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TIF: Wagering Insecurity, Part I–Expectations

This is Part 1 of the Thoroughbred Idea Foundation's (TIF) series “Wagering Insecurity.”

Faced with remarkable competitive pressure from the rise of legal sports betting, horse racing is at a crossroads. Confidence amongst horseplayers and horse owners is essential to the future sustainability of the sport. Efforts to improve the greater North American Thoroughbred industry will fall flat if its stakeholders fail to secure a foundation of integrity. Achieving this is growing increasingly difficult after the sport has neglected its core base–horseplayers–for decades. “Wagering Insecurity” details some of that neglect, and the need to embrace serious reform. Fortunately, there are examples across the racing world to follow.

Participants across racing should have some basic expectations met.

Simply put, the competitions within racing should be fair and honest. Horses should be free from any illegal performance enhancement. Jockeys should expect horses are sound, track surfaces are safe and stewards enforce rules consistently. Bettors should expect that jockeys give horses their best chance to win, betting information is accurate and that wagering systems are secure and do not advantage some customers over others.

Are we meeting these expectations?

This series delves into the integrity of North American horse racing, specifically as it relates to the $11 billion wagered through the pari-mutuel system, and the uncounted billions wagered outside the purview of North American racing regulators.

Horse racing is competing for customers, working to retain existing ones while trying to attract and develop new ones, like any business. Proper standards of integrity are necessary.

Are racing's customers, the bettors, properly protected at present?

TIF believes the answer to that question is “no.” The security of racing's wagering systems is not up to contemporary standards. The oversight of racing from stewards and regulators is not sufficient at present for customers to have confidence in the legitimacy of results.

To read the rest, click here.

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Wagering Insecurity: Are We Meeting The Basic Expectation Of Integrity In Racing?

This is Part 1 of the Thoroughbred Idea Foundation's (TIF) series “Wagering Insecurity.”

Faced with remarkable competitive pressure from the rise of legal sports betting, horse racing is at a crossroads.

Confidence amongst horseplayers and horse owners is essential to the future sustainability of the sport. Efforts to improve the greater North American Thoroughbred industry will fall flat if its stakeholders fail to secure a foundation of integrity. Achieving this is growing increasingly difficult after the sport has neglected its core base – horseplayers – for decades.

“Wagering Insecurity” details some of that neglect, and the need to embrace serious reform. Fortunately, there are examples across the racing world to follow.

Integrity is essential in horse racing to give all participants confidence.

Customer confidence is important for any business, but especially so when people are investing their money.

Across the forthcoming installments of the “Wagering Insecurity” series, several unsettling perspectives are offered. TIF spoke with nearly 50 long-time current and former industry executives, regulators and officials from around the racing world, some for direct attribution and others on background, who shared their unease with the status quo. A common thread: the blame is shared.

The poor state of wagering systems security and integrity measures is not the fault of any one individual, group, regulator or corporation, it is how horse racing in North America has evolved.

Wholesale improvements are needed. If we lift our standards, confidence will build, participation will grow and racing's future will be more secure.

EXPECTATIONS

Participants across racing should have some basic expectations met.

Are we meeting these expectations?

Horse racing is competing for customers, working to retain existing ones while trying to attract and develop new ones, like any business. Proper standards of integrity are necessary.

Are racing's customers, the bettors, properly protected at present?

Both perspectives are addressed throughout the series.

When American racing fails its bettors and stakeholders, it loses customers. In a world where sports betting is available to almost half of the American population and typically just involves downloading a mobile app, cheaper and better policed gambling opportunities are easily found.

Do participants in racing have confidence in the outcomes on the track and through wagering? Right now? No. Could they? Yes, or at least far more so than exists now.

Confidence is good for business.

WHO IS BETTING WHAT

Racing's business statistics are deliberately opaque. There is no central office that tracks racing's betting business and performance, a perpetual disservice to the sport's stakeholders. Basic metrics on wagering would be helpful for many stakeholders in the sport but getting them is practically impossible.

This lack of clarity has become increasingly problematic because the business changed fundamentally in the 1990s and the division of revenues from wagering did not keep pace. Handle shifted from on-track to off-track as full-card simulcasting and internet-enabled advanced deposit wagering (ADW) took hold. On-track betting revenues are often the most lucrative for purses under current agreements between bet-takers, tracks and horsemen. It has declined while the ADW business has grown in significance, with the pandemic-related closures turbocharging that growth, accounting for an estimated $7 billion of U.S. Thoroughbred racing handle last year.

Now, who is betting what, and through which channels?

When Equibase reported total wagering on U.S. racing in the pandemic-impacted 2020 was $10.92 billion, down less than 1% from the previous year despite nearly ten months of racing without live attendance, that felt like a decent showing.

But total handle figures at a nationwide level, or even at the individual track level, do not offer much insight to the health of the business. They tell us very little. It is the composition of that handle which is a more meaningful measure, but such details are almost never available to anyone except the host track where the race occurs.

Citing total handle figures as a measure of performance should be viewed skeptically, particularly by horsemen.

Where does handle come from? How many individual customers are wagering? How many new customers have been created, and how many are still betting? How many customers are betting substantial amounts over $10 million, $50 million, or over $100 million annually? What is the effective takeout for customers of different ADWs? How much are purses earning from different customer segments?

Without centralized reporting of these figures made available to all parties in the sport, it is almost impossible to know.

Here is what we do know.

Reports from the Oregon Racing Commission, which serves as a hub for the largest registered ADWs, show that handle for the three largest ADWs in 2020 – TVG, TwinSpires and Xpressbet – was more than $6.2 billion. That includes all breeds and greyhound betting through those ADWs, not just U.S. Thoroughbred betting, though Thoroughbred racing does generate the vast majority of total action.

NYRABets, a fourth major ADW which hubs some of its betting through Oregon, reported handle of $225 million, but that isn't the entire picture as much of its handle comes from New York residents, which is not included in Oregon figures. The New York in-state numbers have not been made public.

What about the rest?

THE GROUPS

Some came from on-track money from January through early March when tracks were open. A small amount came from tracks with live attendance after March. Some came from smaller ADWs hubbed in North Dakota, where betting handle by ADW is not made public. Some came from Canadian customers.

But much of it came from groups like Elite Turf Club, entities which TIF has called “high-volume betting shops” (HVBS) in our previous white paper but are more formally known within the industry as secondary pari-mutuel organizations (SPMOs). These groups are the biggest customers by handle, receive substantial rebates and have direct access to pari-mutuel pools.

In his 2016 book “The Perfect Bet,” author Adam Kucharski calls it “scientific betting.”

“The techniques are now so effective – and the wins so consistent – that teams…don't celebrate when their predictions come good.”

These groups participate at an institutional level. They bet big because that is what the math dictates. It is cold, calculated investing. Kucharski continues:

“It's not cheap to set up a scientific betting syndicate. To gather the necessary technology and expertise, not to mention hone the prediction method and place the bets – costs most teams at least $1 million. Because betting strategies are expensive to run, teams in the United States often seek out racetracks that offer favorable gambling conditions.”

According to court filings from 2017, The Stronach Group (now 1/ST) owns Elite Turf Club.

Based on a variety of projections which TIF has updated to account for 2020 figures, we estimate total betting from the HVBS/SPMOs was likely between 33% and 40% of total U.S Thoroughbred handle, in the vicinity of $4 billion out of the total $10.92 billion. The reality could be higher or lower. In 2003, they represented approximately only 8% of total wagering.

These groups might not be growing, but rather they are representing a larger percentage of wagering as mainstream horseplayers abandon racing, or shift more of their action to legal sports betting options.

The majority of play from the HVBS/SPMOs is not counted in the ADW figures. Customers like those at Elite, and it is only a few customers, place their bets directly into the pools, bypassing an ADW intermediary. There are also smaller computerized robotic wagering groups which DO process bets through ADWs, entities betting tens of millions annually. Their total handle is unknown to the wider industry because it is commingled with ADW betting.

Bettors may not understand how the big HVBS/SPMO groups operate and exactly what they are betting, but they can readily observe their impact on the game.

What horseplayer hasn't watched as a horse that is last into the gate at 23-1, breaks on top and is never headed, winning at a much-reduced 11-1? Horses routinely enter the gate at 5-1, only to win at 5-2. Or in the last flash of a mandatory payout when a bet of half a million dollars shows up in the pool?

These are discouraging experiences for the people who cash a bet in those races and draws headshakes from many others. For more than two decades, these incidents have plagued North American racing's customers without any meaningful attention or action from track operators. Perhaps their most noteworthy response has been removing the odds from the screen in the final seconds of loading through the first quarter-mile of a race so the drops are less visible. In many cases, the big syndicates wagering hundreds of millions annually through HVBS/SPMOs are the cause of such price crunches, degrading the experience for everyone else.

The inability of regular horseplayers to have any idea what price they are getting damages the product every day. Sports betting customers know exactly what their return will be if their bet wins. What was once a harmful feature of pari-mutuel wagering is now a huge competitive disadvantage.

Sports betting is growing at an explosive rate with attractive betting offerings and widespread distribution. Operators are spending vast sums using bonuses and promotions to acquire customers and are embracing modern betting technology. That is not bad news for racing companies in the racing wagering space, like TVG and TwinSpires, whose parent companies run sports betting businesses, but it is bad for those who depend on purses for their livelihoods.

For the last 25 years, as betting shifted online, purses in many North American jurisdictions have been bolstered by subsidies from additional gaming, be it slot machines, video lottery terminals (VLT), historical horse racing (HHR) machines or others. That era in American racing is far closer to sunset than sunrise as casino wagering moves online where revenues are undivided. Decoupling racing from slot and casino revenues will likely increase. While all stakeholders in racing should undoubtedly pursue every funding source possible, the single greatest, sustainable source of revenue for racing on the continent remains actual wagering on racing.

There are avenues for improvement, but any efforts to attract new wagering on racing will fall flat if the North American racing industry fails to embrace integrity across the sport – within its wagering systems, betting platforms and the running of the races themselves.

In our next installment, one leading expert makes it clear – doping in racing is intertwined with gambling. So why is gambling almost never referenced or investigated in North America in such cases?

Coming Thursday, April 15 – Part 2 – Intertwined

Review the Executive Summary to “Wagering Insecurity”

Want to share your insights with TIF? Contact us here.

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TIF Launching “Wagering Insecurity” Series Beginning April 13

Editor's Note: The following is an edited press release from the Thoroughbred Idea Foundation, which is beginning a 12-part series on wagering insecurity next week. The series will be released in two installments per week, and the TDN will carry summaries and links to the 12 articles.

The Thoroughbred Idea Foundation (TIF) will launch “Wagering Insecurity,” a multi-part series which will examine the current state of oversight of North American Thoroughbred racing and wagering, beginning Tuesday, Apr. 13.

In the aftermath of the infamous “Fix Six” at the 2002 Breeders' Cup, the American racing industry pledged millions of dollars to improve the monitoring of pari-mutuel betting and create a central office to oversee wagering security. While plenty was spent, the oversight never materialized. Vulnerabilities still exist, late odds changes impact many races and transparency is nowhere to be found.

TIF believes improved measures of integrity will boost customer confidence, which will lead to increased participation and put racing on a path to a more sustainable future, particularly in light of the rapid expansion of legal sports betting across the continent.

Customer confidence is crucial to any business, especially gambling, but North America's racing industry has done little to instill it over the last two decades.

“Automated bingo card devices in church basements have more independent monitoring than the tote systems,” said Kevin Mullally, Vice President of Government Relations and General Counsel for Gaming Laboratories International.

Track operators seem indifferent. As one 25-year U.S. state racing regulator told TIF for this series:

“Most tracks, confronted with a wagering integrity issue, would either bury the information or bury their heads in the sand and it would never see the light of day. That's not every track across America, but the majority would not want to make public any information that would question the integrity of wagering on their product.”

In 2005, when speaking of the racing industry's post-“Fix Six” efforts to upgrade wagering oversight which eventually failed, then Del Mar Thoroughbred Club President Craig Fravel acknowledged the track operators might fall short of the mark.

“We [track operators] are a little suspect because we are maybe overly confident at times. I think to allow customers to have sufficient levels of confidence in us, we have to not only demonstrate we are capable of reviewing things, but that there is a sufficiently independent and authoritative organization out there than can be the ultimate arbiter of those kind of decisions.”

Such a group still does not exist.

The TRPB

The Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau (TRPB) is North American racing's only provider of any wagering oversight, but the group has been defunded over years and is not independent. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a consortium of North American racetracks.

The TRPB provides member tracks a platform to monitor wagering on their own races and assist them when needed. The tracks essentially monitor themselves.

Given the consolidation which has taken place in horse racing over the last 20 years, tracks control most of the levers of the greater business. They own most of the online betting platforms which process the majority of bets on North American racing, known as ADWs. They own two of the three main tote companies which handle most betting activity. One conglomerate even owns at least part of a major off-shore rebate shop whose few customers account for an enormous amount of total handle.

Tracks fund the TRPB, which was once called horse racing's own “little FBI,” but has seen its policing functions largely reduced. Horse racing may have been once described as “the best policed sport of all,” but that has changed.

“It was an erosion, over time,” Paul Berube told TIF of the TRPB which he ran for nearly two decades after working as an investigator with the group for another two decades before that.

“Today, there is no national unity, but in the heyday of the TRPB, that was our strength.”

Despite several attempts from TIF, the TRPB's Executive Vice President Curtis Linnell declined the opportunity to answer questions for this series.

Suspicious Betting

While the TRPB has taken on an almost invisible profile to most bettors, there is an unexpected group which has started paying more attention to North American racing,

Unbeknownst to most American horseplayers, a large bookmaking market has emerged in Europe offering fixed-odds bets on North American racing. Total handle is believed to exceed $1 billion annually. Contracts enabling these relationships are often facilitated by XB-Net, a subsidiary of 1/ST, formerly The Stronach Group.

Bookmakers have their own monitoring group which examines wagering on all sports, investigates suspicious wagers and raises alerts to regulatory authorities with whom they have information-sharing arrangements. For the first time ever, they identified suspicious wagering on U.S. races in the fourth quarter of 2020.

According to Matt Fowler, Director of Integrity at the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA), the recent alerts on U.S. races go “well beyond just an unusual betting pattern or unexpected price movements.”

European fixed-odds betting operators are identifying activity involving U.S. racing that should be concerning to all U.S. racing stakeholders. Where is the American oversight on American races?

At present, there is no reporting relationship between European bookmakers and any American counterparts, the TRPB, North American track operators or regulators. For now, the findings will inform bookmaking decisions but not the patrolling of American races, where pari-mutuel handle vastly exceeds bookmakers.

A world-wide market requires world-wide supervision. The TRPB is the closest thing North American racing has to self-regulation, which is fine…until it isn't.

What we have now is insufficient.

Racing on the continent in the 2020s is run with an integrity infrastructure better suited to the 1970s and a business model from the early 1990s. The oversight measures for the races themselves and their wagering systems have degraded over time. Racing's integrity infrastructure is falling farther behind that of the rest of the developed racing world, where more robust monitoring of all markets is far greater, transparent oversight is commonplace and customers are far better protected. Examples of these modern steps are plentiful throughout the series.

Opportunity

Improvements to racing's integrity infrastructure will improve customer confidence, increase participation in the sport and lead to a more sustainable future.

“Wagering Insecurity” provides several recommendations for North American racing to consider.

Notably, the new Horseracing Integrity & Safety Authority (HISA) must include elements of bet monitoring to its practices once launched.

Global sports and racing integrity expert Jack Anderson of the University of Melbourne, who was the keynote speaker at the University of Arizona's Global Symposium on Racing in 2018, highlights several key points throughout “Wagering Insecurity” which support this conclusion.

“Effective doping control is of course a vital element of the integrity objectives of a sport such as racing but it should not be the sole integrity concern and should not be seen in isolation. Doping in a sport such as racing is often intertwined with gambling interests,” Anderson said.

“The prevalence of doping in a racing jurisdiction may also be reflective of weaknesses in that racing organization's race day operations such as:

stewarding and standards of veterinarian oversight,
lack of capacity in intelligence gathering on and knowledge of industry participants,
vulnerabilities in the licensing and registration of industry participants,
and the ability of the racing organization or jurisdiction to punish misconduct by industry participants.”

The role of HISA can and should go farther than its more commonly understood functions which have dominated early dialogue around it–namely its racetrack safety and anti-doping and medication control programs.

The legislation which established HISA empowers much more, declaring that HISA shall “exercise independent and exclusive national authority over the safety, welfare and integrity of covered horses, covered persons, and covered horseraces.” The definition of covered horseraces includes those with interstate wagering and ADW account betting.

TIF makes several other recommendations in the series related to adopting modern, transparent best practices, many of which are in place in other racing jurisdictions and sports. Significant upgrades are possible and, fortunately, the proverbial wheel does not require reinvention.

The opportunity for significant reform is real, lifting the standards of North American racing like never previously considered and importantly, rebuilding confidence in racing's voluntary participants–horseplayers and horse owners.

“TIF's advocacy has focused on improving the business for horseplayers and horse owners as their participation in racing fuels everything,” said Craig Bernick, President and Chief Executive Officer of Glen Hill Farm and founder of TIF. “We need confidence in both groups to sustain the industry, and as the various installments of the series will reveal, it is frightening just how far behind we are in protecting customers.

“Industry consolidation of track operators, technology companies and other service providers has not improved the sport,” Bernick added. “As we move forward over the next two decades, racing needs to compete for customers. Meaningful integrity controls and better pricing are needed to meet the expectations of modern bettors. Right now, we are falling woefully short and present an increasingly uncompetitive wagering offering.”

TIF's Board of Directors established the Wagering & Integrity Issues Steering Committee in July 2020, which was instrumental in the development of this series.

Patrick Cummings, TIF's Executive Director, said: “We are incredibly appreciative of the dozens of current and former racing and gaming industry executives as well as regulators from North America and abroad who provided so much insight, both on the record and for background in this series.”

“This project pulled together many pieces that have not been connected previously, and I believe readers will walk away with a much greater understanding of what has happened for the last 20 years, the extent of the threats facing the business and the tremendous opportunity to bring about changes through HISA. We look forward to sharing the various installments in the coming weeks.”

The “Wagering Insecurity” series will be published free at RacingThinkTank.com, released to industry press, via Twitter and emailed to those on TIF's mailing list. Register to receive notifications here.

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TIF: How Will Racing Pay for HISA? Grow the Business!

by Thoroughbred Idea Foundation

The creation of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) is the most significant development in American racing at the federal level since the passage of the Interstate Horseracing Act in 1978.

Questions now being rightly considered include how much HISA will cost and where will its funding originate from. Below, we offer some perspective on the costs. But as the greater industry determines where the funding will come from over time, racing should proactively adopt policies which seek to grow the wagering business.

The industry already has a plethora of obligations–aftercare, backstretch programs, integrity matters, jockey health and equine research, not to mention purses, the main driver for investment from owners. HISA adds to these. The best way for horse racing to afford all of its obligations is to grow the business.

Racing’s wagering business needs to evolve–appropriate pricing of bets, improving access and reducing costs to accurate data, complementing pari-mutuel betting with fixed odds options, modernizing existing bet processing and infrastructure, all while increasing transparency to the public in many areas. Increasing costs to our already fragile wagering markets, or to a declining base of horse owners, without these needed improvements is a recipe for disaster.

Any step where costs to betting are increased to help pay for HISA programs will hurt the greater racing business.

Projecting Costs

There is every reason to expect that a new level of federal bureaucracy functioning on top of individual state commissions will be expensive.

As it relates to testing, these expenses are fairly clear. For example, if the per-race spending on testing alone from the more than 5,000 races across all breeds overseen by the California Horse Racing Board were extrapolated across the entirety of U.S. Thoroughbred racing, nationwide testing alone would run approximately $20 million annually at current standards.

This is a cost already borne by individual commissions.

Factoring in improvements and upgraded requirements, it should be understood that the $20 million–just for testing–merely represents a starting point.

Administratively, what it will cost to start a federal authority from scratch is more challenging to envision. The HISA creates a layer of federal bureaucracy where one never previously existed. This isn’t necessarily good or bad, it is a reality in development with little insight on costs to this point.

HISA requires the registration of all “covered persons”–an umbrella term which, according to the language of the bill, includes “all trainers, owners, breeders, jockeys, racetracks, veterinarians, persons (legal and natural) licensed by a State racing commission and the agents, assigns, and employees of such persons and other horse support personnel who are engaged in the care, training, or racing of covered horses [basically, all active Thoroughbreds].”

Most are already licensed by existing commissions, but some are not. Will that information be shared or require completely new registrations? The exact administrative requirements are (understandably) unknown to this point, but all of this will come with costs.

The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), which will assist in the development of HISA, serves as a potential reference point to understand the possible administrative expenses.

According to its annual report, USADA conducted more than 14,000 tests in 2019 across various groups which include America’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes, services to the UFC or contracted services for other events, such as the Boston and New York City Marathons. Off a base of just 30,000 Thoroughbred races, down from 36,000 run in 2019, it is reasonable to expect the number of annual tests in U.S. Thoroughbred racing would be no less than five times larger than those conducted by USADA, and very likely more.

USADA’s testing costs in 2019 ran more than $13.5 million, but non-testing expenses, which includes results management, science, research and development and drug reference, education and awareness, as well as general and administrative expenses totaled an additional $9.3 million.

It would be reasonable to estimate that HISA’s costs would be similar, if not more, given a substantially increased number of tests, across a far larger base of competitors and events (races) requiring tests.

Whatever the exact costs, it will be more than in pre-HISA times.

Grow the Business

The best chance racing has of covering HISA costs is if racing finds a way to actually grow the business, turning around two decades of decline.

Grow the business. Grow the business. Grow the business.

State commissions are, for the most part, funded through fees assessed to, or withheld from, the sport’s participants. Receiving a portion of the hold from wagering takeout is one source of funding, licensing fees and starter fees are another. Some receive funding through a share of alternative gaming revenue too.

If wagering on racing continues to decline, recalling that it has dropped roughly 50% adjusted for inflation over nearly the last two decades, the ability to pay for HISA and plenty of other programs required of the industry–aftercare initiatives, jockey health, equine research, among others–would grow increasingly difficult. Takeout hikes would be a completely counterproductive measure to pay for HISA as betting churn would decline.

The path to a brighter future, where the industry’s liabilities can be covered, is wagering growth.

More wagering on racing yields a more sustainable business for all stakeholders. But yet, many of the decisions made by racing operators over the last two decades have been in opposition to growing wagering on racing. This has to change.

Whether it is the continuation of churn-killing jackpot bets, high takeout rates, an aversion from many to exploring fixed-odds options, or continuing to operate antiquated pari-mutuel bet-processing systems without modernization–these and other actions have greatly limited racing’s growth, all as the sport’s liabilities increase and its social license to operate becomes tougher to retain.

As racing and humanity emerge from a troubling calendar year, make no mistake that 2020 was a year of tremendous growth in legal sports betting. Those states doing the best with sports betting are those which have embraced online betting and competitive markets. While the overall environment for betting has never been stronger, racing’s wagering product remains stagnant.

If racing wants to succeed, and cover its growing liabilities which now include HISA, it must undertake measures to radically improve–and grow–the wagering business.

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