Letter to the Editor: CAW ‘Activity Stinks to High Heaven’

by Walter Toner

Rainy afternoon on Cape Cod and I had a few minutes to kill, so flipped the channel to TVG for a quick flutter. I selected the filly Just Like Magic, approaching the gate at 7-5 as the recipient of a $10 win wager in the 3rd race Oaklawn (3/28).

She charged up the rail and won. Final odds were 3-5. WTF. Sorry for the crudeness.

Racing will never engage the next generation of punters with 15-27% takeout and NO fixed odds, when they can bet on sports with a 4% vig and wagers that are fixed.

In the UK, an extremely sophisticated betting market, exchange wagering in its 20-year history now handles 85% of wagers, plus or minus.

Further exacerbating the industry's vulnerability is the contents of this article. My takeaway from this article is that Stronach and his friends:

  • Own racetracks
  • Own offshore betting hubs for friends
  • From these hubs, friends receive substantial discounts to wager into onshore pools
  • And we can assume the friends are getting late, direct access to track pools… and perhaps entering the pool after the start

Now the late betting is speculation on my part. It feels like it happens. And from the first four bullets, it seems suspiciously like that might be happening.

This insider activity stinks to high heaven, not just regular heaven.

This beautiful sport is bucking these horrific headwinds of scandal and a less-than-competitive product. Yet racing will always have tremendous potential.

But what is the point of one laboring all night on PPs to arrive at a horse that one feels should be 6-5 or 7-5, only to see that selection drop to 3-5 at the quarter pole?

My introduction to racing was with Win Elliot, the Schaefer Circle of Sports, and Fred Capossella. Old timers can place an era on those names. My first Racing Form cost me 50 cents; what are they now, $10? I can make an informed wager on the Red Sox without that surcharge.

Sadly I am not sure that I'm going to ever see the industry make any real progress making horse racing as competitive and accessible as other wagering products.

Thanks for reading.

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BetMakers Launches Fixed Odds Mobile App

MonmouthBets, the first legal and regulated mobile application for fixed odds betting on horse racing in the United States, has launched announced BetMakers Technology Group Friday. Approved by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, the MonmouthBets app is now available for New Jersey residents to accept wagers on mobile devices ahead of Monmouth Park's 78th season beginning Saturday, May 13.

In addition to being able to place bets on Monmouth Park races, New Jersey horseplayers can now place fixed odds wagers on races from Tampa Bay Downs, Canterbury Park, Delaware Park, Hawthorne Race Course, Emerald Downs, and Century Mile.

“With last year's retail offering setting the foundation, we are excited and honored to bring fixed odds betting to horseplayers through our MonmouthBets digital platforms,” said BetMakers CEO Jake Henson. “Fixed odds betting will help to form a healthy betting ecosystem for horse racing in New Jersey and beyond, with the transformative potential to provide a massive benefit to the entire racing industry.”

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Trainers Speak Out on HISA at HBPA Conference

Edited Press Release

The 2023 National HBPA Annual Conference closed with a lively discussion with three prominent horsemen who questioned the need, validity and overreach of federal legislation pitched as the so-called savior of racing while the industry heads into a challenging economic and logistical future.

Bret Calhoun, Ron Faucheux and Jason Barkley participated in the Trainer's Talk panel moderated by multiple Eclipse Award-winning journalist and media specialist Jennie Rees and talked about everything from the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, challenges facing small to mid-sized stables, finding and keeping help and what gives them motivation in spite of all of racing's uncertainties.

HISA dominated the discussion–as it did much of the conference this week at The Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans–and the trio pulled no punches when it came to the controversial entity.

“The whole thing is a façade. It's been all smoke and mirrors,” said Calhoun, a member of the Louisiana HBPA board who also maintains strings in Kentucky and Texas. “They sold this thing as the safety of the horse. It's absolutely not about safety of horse. It's a few people, with self-interest and they have their own personal agenda.”

Faucheux, also a member of the Louisiana HBPA board and just two back of the leader on the Fair Grounds' leading trainer's list that he topped for the 2021-22 meeting, conditions a stable of about 60 horses and hasn't left his native state since HISA rules went into effect last summer.

“I haven't signed up and I won't sign up. I'll get out of training if I have to sign up,” Faucheux said. “A stable like mine, 55-, 60-horse stable, I couldn't afford the cost of having to hire somebody to do the paperwork for me. The added expenses of it all, it wouldn't work financially for me. It's a struggle to get by the last couple years. Feed costs have gone up 50 percent, hay, shavings, it doesn't make financial sense for a trainer in Louisiana year-round to sign up and have to take on all those added fees because right now we're barely making it as it is.”

Barkley maintains a stable of about 30 horses based at Fair Grounds and Oaklawn Park in the winter and in Kentucky the majority of the year. A member of the Kentucky HBPA board and a third-generation horseman, Barkley said he feels the impact of the regulations already and only sees them as potential obstacles for trainers hoping to grow their stables.

“A lot of my smaller clients they don't want to pay the added cost of a per-start fee, the extra vet checks, and all the added fees they want to put on us,” Barkley said. “There's added costs and the time to do all the work. Between me and my main assistant, who is my wife, Shelbi, we do the extra paperwork, keeping track of everything. We already kept track of what every horse got every day but to then have to put it into files, that doubles the workload. That is time taken away from actually working with your horses, which is what you should really be focused on.”

Fixed-Odds Wagering…

Fixed-odds wagering on horse racing is coming to America and should be embraced as well as understood by horsemen.

That was the advice of two heads of major horse-racing content distributors and two executive directors of horsemen's associations. They spoke on a closing-day panel at the National Horsemen's Benevolent & Protective Association conference.

The panelists addressed both the growth of U.S. tracks sending their race product to legal bookmakers overseas and the possibilities and challenges of introducing bookmaker-style fixed odds as a wagering option at U.S. tracks, whether at the actual track, another bricks-and-mortar facility or online.

“We've really had a mantra to educate our members on what's coming,” said National HBPA CEO Eric Hamelback. “Whatever you decide as a state–to bring it in, not to bring it in, or if you're fortunate enough to have a sports-wagering license–I believe sports wagering and fixed odds are in our future. But it's up to us to continue to educate everyone properly on the pros, the cons and the nuances of what's going on.”

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HBPA Panel on Fixed Odds: Future of Wagering

HOT SPRINGS, Ark.–Dave Basler sees betting on table tennis in Asia and envisions it being replaced with horse racing in America's burgeoning sports books.

“We can fill that void a lot of times during the day so that they don't have to play table tennis from China or cricket from Australia–things that people have no idea about,” Basler, the executive director of the Ohio HBPA, said Thursday during a morning session of the National HBPA Conference at Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort. “That's not just attractive to sports books, that's attractive to horsemen and racetracks for the opportunity to increase our revenue.”

Eric Hamelback, CEO of the National Horsemen's Benevolent & Protective Association, at the 2018 conference cautioned horsemen that sports wagering was coming and the racing industry needed to be prepared. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Supreme Court struct down the ban on sports wagering. Thirty states now have passed such legislation, including Arkansas.

Now, he says the U.S. racing industry must turn its attention to implementing fixed odds. That's a divergence from the pari-mutuel industry that currently is the linchpin of American horse racing, while sports betting is based on fixed odds that allow players to lock into a price in advance of an event.

“It's here, it's on us,” Hamelback said. “Now we need to really move and pivot and focus on how to deal with it.”

The panel also included Louisiana HBPA executive director Ed Fenasci. Sports betting began in Louisiana last fall, with an online component starting in January. Basler's home state of Ohio is scheduled to start sports wagering Jan. 1, 2023 after passing the enabling legislation in December.

“Pari-mutuel wagering is not going to be in the sports books,” Basler said. “Fixed-odds wagering will be. So we need to take advantage of that ability to bring in customers and get our product in front of millions and millions of potential new fans.”

Fenasci said sports books have the ability to be more creative than pari-mutuel wagering, including with parlay bets.

“Who knows what is going to become the popular wager, right?” he said. “Two grays will win today at the Fair Grounds. This trainer is going to win a race and this jockey will win two races. You can marry a hockey game with the fifth race at the Fair Grounds and marry that to maybe a college football game betting on LSU.

“This is the future of horse-race wagering in the United States. Not this year, five years from now. This model of sports book wagering has competed very well with other forms of gaming. The parimutuel model has been eroding over the last 30 years. It's not standing the test of time when other forms of gaming come in and capture the attention of the customer base.”

Fenasci said the apps for betting online with sports books is “the type of interaction that is going to appeal to 20- and 30-year olds…We want shelf space on these new e-commerce sites. We want horse racing to be there prominently displayed for people who may not have had the opportunity in the past to consume that product.”

Basler said fixed odds could make “an unbettable race now a bettable race.”

“There's a graded-stakes race with six horses and a 3-5 shot in there,” he said. “There's a good chance the bookmaker will take the 3-5 shot out of the pool entirely and price everybody else as if that horse weren't in the race. There are a lot of things that we don't have the ability in parimutuel pools that fixed odds can offer and perhaps enhance our product.”

Former Ladbrokes executive Richard Ames is CEO of British-based Sports Information Services and president of its U.S. subsidiary SIS Content Services Inc., both of which provide content and production services to the betting industry. He said Australian racing went from being overwhelmingly parimutuel to a decade later seeing “probably 55, 60 percent” of wagering through fixed odds.

“We know consumers like the idea if they place a bet at 6-1, that's what they're going to get,” he said.

Panel moderator Michele Fischer, an industry consultant who spent years working for the tote-betting company Sportech Racing and now serves as vice president of SIS' American operation, said some horsemen are surprised to hear that U.S. races already are being distributed in overseas sports books. While the Stronach Group-owned GWS is the largest exporter of U.S. content, she said SIS is the world's largest horse-racing content distributor in the world. It is fairly new to the American market, however.

SIS currently distributes on a 24-hour cycle more than 30,000 horse races and 38,000 greyhound races a year at 118 tracks in 16 countries.

“The sports book wants to have a volume of content,” Ames said. “They want to have access to thousands of races.”

He said there are different models on how racetracks and horsemen are compensated for having their races in sports books, including a fixed fee, revenue-sharing or getting a percentage of betting proceeds.

“Why should we consider this?” Fischer asked rhetorically. “Horse racing had a fabulous year in terms of handle in 2021, the highest it had been since 2009. In some states, we have a false comfort. Purses are very high–you look at Kentucky with HHR (historical horse racing) booming there. It's doing well in Virginia. But when you look at the big picture across the United States, the simple answer is horse racing is not self-sufficient. We're using alternative gaming to support our purses.

“This is an opportunity to become more self-sufficient, because we're betting on horse racing–not betting on a VLT machine or HHR machine.”

   Rees is a horse-racing communications specialist in the horse-racing industry, including working for the National and Kentucky HBPA.

 

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