Monday, April 23, 2018

Give Bettors the Goods, Monday Notes

Good day everyone!

"Walk a mile in someone's shoes." It's sound advice. When you do, you have a respect for what they do, how they think, and your understanding about an assorted issue tends to grow.

In race 7 tonight at Woodbine/Mohawk, there's a horse with a 5-2 morning line that looks pretty good. But he's been off since March 8th.

Unlike the thoroughbreds, where a six week break is modelable and a horse may have listed workouts to make an informed opinion, in harness you're completely in the dark.

Because these horses need to race frequently to stay in form, this horse is a total coin flip. He could be 50-1 fair odds, or he could be 5-2. There's no trainer data. No one publicly knows. Even the track handicapper said "It's a guess."

This is the last leg of a pick 4, which will garner about $50 of $60,000 of handle. Casual players might say they'll spread to be safe, but at 25% juice they're getting their heads handed to them. Sharp players who know the trainer will feast on them like chum. Any player worth their salt will not bet this pick 4.

"Walk a mile in their shoes". Understand that you're whacking your customers in the teeth. You need to stop doing this stuff.

Why not field test some marketing and bettor outreach? I get the status quo is a safe port in a storm, and by trying something that could potentially fail is very hard for the business to get its head around. But as Jeff Bezos said once - "Companies overemphasize how expensive failure is going to be. Failure is not that expensive. The big cost that most companies incur is harder to notice and those are errors of omission."

I'm very interested to see how Kentucky Derby betting goes this year. I'm super impressed over the years how the brand has grown, along with the work CDI has put into it. I'm also wondering about the tax changes and how it increases churn during the day, with the simple fact that racing's "big days" are growing almost each and every event. With all things equal, I guess we should expect a nice bump. But we'll see.

I'll just leave this out there.

Have a nice Monday everyone.


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