conclusion about the health of the racing industry. Bettors wagered a record $7.59 million on the Pick Six and a total of $18.4 million on a routine eight-race program — figures that would have been inconceivable in an era when the sport was supposedly healthier…. For any horseplayer with a pulse, Monday’s pick six was irresistible” (WashPost).

Posted in Betting on July 3, 2007