Horse Racing: Takeout, not lack of betting options, is the real problem here.

And it's not going to get any better soon....

Racing Roulette, and why it will never work. Bill Finley, Thoroughbred Racing News

A roulette-based horse racing wager can never succeed with a 15.43% takeout. Yes, it was created to appeal to people who might be at the track for the first time and are confused by the pari-mutuel process. Anyone can understand roulette. A few small players and newbies might play it for fun, and, perhaps, it’s worth keeping around for that reason alone.

But no serious handicapper is going to go near a bet where the value is so poor. If $3,000 is bet on racing roulette, $2,537 is returned to the winners. Over the long-term, with a real roulette game that handles $3,000, $2,845 is paid back. That’s quite a difference.

The shame of this is that racing roulette, if it could be done properly, is actually an excellent idea.

To fully understand the folly of this thinking take a look at the following Twitter thread by California Horseplayer advocate Andy Asaro

You CANNOT currently lower the takeout on any wager to 5.26%.  It won’t/can’t happen.  12% is about as low as anyone can currently go.  Maybe 10%. And again it comes down to the TOC fully participating in any reduction because of SB1072

By my way of thinking this boils down to two issues:

1.  Takeout in horse racing is non-competitive with other forms of gaming, and it's been on the INCREASE for the last several years as handle declines.

This, ironically, is the same strategy being deployed by the larger casino groups as their gaming declines. Make the hold higher, the odds worse, and milk the remaining gambler for all their worth at the expense of the owners.

In the end what this does is destroy the value proposition for gambling. Most intelligent people, or at least those with an understanding of math, understand the rather simple concepts of "house edge" and "track takeout". They also understand odds, probability and the fact that the only people who make money, long-term, in casino or horse-betting are the owners of the casinos and tracks.  This math has been solid for a long time, it is rarely changed.

The problem occurs when someone in this value chain gets overly greedy, is not content to let the baked-in house advantage be enough.  This is why you see takeout rising across the land. It is also why you see casino odds getting worse and worse with no end in sight.

Why do they do this?  Because they CAN.  The fact is that most people who are placing a wager of any type are doing so because they either saw it on TV, or in the movies, and think that they can go and "beat the odds" without fully understanding what the odds really are.

One fix for this: Would that the horse-racing "media" (i.e. NBC, Fox, etc.) do a better job explaining to the potential bettor the damage that can be done by breakage (simplified: rounding down on payouts) and takeout.  Have you EVER heard Eddie Olcheck mention either?  Nope, and you won't because there's precious little horse racing media that is not beholden to the tracks, the horse owners and the establishment trainers.

Which, conveniently, leads us to...

2. Track owners, horse owners, trainers etc. place little to no value on the horse player, and in some cases hold them in contempt.

Hall of Fame Trainer D. Wayne Lukas is famous for suggesting that horse racing would be better off without the horseplayer. There are many in the community who feel that to be true. They point to Meydan, heavily subsidized by the Royalty, as evidence of this.  What they ignore is that there IS horse betting going on in the UAE, it's just handled off the books by bookies instead of track windows. It's understood, and allowed, provided it's done under the radar.

In America without betting the horse racing industry would be a thing of the past. Yes, they could rely on slot revenue (or, slot warfare as Twitter user and Horseplayer Inside the Pylons terms it.) in perpetuity, thus limiting and destroying any track in a State not willing to make the expansion, or they could look at real reform, or running in front of small crowds, with seven figure purses going the way of 3:2 blackjack.

Horse racing needs the horseplayer like casinos (still) need the dedicated gambler whether they like it or not. The two have a symbiotic relationship that can either be healthy, or unhealthy depending on management behavior.

Ironically, the decrease in track handle is widely believed to be a major issue for tracks everywhere despite horse players not being "central to the success of the industry". 

Think about that for a minute and then ask yourself why management holds the attitudes that they do/

The only answer you can come up with is that they're not that bright, not that creative and not that serious about solving the systemic problems that exist.

All three are true.