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Originally Posted by Cannon Shell
Making racing better
1. Lower takeout - Simple and effective. Slots allow tracks (and states) to lower their % because it will be more than offset by the slot income. The increase in handle will eventually cover the lower % and will probably exceed the previous take amount. This gives your customers more money which will go back into the pools which will increase churn which will make tracks more money in the long run. Everybody's happy.
2. Increase owner participation - Tracks do virtually nothing to try to increase the number of people who own horses. Why? Because they are too stupid and cheap to recognize great potential customers. The amount of interest that a person will have in racing if they own just a small piece of a horse will increase dramatically. That increase will in turn cause those people to bring in others as they speak of their ownership experience. Plus the fact that people who would have an interest in possibly owning a horse would be a better demographic to shoot for than the "younger" crowd who the majority of have little time or money. Make people feel like they are part of something instead of just nickel and dining them every chance they can get. Not to mention that those people will be better educated by the ownership experience and who would not want your customer base to be educated?
3. Fix your product - Steps need to be taken in order to improve the product on the track. Things need to be done about a few barns basically controlling all the good horses. Limiting stalls and restricting the amount of foal papers on file would be a start. This is an especially big problem in NY but it is spreading. What do you think the reaction would be in another sport if one team was allowed to dominate to the degree that you rarely saw the players play because one team hoarded them all? It is killing racing at the highest levels and will get worse as those barns just continue to get stronger. Address the statebred programs that run wild in some states. The fact that Saratoga is sometimes carding up to 5 statebred races a day is troubling. Also the idea was to improve the breed overall and the NY program in particular is not achieving that. I say that because the number of bad NYbreds being produced is rising and many of the best NY breds are by out of state stallions anyway. I dont know which is worse, maiden $15k NYB's or those same horses running in MSW's for 48k purses? On a national/regional level get together with other tracks and fix the stakes schedules so that we dont have the same race at three different tracks the same weekend dividing the races up where none of them are very good races.
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Very nice ideas. I love the re-scheduling of the regional stakes races. This is why I like speaking with you on racing.