Slots Are Poison for Growing Demand for Racing

From Power Cap:

The core issue here is too much racing and nil cooperation. Slots propping up an unappealing product is akin to having a braindead patient hooked up to a respirator. The patient is alive but it is no life and he is a burden to all those around him. The surplus of unappealing slot enhanced racing is becoming a burden to the family of racetracks on the east coast and has spread disease throughout all of them.

Similar in harness? Pocono and Yonkers peeling off entries from the M. Local Ontario B tracks peeling entries off Woodbine/Mohawk. A very poor watered down product based solely on slots in many areas that would not have racing if based solely off demand.

One thing that really sticks in a lot of folks teeth in racing is that the slots funding was based on a flawed premise of "if you flood the market by supplying a poor product, demand will rise." That was perhaps our biggest mistake with slots; the inability to act with cohesion and common sense for a better tomorrow.

The simple market-driven axiom that if we flood a market with supply, without lowering price, bad things will happen seems to have been completely dismissed in racing. And the worst part? Despite overwhelming evidence that this was a mistake, we continue to this day write slot deals with exactly the same flawed premise.