Fed Up With the CAWs, Brent Sumja is Now an Ex-Horseplayer

It was back in 2004 that Brent Sumja made a career decision. He was among the leading trainers in Northern California, but wasn't following his true passion. That was playing the horses. So he disbanded his stable and set out to be a professional handicapper. It went well. He played the races regularly and also focused on the handicapping tournaments. In 2014, Sumja won five tournaments in a four-month span from May to September to clinch the title of 2013 Daily Racing Form NHC Tour Champion and the first prize of $75,000 that goes with it. For years, he was confident that he had made the right decision.

But the game he was playing in 2013 is nothing like the game being played today. That, he says, is because of the proliferation of the Computer Assisted Wagering (CAW) players. He's found that he can't compete against them, their algorithms, their ability to bet huge amounts at the very last second and their huge rebates.

In a Tweet posted Sunday, Sumja announced that he was walking away. “They (CAW players) have infiltrated every last pool and after 40+ years I am done feeling and being duped by sketchy practices,” he wrote. “Going to concentrate on other sports I am excited about. They ruined horse racing.”

Ironically, the decision came after he made a winning bet on the 20-cent jackpot Pick Six at Del Mar. The winners paid $5.40, $14, $5.20, $56.80, $6.60 and $4.40 and the bet paid $3,216. Sumja is convinced it should have paid more and that the reason it didn't is because the CAW players swooped in and took home most of the pool.

“It's been a culmination of years of just feeling like something is going on that makes me feel that I am not playing on a level field because of the computer players,” he said. “I don't understand technology, so I don't know how they are doing it. But I do know that when you see late odds changes and they are correct way too often in terms of them winning it seems not possible. It gives me a feeling that I am playing in a game that is stacked against me. You know the old adage, when you feel like you are the sucker at the table it's time to get up. I have read what Jerry Brown wrote in the Thoroughbred Daily News and have followed all the numbers Pat Cummings has been coming up with. It's made me realize I have no edge anymore. If I can't beat the computer players why should I play?”

Sumja said he had been wagering about $500,000 a year and worked with two other horseplayers, one betting $2 million a year, the other $1 million. Both partners have also quit wagering on racing. Sumja's wagering dollars are now devoted to sports betting.

“We're all out, but I don't think the tracks care,” he said.

As is the case with many horseplayers, Sumja got tired of watching the horse he wagered on at 4-1 30 seconds before the race break on top and go down to 8-5. Even when those horses won, it left a bad taste in his mouth and he can't understand why the horses whose odds take a late plunge seem to win far more than their fair share. He is not willing to concede that maybe that's because the CAW players' algorithms are so good that they usually come up with the winner.

“I'm not going with the company line that they are just great handicappers. I don't buy it,” he said.

Sumja wants the tracks to close the pools well before the race starts.

“They have to close the pools off significantly ahead of the first horses going into the gate,” he said. “That would take away the feeling that something isn't quite right. You bet on sports and you take a team at +$350, the game ends and you win you get paid +$350. If you take a team getting four points and if they cover the spread you win. What horse racing is doing would be like them telling you with a football bet we'll let you know what the spread is after the game has started. You might have plus three or plus six. We'll let you know during or after the game. Why would you play that? You wouldn't. Shut the pools down three minutes to post. Shut everything down. Let every player see what odds they are really getting.”

Sumja understands why the tracks willingly accept wagers from CAW players. By some estimates they now account for one-third of all the dollars wagered on U.S. racing or about $4 billion annually. The tracks have made a business decision that it's in their best interests to take their bets. Sumja counters, saying that a lot of players are now doing the same, making a business decision that because of the CAW players it is not in their best interests to continue betting on the sport.

“If that's what racetracks want, to cater to CAW players, that's fine,” he said. “But you have a choice not to play nowadays. There are so many other types of wagering available. I've been making my own football line since I was 15. I love betting on sports. And when I make a sports bet that is paying 7-2 I get 7-2 if it wins and not 6-5. It's a refreshing feeling.

“In his article, Jerry Brown wrote about the myth that horse racing won't make it without the money being bet by CAWS. Horse racing made it for 100 years before anyone ever heard of CAW. I understand games change. If racetracks feel this is what they need to do to maintain their business that's what they're going to do. It also comes to a point where you make your own decisions and when you realize you're in a bad spot you've got to stop playing. That's my position. I'm not playing anymore. Neither are my friends.”

Sumja said that after he posted his tweet he heard from dozens of people who said they also have quit betting on racing and that they were happy that he spoke out. The horse racing industry used to get $500,000 a year in handle from Brent Sumja. Now it gets none. How much longer can this keep happening and how many more Brent Sumjas can it afford to lose before real and lasting harm is done to the sport? These are real problems and so far the sport hasn't been able to offer any serious solutions.

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Technology, Engagement, and the Future the Focus of Annual Round Table Conference

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – A panel on computer-assisted wagering (CAW) and its pros and cons, and another on trainers' reactions to the new Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) regulations, took center stage at the 2023 Jockey Club Round Table Conference on Matters Pertaining to Racing held in Saratoga Springs, New York on Thursday.

Patrick Cummings, the moderator of the panel on CAWs, is the Executive Director of the Thoroughbred Idea Foundation, a racing-industry think tank. Cummings took the panel through a brief history of parimutuel wagering and the changes the industry has seen before landing at the crux of the subject matter: CAWs.

“The CAWs are individuals with well-resourced staffs, developing couture models assessing vast amounts of data,” said Cummings. “They deploy finely-honed algorithms to efficiently place bets, often at the last possible second, all while receiving significant rebates for their play.”

The rebates, he said, while sizeable, were only one of the challenges that CAWs present to racing. The other is their ability to bet large amounts of money at the last possible second before the race, which gives them an advantage over regular players.

Pat Cummings | Skip Dickstein

“In pari-mutuel wagering, betting late has always been beneficial,” Cummings said. “But, when all betting was done on-track, betting late came with the risk you might not get your bet down at all.

“That's not a concern now, especially for the CAWs, who've been given the ability to place batch bets, dumping vast amounts in the final cycle of betting. The impact of that is witnessed every day, in nearly every race and across almost every pool.”

That impact, he said, has led us to where we are now: CAWs have grown from 8% of total handle in 2003 to around 33% of handle today. At the same time, when adjusted for inflation, non-CAW wagering is down by nearly two-thirds over the same time period. That's a concern because the money returned to racing in the form of purses is much greater from normal bettors than from those receiving huge rebates. So while handle may be up, “the greatest source of growth has been a handful of high-frequency bettors,” who pay less back into the system.

“How the evolution of CAWs is managed and how we support the existing customers we still have might be key to the future of wagering on racing in today's tech-forward world–one with unfathomable processing power, machine-learning, AI and more,” Cummings said.

Cummings led a Q-and-A session with Joe Longo, the General Manager of Content Managing Solutions for NYRA, which owns an ownership stake in the Elite Turf Club, one of the largest computer syndicate operations; and Dr. Marshall Gramm, a horse owner and professor at Rhodes College.

Gramm said he had written models with partners based on statistical probabilities. He started receiving rebates in 2011, and said that doing so not only allowed him to turn a profit, but to increase his handle enormously, from $49,000 in 2010 to $25 million in 2015. He has gone on to be a major racehorse owner, with 116 horses he now owns alone or in partnerships.

Gramm said that some in the industry have come to believe that rebates are all negative, but that his churn had increased exponentially because of it.

Love it or hate it, though, CAWs are here to stay, said Gramm.

“There's no walking back from it,” he said. “The computers aren't going away. You can't step back in time.”

Neither panelist addressed the issue that Cummings talked about in his introduction and that was covered in Jerry Brown's TDN op/ed, Existential Crisis, that because in parimutuel markets, players are playing against one another, regular people are effectively paying more, and leaving the game.

Longo discussed how NYRA has become the only racing organization to ban CAW bettors in the win pool within two minutes to post in order to negate the late odds fluctuations which have become so frustrating to horseplayers. Longo said that while no other organization had followed that lead, he felt that others eventually would.

HISA Panel Discusses Adjustments to New Rules

Trainers Jena Antonucci and Ron Moquett served as panelists, along with Ben Mosier, Executive Director of the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit (HIWU), and HISA's Lisa Lazarus on a Q-and-A panel moderated by Jim Gagliano, the President and COO of The Jockey Club, on how trainers were adjusting to the new HISA regulations.

Gagliano asked the two trainers how their life had changed under HISA.

Trainer Jena Antonucci | Skip Dickstein

Antonucci said that she was already running her business along the lines that HISA requires in terms of record-keeping, but acknowledged that that part of the business had been a learning curve for other horsemen. Moquett said that, “as a Thoroughbred trainer, there's a new set of rules to follow and we're going to adapt to those rules, but primarily, we keep the priority on the horse.”

Antonucci acknowledged that there were concerns and bumps in the road as the program has gotten underway, but urged people to come forward with those problems so that the solutions could be found. But the benefits, she said, were dramatic.

“I may be a minority in this thought,” she said, “but I find it has been the great equalizer. It isn't a secret that there is availability of different levels of pharmaceuticals on different levels. Really smart chemists, and people looking to gain an edge. So I feel the biggest benefit has been to probably the hardest hit of this industry, which is the middle and the smaller side, where it has allowed a level playing field and where that guy or gal who busts their butt 24/7 can walk into a race and not feel like they're going to watch another horse re-break at the top of the stretch. That their plied trade and their skill set will have an opportunity to shine, where that eight-percent trainer historically, where it looks like I can't train a racehorse? All of a sudden, he's winning more, or she's winning more, and it's not because we've done anything different in our practice. And you know what? What I do, I do darned well, and my horse–whether it's in the Grade I Belmont Stakes or a $12,500 maiden–is going to have the chance to march down that stretch and compete eye-to-eye with the horses next to them, and there's not a pharmaceutical in our way.”

The crowd gave her an ovation after the comment.

“There are a few parts of it that have been very challenging,” said Moquett. “You're dealing with a large group of people who are now just getting introduced to technology. I'm helping people who are sometimes my competitors try to understand and navigate the system.

“I wear a number of hats,” he said. “I train horses. I own horses. I'm a member of the HBPA, and I'm on the HISA Advisory Committee. I'm constantly a sounding board. People come to me and say this is unfair, and I come to [HISA]. It's new. There are going to be problems, and they're going to have to listen to horsemen. It doesn't matter how good [Lisa Lazarus] is at her job, we need the Bill Motts and the Steve Asmussens. My job is to say, `look, I understand what you're trying to do, but we need to do a better job of explaining to people what the differences are between accidental contamination, an overage of an allowed medication and someone trying to gain an edge.' I'm basically representing 4,500 people that have to go through every regulation that HISA believes is okay. So [Lazarus] and I will get together, we'll battle, and we'll come to a solution. I will say we don't always get along that great, but she has been very good about hearing me out.”

Lisa Lazarus said, “One of the things we heard a lot was that if the public hears that a trainer has a medication overage, they think that they're a cheater. That they don't understand the difference between true doping substances, and medications that are allowed, but just not on race day. And so, one of the things that the [AMDC] does is distinguish very clearly between allowed substances and banned substances.” Violations for each were very different, she explained. “We're there to protect the 99% of trainers who are competing cleanly, so that they get a fair race.”

Safety, and The Traceability of Thoroughbreds

Tracing what happens to a Thoroughbred when it leaves racing or breeding has long been a problem for the industry, an issue that Kristin Werner, the Senior Counsel for The Jockey Club, addressed in her report on Thoroughbred Safety.

“I am pleased to announce that the `Transferred as Retired from Racing' process has gone digital,” said Werner. “The permanent removal of a horse's eligibility to race is beneficial to the retiring racehorse, but the process requires thoughtfulness and transparency on the part of the seller and buyer to avoid contractual disputes or other disagreements. To that end, the previous process required a notarized signature and hard-copy form to retire a Thoroughbred from racing. With the assistance of digital signature verification, we are now able to confidently collect the required signatures through the Interactive Registration website, which will make the process easier for everyone involved.”

Kristin Werner | Skip Dickstein

Werner also reported that the ease of traceability is increasing due to the replacement of hard-copy certificates with digital ones starting with the foal crop of 2018. This, she said, “will allow The Jockey Club to follow up with the certificate manager to try to trace a Thoroughbred that has exited the racing or breeding population with an unknown outcome. When this system is in place in 2024, an automated prompt will be triggered when a horse has not been reported dead and has no racing activity, no breeding activity, and no Thoroughbred Incentive Program number for a specified time period. The communication will explain why the prompt was triggered and will ask the manager to indicate the horse's current status.”

For foals born in 2017 and prior that had made a start in the past 10 years, she said, The Jockey Club would be reaching out to the last connections to try to determine their status.

Werner also addressed racing's safety issues.

“In 2022, data analysis from the 14th year of reporting to the Equine Injury Database (EID) showed a decrease in the rate of fatal injury in 2022 to 1.25 fatalities per 1,000 starts,” said Werner. “This is the lowest cumulative fatality rate since the EID was launched in 2009, and is the fourth consecutive year that the rate has decreased. While 99.88% of Thoroughbred races were completed without a fatality last year, clusters like those that occurred in April and May of 2023, unfortunately, cast a shadow over the good news and bring equine fatalities back into the headlines of national media,” she said, referring to the fatalities during the week leading up to the Kentucky Derby.

Werner said that the advent of the EID had allowed them to identify 35% of the risk factors which put horses at increased risk for breakdown during the running of a race. Those factors include a horse's vet list history, the race distance, and the time a horse has spent with a trainer. Long races, and longer time with a horse's trainer make that horse statistically safer.

The Safety Committee is also calling for the dissemination of information regarding the consistency and maintenance of track surfaces. “The Thoroughbred Safety Committee today calls for that information to be frequently measured at periodic distances and made available to the public,” said Werner. “Working with other key industry stakeholders, especially the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority and the Racing Surfaces Testing Laboratory, The Jockey Club recommends exploring the best methods for providing the racing surface data to the horsemen and public, including through an app, website, or other electronic feed. As with all of its recommendations, The Jockey Club will help provide resources to ensure this recommendation is met.”

Analytics in Sport

Michael Lopez, the Director of Football Data and Analytics for the National Football League, is a Saratoga resident who used to teach at Skidmore College in town, and a long-time horse racing fan. He talked about how the NFL uses data to drive decision-making, and ways in which he felt horse racing could do the same.

Michael Lopez | Skip Dickstein

And while the sports are completely different, there were several interesting parallels.

Wearable technology has been an interesting new potential safety tool for horses, designed to measure things like their regular stride to detect any changes that might indicate a problem. The NFL is doing the same.

“Recently,” said Lopez, “all NFL players are now wearing RFID chips in their helmets, shoulder pads, and cleats, small enough so that the players don't feel them, but enough so that a signal is emitted each time they step onto the practice or game field. The burden is heavy–this data is messy and the tracking cumbersome–but the idea of a cleat specific to a running back on turf, or a helmet specific to a quarterback who likes to scramble–gives the league plenty to work on. And each practice, each club is required to wear tracking devices that give insight into a player's load, distance traveled, speed, etc., which enables sports scientists to evaluate performance, if players need to tone down, or injury recovery.”

Moreover, the NFL is timing the replay review process to ensure that a coach's challenge in a more prominent game is treated the same way that it would be in a less-prominent one. After the non-disqualification of Forte (Violence) in the July 29 GII Jim Dandy S. prompted much discussion over whether a less well-publicized event would have merited a DQ, the topic struck home. “The horse racing corollary is obvious,” said Lopez. “When, why, and how stewards decide for or against a disqualification, because a possible DQ at Del Mar should have the identical decision-making process to one at Saratoga.”

Engagement With Racing

Lindsay Czarniak | Skip Dickstein

Lindsay Czarniak was just a baby when her father Chet took the job as the first-ever horse racing reporter for USA Today in 1982. Today, she is a sports broadcaster who anchored SportsCenter for six years and who works as a Fox Sports sideline reporter. She is a studio host for NBC's summer and winter Olympics. She is also an influencer with America's Best Racing and a West Point Thoroughbreds partner who was one of the co-owners of Jace's Road (Quality Road) in this year's Kentucky Derby. “My goal was to give folks that pay attention to my content the VIP access,” said Czarniak. “I had so many people pulling for Jace's Road because they knew we were in the big race.”

Her advice for racing? Lean into storytelling and access; just because it feels normal to people within the industry doesn't mean that it is to fans. “There is a family aspect, a necessary aspect, a high-stakes aspect to this sport that your average sports fan would consume.”

She also advised racing to place itself where young people consume content, i.e., streaming platforms, digital and social media, etc., and to communicate the safety steps that have been taken.

Racing and Data

Kyle McDoniel was named the President and COO of Equibase on June 1, 2023, and comes from a sports and data background, having most recently served as vice president of U.S. Strategic Partnerships for SportRadar, a sports technology company.

McDoniel talked about the challenges inherent in GPS tracking of horse racing, and said that Equibase is now producing tracking at 28 tracks across the U.S. and Canada, representing over 75% of North American handle. In addition, he said the company was continuing to invest in graphical representations of past performances, including those that illustrate stride frequency and length averages, among other things.

Janney's Closing Remarks

Stuart S. Janney III | Skip Dickstein

In his closing remarks, Jockey Club Chairman Stuart Janney said that the advent of HISA had done a lot to secure racing's future.

“Four years ago, at this program, a great Australian breeder-owner, John Messara, speaking about the proposed federal legislation, said, `You've got everything to unleash your monster of economic rewards if you were to join the rest of the world in this harmonization in terms of the drug rules.' John was right and we are here today and it's now time to capture that future.”

To do so, said Janney, “I have two suggestions. First, we have to embrace the international aspect of the sport. Racing is global and thankfully, in many parts of the world, the sport is thriving.”

His second suggestion, he said, involved marketing. “We need to get past the concerns that we are constantly in turmoil, rocking from one crisis to the next. Another Round Table speaker from the past, David Fuscus, [who] discussed crisis management, said, `If we come together as an industry, negative perception can be turned. There is hope we can come through these dark days, but to do so, the public needs to understand what we're doing and believe we are on a path to success.'”

Entire Conference Available Online

To watch the entire Round Table conference, click here.

 

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Letter to the Editor: Existential Crisis. No Hyperbole

There have been several stories recently in the TDN about Computer Assisted Wagering (CAW), and many of them have contained accurate and useful information. But what those articles have failed to do is convey what CAW really is and does, why it matters, and most of all, how dire and urgent the situation they have created is. Hence this letter.

1-First, the basics. Betting handle is the lifeblood of our industry. It directly funds purses, creates all the jobs in our business, and indirectly funds the commercial bloodstock industry—no (or less) purse money to run for, and eventually yearlings will have the market value of show horses, and stud fees will follow them down.

2–The parimutuel pools are a market; horseplayers compete against each other, not the house. CAW is not just someone using a computer to handicap. Yes, there is a handicapping element, and if someone creates a good handicapping model, good for them. But the important part is this—CAW “players” are being given a massive advantage over regular horseplayers. They get electronic access and a last split-second look at the pools, which gives their computers the ability to assess the situation in a microsecond, and automatically make hundreds of targeted and incremental bets, totaling tens of thousands of dollars per “player,” right at the bell. No human can do that, or compete with it.

3–Because CAW is responsible for so much handle, and because many of the CAW “players” have banded together to negotiate, they receive gigantic rebates. So in effect, they are playing into a much lower takeout than the general public, and that, combined with the advantage they have been given, enables them to basically vacuum the pools. And since it's a market, if they're siphoning off money, someone else is losing it. More on that in a moment.

4–In our industry, we publish handle figures, not profit and loss. But remember: CAW “players” get gigantic rebates. That means the industry gets to keep much less of every dollar they bet—roughly speaking, it takes $3 of CAW handle to equal $1 bet in the backyard at Saratoga. So if overall handle stays the same, but CAW handle is replacing non-CAW handle, for purses, and for everyone else in the industry, it's like handle going down. And CAW is now responsible for about one-third of national handle.

5–The overall retail blended takeout on racing is normally about 20%. But with the CAW “players” making money as a group, it means the horseplayers who make up the other two-thirds of the pools are in effect paying the entire takeout. So for them, the takeout is up to roughly an onerous 30%. Now, horseplayers are not like the people who buy expensive yearlings. They generally work for a living, and as a group have a finite amount they can lose over the course of a year, or lifetime. So as the takeout has gone dramatically up, one of three things has to happen:

A) Horseplayers bet the same amount, and tap out faster. That reduces churn on handle, and handle overall goes down.

B) Horseplayers reduce what they bet as they lose more, to make their money last longer. Handle goes down.

C) Horseplayers stop betting or switch to legal sports betting, which has a takeout of between 5-10% (and no learning curve, since most of us grew up with these games, and there are no odds changes after you bet). Handle goes WAY down.

In other words, CAW isn't just disguising the drop in non-CAW handle, it is CAUSING it.

I know many serious, lifelong horseplayers who now only play on big days, or who have quit the game entirely.

6–So here it is; figures courtesy of Pat Cummings:

As CAW handle has gone from about eight percent of the pools to about a third over the last 20 years, non-CAW handle has nosedived. To give you an idea of how short a time period we're talking about, Smarty Jones won the Derby in 2004.

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION, ORDINARY (NON-CAW) HANDLE IS ABOUT ONE-THIRD OF WHAT IT WAS JUST 20 YEARS AGO.

Do I have your attention now?

Almost all of that drop came before the advent of legal sports betting. And remember, the non-CAW handle is the oxygen-rich blood that nourishes everything. CAW is not just taking money out of the pockets of ordinary horseplayers; it's killing horsemen and the industry as a whole.

This is an existential crisis, without exaggeration. Since only handle figures are published, the picture has been obscured to the public, but we are not talking about a long horizon–I think major cracks will start becoming visible within the next year or so, because the downward spiral is accelerating rapidly now that there's sports betting. And as ordinary handle goes down, CAW will as well–the robots adjust their bet size to the size of the pools, so that they aren't killing their own prices. These guys aren't in our game for fun, like horseplayers are, they're here to suck money out of the pools. And when they no longer can, they will leave.

7-So, what can be done? Finally, some good news: because the industry makes so little from a dollar of CAW, eliminating a portion of their handle will not have anywhere near the same effect as eliminating the same amount of ordinary handle.

The first thing that has to happen is that the unfair advantage has to be taken away from the CAW players. Their special access to the pools has to be shut off with three minutes to post, like NYRA did with their win pool. But it can't be just cosmetic. It has to happen in all pools.

The second thing is to reduce their rebates. If you make twice as much from each dollar bet, even if CAW handle is cut in half, it's a wash. And if those two actions erode their edge to the point where they bet much less, good; that's the idea. We need to knock that third of the pools figure down by quite a bit, to salvage what's left of the non-CAW handle, and hopefully create more.

I'm using “salvage” advisedly, because we are hemorrhaging customers, and once they are gone, it is hard to get them back. Since I wrote the first draft of this letter one of those cracks has appeared. Golden Gate is closing, in an attempt to triage California racing. We need to stop the bleeding. And we need to do it right now.

Jerry Brown is the president of Thoro-Graph, Inc. 

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Pat Cummings Joins The TDN Writers’ Room Podcast

Computer Assisted Wagering (CAW) has been a hot topic of late. What we know is that there are a handful gamblers that use computer algorithms to formulate their wagers, are allowed to make their bets at the very last second and receive substantial rebates. But there's a lot we don't know, like how much are they betting, what pools they most prefer and what affect has that had on the “regular” player? In his latest report for the Thoroughbred Idea Foundation (TIF), entitled Sharks & Minnows, TIF Executive Director Pat Cummings dug into the issue. To find out more about his findings, the TDN Writers' Room podcast presented by Keeneland was joined this week by Cummings. He was the Green Group Guest of the Week.

Using data from Del Mar, Cummings concluded that CAW players are betting more each year and that the amount of betting from “everyone else” is declining.

“Not only are the sharks growing, but the minnows are declining,” he said. “For the first time in this paper, were able to really separate how the CAW play has grown and how all other customers have in almost every pool shrunk. Total handle figures are often marketed in the industry press releases, they're touted. It looks like on an annual basis that not a whole lot has changed. That's not telling us the accurate picture. For years now, the Thoroughbred Idea Foundation has wanted to really dive into who's betting, how are they betting, how are they participating and how is the market changing? What we're seeing now more clearly than ever before is what's happening with all other customers. We're talking about people that may bet $10 a year or maybe even $2 million a year. They are a smaller percentage of the pools and declining.”

When asked if this could lead to a “doomsday” scenario, whereby the “sharks” have driven all the “minnows” out of the game, Cummings said that is in fact a concern.

“I'd call it a real threat,” he said. “And I would suggest that some of the biggest sharks are eating some of the smaller ones too.”

He estimated that CAW players now account for 33% of the total handle in U.S. racing

Cummings is not in favor of banning CAW players. He recognizes that if they go away overall handle would plummet, which could be catastrophic. The answer he says is to find ways to level the playing field when it comes to the sharks versus the minnows, starting with the takeout.

“Takeout rates have not come down commensurate with all of this money coming in (from CAW players) at low price points and driven by technology,” he said. “That's the opposite experience that investors have had in almost all other areas, where we have seen costs for customers come crashing down. The days of the $35 stock commission are long gone. And yet 50, 60, maybe even 70% of all trading on the stock market now is high-frequency trading. Ordinary investors in 401Ks and IRAs, regular mutual fund holders, exchange traded funds, different products have been created to allow ordinary investors to buy and hold. And their costs have come down from where they were 20 years ago. We have not seen that same evolution in American horse racing wagering, which remains one of the most expensive gambles out there.”

Cummings also called on the industry to end all jackpot bets. He has found that not only do they keep money out of circulation by cutting down on churn, but that the CAW players often come in and take home a disproportionate amount of the pool at the expense of the regular player.

“If you run a parimutuel wagering business and your goal is to keep collecting commissions on parimutuel wagering, then why introduce a bet that limits the number of times that a customer can keep coming back to your window and churning their money?” he said. “You're going in the complete opposite direction to all traditional business logic, which is you should drive customers back into your wagering pools. Yet, tracks continued to persist with these bets. The jackpots need to go as quickly as possible. Tracks need to revert to a traditional play, get that daily payout, get that churn up. The sport needs churn. It's better for every stakeholder along the way.”

Elsewhere on the podcast, which is also sponsored by Coolmore,https://lanesend.com/  the Pennsylvania Horse Breeders Association, Kentucky Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders1/st Racing, WinStar Farm, Lane's End, XBTV.com and https://www.threechimneys.com/ West Point Thoroughbreds, the team of Bill Finley, Randy Moss and T.D. Thornton, took a look at the win by Two Phil's (Hard Spun) in the GIII Ohio Derby and his subsequent injury and retirement. There was a look back at the Royal Ascot meet, where one of the highlights was the win by the U.S. based 2-year-old filly Crimson Advocate (Nyquist) in the G2 Queen Mary S., and a look ahead at Saturday's GI Stephen Foster S. at Ellis Park. The podcastwrapped up with a discussion on a new proposed rule by the New York Gaming Commission which would require all horses to undergo checks by a veterinarian 72 hours prior to a race or a workout.

Click here to watch the Writers' Room podcast or here for the audio-only version.

The post Pat Cummings Joins The TDN Writers’ Room Podcast appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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