Panaramic Art; The NA Cup and Metal Health

Phil from New Jersey has Panaramic Art video’s linked up on his site, along with some commentary. I must admit, I do not follow the Meadowlands as I once did. But horses like this are fun to watch. A good deal of time we hear with horses like this, “wait until the Open horses come back, then he will meet his match!” Sometimes this is true, but with some it is not. Mr. Big last year parlayed his winter successes into an Older Pacer of the Year award. It will be interesting to see how Art does the rest of the year.

Phil has some interesting thoughts and questions on WEG racing below in the comment section of the Barbaro post. If you have any Woodbine tips for Phil, please comment there.

I watched War Pass win this weekend. He is a real beauty. It was a cheap field but he is poetry in motion. You can check the video here if you are interested. Again that got me thinking about our first Classic race in harness racing, the North America Cup. I have heard almost nil from the press about how the horses are wintering. Anyone heard anything? I found out the most about a horse by chatting with Jeff Gillis at Harnessdriver.com. Jeff relayed that 2YO Crown champion Santanna Blue Chip has been jogging and training well. He is paid to all the big ones and they are hopeful he has a good year. Other than that I am in the dark. Trot magazine should come out with a North America Cup winter book again. I look forward to hearing some updates.

More slots talk in Pennsylvania, courtesy equidaily.com. The first link is to the usual “we have higher purses now, so racing will grow” stuff. The second link says “the jury is still out”. I am not sure, but I think every subsidy in history was used to decrease the cost of the product to raise demand. Milk, pork, whatever. All we have had in racing is higher prices, and when places like Premier Turf Club, or Betting Exchanges, or whatever try to give the player a break by cutting prices, they get shut out of pools, or shouted down as pirates. I don’t know when racing will realize that the people or companies who are cutting prices for you are increasing your competitiveness, and are a vital part of the game.

Cangamble has some thoughts on WEG and racings pricing in his latest blog post. Sometimes I feel we are banging our heads against the wall, but I guess as long as the wall is there, we’ll keep bangin’.

I see there is some talk on harnessdriver.com about racing in Atlantic Canada. A few of the boys are trying to get their point across that making racing competitive again is a pricing issue. One poster who disagrees speaks about survey’s showing people do not care about takeout, nor do they even realize what it is. He is right, that is what most of our current customers feel. However, that is it in a nutshell: Everyone who cares about prices have already left racing for other games. We don’t need to survey our current customers to tell us what we already know - not to mention they are dying off - we have to survey who left racing and how to get them back. You’ll find out the mantra of those who left betting racing is quite simple: They left because they could not win because of racings egregious and asinine takeouts. When we get them back racing will win.

Try having a discussion with someone in racing about that salient fact, though. They’ll look at you like you have six heads.

Like I said, we’ll keep bangin’ our head.