JC / Railbird

The Industry Archive

Plonk’s Pipe Dream

Jeremy Plonk lays out a year of racing with staggered meets, staggered post times in his latest ESPN column:

Beautiful, except that the Belmont fall championship meet is missing, and relegating Suffolk Downs to winter racing seems harsh. What about the MassCap?

Posted in The Industry on November 12, 2008

Alternate View

Perhaps not despite the fact, but because there were:

I point to numbers crunched earlier by Steven Crist.
John Pricci comes to a similar conclusion about market dilution, in a lot more words.
Re: Equibase, usually mild Blood-Horse editor Dan Liebman is outraged at the “preposterous decision” made by the industry’s data collector to stop providing meet-total handle figures. That is preposterous! And not only because such a ridiculous decision makes it harder to report on trends in the industry, but because the attitude behind it is so contrary to this era’s ethos of increasing access to information and data. Another reason for “the brash and the bold to take over,” as commenter JS put it elsewhere …
In happier news, Monograph Mile season kicks off: The Thoroughbred Times is taking nominations for its annual book award, won last year by T.D. Thornton of Suffolk Downs for “Not by a Longshot.”

Posted in Data/IP, The Industry on September 12, 2008

Sure Thing

One of the biggest and most underreported stories in racing is the ongoing scandal that is the technologically-outdated tote system. While it seems to work most of the time, news of past-posting incidents of varying seriousness keeps breaking, creating a nagging sense of doubt among players. The latest occurred last month, Ray Paulick reports:

The fourth race at Philadelphia Park June 28 was just a run-of-the-mill claiming contest until the Scientific Games totalizator system malfunctioned shortly after Magical American crossed the finish line as the winner. The top three finishers (4-2-3) were put on the board, but the problems with the tote delayed Philadelphia Park from making the race official and posting the payoffs….

A little over a thousand miles away at Tampa Bay Downs on Florida’s Gulf Coast, some horseplayers became curious about what impact the tote failure had on the AmTote wagering machines there.

Lo and behold, they discovered wagers made on the winning horses in Philadelphia Park’s fourth race were still being accepted. The Paulick Report has learned that players started punching out win tickets, exactas and trifectas. The delay, from the time the Philadelphia Park race was run until someone in the Tampa Bay mutuels department realized there was a problem, was about 10 minutes, at which time betting was halted. It was nearly 15 minutes from the time the race was run until the Florida track received a stop betting order from Scientific Games (formerly Autotote).

When the system was restored, Tampa paid out more than $13,000 to bettors who’d taken advantage of the glitch (most of that to one player, who apparently made $1000 in wagers). Dick Jerardi, picking up on the story, points out that the payoffs were unfairly affected for players who had legitimately bet the race:

It is fairly obvious the winner would have paid quite a bit more had the “past posting” not taken place. The daily double, combining the 3-5 winner of the third race and Magical American, paid $32.40, quite a bit more than a 3-5 combined with a 7-2 shot should have paid. Without the very late (and very illegal) betting, Magical American likely would have been 8-1 or so. The $27.20 exacta with second-place Ironton also likely was low.

A couple themes apparent in other recent reports of past-posting appear in the telling of this incident: That the tracks involved, or the TRPB, did not disclose the problem and its effects immediately, and that for all the investigations and fixes in various processes (more on that in Frank Angst’s ThoroTimes article on the incident) there is little sense that there is any urgency on the part of the industry to plug the gaps and update the tote network. Meanwhile, the Wagering Transmission Protocol (PDF), which would be a huge step forward into transparency and accountability, languishes, and bettors are left wondering again how much, really, they can trust the system in which they play.

Posted in The Industry on July 8, 2008

Late Scratch

Settling in late to watch today’s house hearing on horse racing and catch Randy Moss saying Thomas Jefferson used to keep a stable of racehorses on the White House grounds. Really? That’s an interesting historical tidbit. [Actually, it was Andrew Jackson, who not only kept thoroughbreds on the grounds, but entered runners in the name of his nephew and private secretary Andrew J. Donelson.]
The big news this morning is that Rick Dutrow is a late scratch from the witness list, a change Blinkers Off alerted us to last night. According to the Associated Press, the trainer has been feeling ill since the Belmont (I bet):

Ray Paulick, live blogging from the packed hearing room, reported earlier this morning that subcommittee staff were claiming Dutrow didn’t call to say he’d be a no-show, but Joe Drape whispered to Paulick not long after, “They lie … I know for a fact Dutrow called Whitfield’s office.”
Jess Jackson is up now and talking about Curlin running without drugs — “Not that he didn’t in the past, but we changed that, when we went to Dubai.” You know, this hearing isn’t going to be so dry after all …
11:30 am: First panel concludes without one mention of horseplayers and racing fans as stakeholders in this game or of the $15 billion we push through in handle annually.*
1:25 pm: Checking in on the second panel, see NTRA president Alex Waldrop looking tense, his eyes darting about, while congressman Ed Whitfield is saying, “I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the government to set minimum standards.” That would seem to be the conclusion to which much of today’s testimony and questioning leads, but you don’t have to be Alan “Self-Regulation” Marzelli to wonder if that would truly be the best outcome …
* More on this in the comments section of the Paulick Report’s live blog of the hearing. I found myself feeling irked about the oversight after listening to Jess Jackson declare that owners were “the lifeblood” of the industry (not to knock the importance of owners — this sport couldn’t go on without them any more than it could go on without bettors) and then hearing every group but the fans named as stakeholders in the industry in response to one of the representative’s questions. As the passage of the NY OTB bill this week showed, players pay when they get overlooked. The subject today may officially have been horse safety, but what the committee was really talking about was industry regulation via the IHA and I believe players deserve representation in any discussion of that matter, before someone comes up with a brilliant idea like slapping a 1% surchage on every off-track/simulcast wager made so as to pay for a national commission or drug-testing laboratory. Waldrop at least gave a nod to players in his statement — “The last thing this industry needs is another layer of bureaucracy funded by yet another tax on our long-suffering customers” — for which I extend my appreciation.
** Also, my appreciation to Randy Moss, whose written testimony mentions the bettors. Moss, at least in print, was there partly to represent the fans.

Posted in The Industry on June 19, 2008

Thursday Morning Links

– Racing journalism has its problems, but access to the sport’s (human) stars isn’t one. In this way, at least, being a niche sport benefits fans and writers, unlike baseball.
– The Quick-Pick inquiry spreads, wild finger pointing begins, and a California state legislator notices that there’s no independent wagering monitor. Uh oh.
– Pittsburg Phil, Noted Plunger, Passes Away. Consumption, such a shame. He was just at Ascot last year.
– Dutrow has yet to confirm post-Belmont plans for Big Brown with IEAH, but he’s considering the Travers and the Breeders’ Cup Classic. Curlin vs. Brown — we can dream.
– How they take those pics: Wired at the Preakness Stakes.
– Mike Brunker is looking prescient. Flashback to his April 1 column, in which he not only predicted Big Brown’s Derby win, but went a couple steps further: “This is a colt with the talent to end the 29-year Triple Crown drought …”

Posted in The Industry, Triple Crown on May 22, 2008

I’ll Wait to Join …

So, I’ve been trying to muster interest in the NTRA Horseplayers’ Coalition, which sounded exciting when its formation was announced earlier this year but is decidedly less so now that it has formally launched with the sexy topic of tax reform at the top of its agenda. Horseplayers can join for $25, for which they’ll get legislative updates and discounts from such companies as John Deere and UPS. As Dana points out, the timing is good for what’s essentially a horseplayers’ political action committee, and to be fair, the coalition builds on two things the NTRA does well — Capitol Hill lobbying and managing its purchasing program. I’m certainly not opposed to reforming the unfair taxes heaped on handicappers, having had the good fortune in 2007 to run into the IRS’ outdated and onerous reporting and withholding rules — what was abstractly unpleasant became practically so — and yet, I haven’t rushed to sign up. I can’t shake the sense that this group is more about serving the industry than about serving horseplayers, who care about taxes, but also care about doping, transparency and integrity, takeout, and ongoing ADW disruptions. I’d like to join a coalition that truly represents players on all those matters, not just the one issue that’s in sync with establishment concerns.

Posted in The Industry on April 23, 2008

A Theme Emerges

“With no real-time monitoring of wagering pools, extensive investigation would be required to determine how much money was bet and how many winning bets occurred off-track after the race’s start.”
“When asked about past posting, we can still only say that it does happen from time to time, but we cannot tell you how often because we really don’t know.”
“Infuriated by what he has seen, Maloney has taken his case to any racetrack official or mutuel manager that would listen to him. These were serious allegations he was bringing forth, yet no one would take him seriously.”
“I’m sorry to say that our tote systems are such that we don’t have good control of knowing where those revenues are coming from.”

Posted in The Industry on January 15, 2008

And Then There Were Five

Not a surprise, but still startling in its starkness: “Only five full-time positions remain in the United States for people writing exclusively on thoroughbred racing for general circulation newspapers” (Paul Moran at the Races).

Posted in The Industry on September 30, 2007