National HBPA Conference Day 2: ‘Monumental first step’: Horse-Racing Fixed Odds on Sportsbooks Gets Toehold in Colorado

The new reality of Computer Assisted Wagering’s escalating presence in racetrack’s pools and the emergence of horse racing as a fixed-odds betting product on sportsbooks were the focus of Thursday’s second day of the three-day National HBPA Conference at Prairie Meadows.

Discussing fixed odds on horse racing as a new betting product has become a fixture at the National HBPA Conference, led by industry consultant Michele Fischer, who also is vice president of SIS Content Services, a subsidiary of the largest horse-racing content supplier to global bookmakers/sportsbooks. But this time the panel had the added twist of having actually launched fixed odds on horse racing on a sportsbook in Colorado in February after years of talking about it.

Fischer called it “a monumental first step,” saying that racing is attractive to sportsbooks globally and should be part of the U.S. offering. “Sportsbooks want quality 24/7 content with good margins. Horse racing provides it and more,” she said.

The panel featured Louisiana HBPA executive director Ed Fenasci; Kim Oliver, president of the Colorado Horse Racing Association, and Dan Hartman, associate partner for regulatory and government affairs at GMA Consulting. Hartman previously held leadership positions with the Colorado Department of Revenue, including serving as Director of Gaming, where he played a pivotal role in establishing Colorado’s sports-betting program. Both Bally’s Arapahoe Park Horse Track and its horsemen receive source-market fees from all sports betting on horse racing in Colorado.

Colorado is the second state to begin offering fixed odds on horse racing and the first to make it part of a sportsbook, currently only on bet365. Colorado sports bettors, through bet365, now have 155 racetracks distributed by SIS on which they can wager via fixed odds. bet365 is a leading global betting brand that offers racing on its sportsbooks around the world. Additional operators in Colorado are expected to include horse racing by the end of the year.

New Jersey’s pioneering venture is much more limited, currently offered only at Monmouth Park and a separate website, but it is not as yet part of a sportsbook offering.

Colorado’s Division of Gaming does not yet break out the betting figured on fixed-odds on horse racing at this time. However, Colorado racing stakeholders have indicated that they are pleased with the growth from the launch in February.

Tracks and their horsemen have to weigh the benefits of adding horse racing to a jurisdiction’s sports-betting products with the possible cannibalization of its pari-mutuel wagering versus introducing horse racing to a massive number of sports bettors who may have never been exposed to the sport. In the case of Colorado, it was an easy decision, with Oliver saying they were struggling just to keep horse racing alive.

“We are small and really didn’t have anything to lose,” she said.

The advantage of fixed odds is that players lock into odds on a horse race, just as they do betting football, basketball or, in Colorado, a myriad of sports that include table tennis, on which $10 million a month is bet. Fixed odds do not depend on pool liquidity like pari-mutuel wagering, with allows smaller racetracks with competitive fields to be attractive to bettors.

Fenasci has been working for several years to bring it to Louisiana, where a portion of every bet placed on other sports goes to racehorse purses and the breeding fund.

“Why do I get so excited about fixed odds, sports wagering on horse racing?” Fenasci said. “Why am I so optimist? One, it generates revenue for the tracks and purse money for my horsemen directly from the exciting product that is horse racing. There are people doing sports wagering on ping pong — and at a pretty good volume. A horse race is 100 times more exciting, in my opinion.”

Also, Fenasci said, “It’s directly tied to our product. At some point you’re always worried that a legislative body might feel why are we giving them all this other gaming money that has nothing to do with horse racing. It’s a constant battle to reinforce that it’s important to keep our industry strong and moving forward.”

The panelists expressed hope that if fixed odds on horse racing expands, it will get some committed sports-betting enthusiasts interested in racing.

“They’re bringing it to a new set of demographics,” Hartman said.

Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia now offer betting on sports since the Supreme Court in 2018 overturned the federal law banning it everywhere except for Nevada and Atlantic City.

“There are aspects of parimutuel that are more attractive for certain types of wagers than with fixed odds for an expanded wagering product,” Fenasci said. “But if a certain trainer has five horses in, and you want to bet he’s going to win three or more of his races, you can do that with fixed odds…. It gets our exciting horse-racing product in front of a much larger customer base and in new and innovative ways. If you have a product and you want to sell it, do you just want to be in the mom and pop store around the corner? Or do you want to be on Amazon and Walmart? That’s what we get when we get our product on FanDuel, DraftKings and all the other big operations that are actively promoting, actively seeking customers.”

Computer-assisted wagering (CAW) panel: The good, bad and why horsemen’s groups should be paying attention

The Computer Assisted Wagering (CAW) panel at the National HBPA Conference proved an especially lively session with the assembled experts not shy about challenging one another. Thoroughbred Daily News writer Dan Ross, who has written extensively on the subject, moderated the panel at Prairie Meadows.

Pat Cummings, executive director of prominent horse owner Mike Repole’s National Thoroughbred Alliance, started off the conversation by telling the audience of horsemen and their representatives that the acronym CAW refers to “a very small number of horseplayers who are using some sort of automated programs to place bets.

“They develop finely honed systems, algorithms that sense vast amounts of data and place their bets in very quick fashion, oftentimes right before the race begins,” he said. “They are able to batch bets. My research (indicates) that there are 10 or 12 top-tier players in America who are using this approach to wager on horse racing. Those 10 to 12 players probably represent somewhere between $2-3 billion of U.S. thoroughbred racing’s $11.6 billion wagered last year.

“… So in a race here tomorrow night, there may be $4,000 in the win pool at one minute to post. And when the race goes off, there may be $10,000 in the win pool. In the last one or two tote cycles, a chunk of that money has come in from these players betting in an automated fashion. Their program may say to them, ‘bet $125 on the 5, $272 on the 4 and $357 on the 6.’ And of course, they’re betting exactas and trifectas, every pool they’re allowed to bet.”

The criticism of CAWs is that they can discourage ordinary horseplayers because of how they can influence the odds — which might not show up until the race becomes official. In addition, the biggest players can get substantial rebates back from the track operators. On the other hand, horsemen’s purse accounts could take a huge hit if the CAWs went away because they account for such a large percentage of overall betting.

Some racetracks have gotten into CAW ownership, with the Stronach Group and the New York Racing Association buying into Elite Turf Club and Churchill Downs Inc. owning Velocity.

“These CAW customers have vast teams working for them doing various forms of analytics,” Cummings said. “They’re betting pretty much every race, every track, every pool, every day. They are your biggest customers. The story that emerges is what effect does that have on the average horseplayer who is engaging with your product.”

Jack Jeziorski, president of NYRA Content Management Solutions, assured the audience that “these bets aren’t put in automatically. There’s somebody there physically hitting the key to put those bets in. And part of that is because most racetracks don’t go off at post time, so you can’t set it to go off automatically. A typical time is the first horse going into the gate, they’ll place the first batch of bets, then maybe a batch or two after that.

“… We’re not looking to take advantage of players or have them have a bad experience. But at the end of the day, not a lot of people make money in this game…. (CAWs) have vast amounts of data and are always looking for another piece of data to add to the model.” And with online wagering, he said, “we all have the ability to get that bet in at the last minute.

“The true difference is that these guys get the best rebates, and the speed in which they can get those bets in.”

Dave Basler, executive director of the Ohio HBPA, said “close to 40 percent” of the wagering on his state’s three tracks comes from CAW. He said what directly impacts both the Ohio horsemen and tracks’ bottom lines from betting are the host fee charged to each outlet for a track’s signal.

“The other part of the equation that sometimes doesn’t get enough consideration, I think enough, is the volume that they do,” he said. “There’s a tipping point. The CAW players are very cost sensitive. Depending on what your takeout is and your host fee is, that can get to a point where your handle becomes less. The CAW players are unquestionably your biggest customers. I don’t care which track you’re at.”

Basler acknowledged that negotiations have become more difficult when track ownership also is an investor in a betting platform catering to CAW players.

Jeziorski said less than 20 percent of NYRA’s betting come from CAW players.

“What you really should be looking at is how much are these guys taking out of the pool vs. how much they’re paying the track and the horsemen’s in host fees,” he said. “If that ratio is out of whack, then you need to be looking at how to adjust it. The easiest way to adjust it is the host fee being charged.”

Cummings said that with so much purse money now generated by other forms of gaming, tracks lose sight of “the importance of wagering connecting with customers on a day in and day out basis. It is not as important to the corporate interests that are involved.

“I’d really like to challenge the horsemen’s groups to spend more time focused on how do you exercise your rights as horsemen to ensure that mass-market customers, ordinary bettors stay engaged in the sport you cherish.”

Cummings and Jeziorski disagreed on just what percent of overall wagering comes from CAW players. But they agreed racing has not done a good job trying to keep and grow its “retail” players.

“The real problem right now is not the computer guys,” Jeziorski said. “… The problem is we don’t have enough retail players, and we’re not doing enough to get retail players. Part of the problem is we don’t have a compelling betting product on a day to day basis. I think the number put out (Wednesday) is our field size nationwide is 7.4. It needs to be eight, really 10 – and then takeout doesn’t matter as much.

“The computer guys are not the problem. We know how to manage it. We know how to maximize our revenue out of it. It is not what’s killing the game.”

Cummings said that he’s not against CAWs.

“Horse racing needs all of its customers,” he said. “It is the negative effect that one group of customers cause another…. When you adjust for inflation over the last 20 years, the non-CAW play is down more than two-thirds. We have seen an erosion of our mass market customer base. That’s really bad.”

Basler spoke from the perspective of an accomplished handicapper who has qualified for the National Horseplayers Championship six times. But, he said, “I’m not in the same stratosphere as the computer-assisted wagering players. They are so much above anybody who picks up and reads the Daily Racing Form in terms of the hours they put in, every aspect of it.

“… The best players are going to win, and I can’t level that out, no matter what I do. I can’t make the guy who comes in and bets the 7 horse in every race be on the same level as the guy who spends $7 million in programmers looking at every facet there is to look at in horse racing. They are extremely smart men and women. They put as much time and money into this game as anyone. So I don’t begrudge them winning.

“Overall for the industry, losing retail customers is a huge deal. I don’t think it’s directly related to CAW players. Sports betting obviously is part of that equation. There’s a lot more entertainment, more options for people’s dollars than 30 years ago.”

Also Thursday, Susan Martin, who heads sales and marketing for The Jockey Club Information Systems Inc., provided her annual update to horsemen on all the new data products available on equineline.com, the industry’s premier source for thoroughbred pedigrees, race records, stallion progeny, broodmare produce records and other reports. Martin discussed new free features, as well as the expansion of information available through Blood-Horse products, and discounts available for HBPA members.

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