Thursday, January 15, 2009

Making Money at Racing

I am reading a post at Paceadvantage speaking of how nuts we are to bet racing. I am also reminded going to a conference where an ADW exec would not state the number of people who are winners at his ADW; only saying coyly 'we don't speak about that', because we know the number is probably 1 in one thousand. I think about the Mike Maloney interview where he stated when asked about how many professional horse bettors there are in the US he said 'maybe a couple of hundred of us'. But as I did below with Adam's blog about making $300,000 at racing in the UK, I again am doing a little reading.

I come across this: A gentleman who last year challenged himself to make 100,000GBP (about US$200,000) by betting the horse races. Guess what? He accomplished this feat on December 19th.

We have spoken many times here that our system is broken, our takeouts are too high, yadda, yadda, yadda. Broken record. But if we branch out, get rid of our worldview that racing is a place we should go to lose, we see how the other half lives. This game with low rakes (the above bettors are playing with 4 or 5% win takeouts) can explode (each of them probably are churning hundreds of millions per annum in handle). In the UK whose GDP is about 2.2 trillion, horse bettors like this are still drawn to racing, and bringing new blood with them to enjoy the game. In Canada and the US our GDP is about 15 trillion, so there is no reason we should not be able to blow away the UK numbers.

This game can grow rapidly if we would just get off our asses and make it affordable to the masses. Seriously, how much more evidence do we need? Do a scan over here in the blogosphere on bloggers who are documenting their $300,000 year betting racing and get back to me.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I doubt these guys will ever get it.
Anyone have a few hundred million to give this a go? Assuming you can either buy out Great Canadian Gaming for somewhere in the ballpark of 300 million or:
http://www.ontarioracingcommission.ca/licensing_tracks.aspx?id=121

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