Computer Assisted Wagering - Elite Turf Club

[Any1Left]

https://www.horseracingnation.com/news/Horseplayers_are_warned_that_computers_are_not_going_away_123

"Computer dollars went from 8 percent of the market 20 years ago to 33 percent last year."

"Gramm, who said he owns 113 racehorses, has lived both sides of computer play. He has gone from betting maybe $1,000 a week to wagering with his betting partner as much as $25 million a year and accepting rebates that he said have helped him turn a profit."

“There’s no turning back, right? The computers aren’t going away,” Gramm said. “We can’t step back in time.”

42% of all the handle is computer assisted wagering, and all of them are making a profit, I have no clue how. Elite Turf Club comprises almost 30% of this 42%. That leaves only 58% of the handle left for everyone else, how could we possible stand a chance?

From speaking with race track executives, they don't see this as a problem, since to them more money in the pools = a better game. No one can win at this game anymore, because the computer groups take literally all the money.

All you need to do is search 'computer assisted wagering' and read the articles by Andrew Beyers and the President of Nyra discussing these groups, and seeing Beyers call this whole situation a complete disaster, and a disgrace to the public.

These computer bettors are given access to the pools, and their bets come in 1-2s before post time, after getting to see everyone else's wagers. The only race track that doesn't allow computer assisted wagering is Oaklawn Park in Arkansas, which completely prohibits it. Many ADWs do not take this track.

[Papillon]

The owners of Oaklawn saw how these guys(Elite) pick the pockets of regular bettors--so they barred them from their pools years ago

Hats off to Oaklawn

when some bettors on this site look at the M1 handle $3mil or so--they think that's a good thing-and that's amusing

[Any1Left]

https://www.thoroughbreddailynews.com/computer-assisted-wagering-anatomy-of-a-deal/

https://www.horseracingnation.com/news/Beyer_Crist_and_Privman_on_computer_wagering_issues_123

I understand there's not too many gamblers that post on this site anymore, and the horsemen don't really care about the gambling aspect of the game. Truth is, eventually welfare money is going to stop coming in, and the computer bettors will disappear. Its likely that every big player has left the game except senior citizens using retirement money, as its clear to anyone that the game is unbeatable right now. The addicted horse players are getting older and older with no new players coming in. This can't go on forever, and eventually this dead game will stay dead, forever. Letting Elite Turf Club monitor all wagers and giving them edge betting is not just completely immoral, but also just a bad idea financially. Yet there seems to be no one at track management who looks at things through a good lens. The racetrack understood that people equate bad payoffs to cheating. Horses go off stride and computers are able to make thousands of bets that create horrible payoffs, it makes the game look like an embarrassment. We have never had answers from that pick 6 scandal way back about how they actually prevented something like that from happening again. Even in poker, vulnerabilities are being found, and those sites are investing millions into security, so how much security could the race track have when they put not effort and no money into security?

[davenchop]

ive heard this argument every year for the last 25 or more years.. yet the purses are as high as ever
i see nothing on the horizon that gives the clue that welfare money is going to stop anytime soon.. whenever
you read a story about some politician bitching about race track welfare the story goes away and its back to the
status quo.. until i see some municipality actually stop giving horse tracks welfare money and others follow suit its just
the same rehashed bullshit i read year after year

[Papillon]

ive heard this argument every year for the last 25 or more years.. yet the purses are as high as ever
i see nothing on the horizon that gives the clue that welfare money is going to stop anytime soon.. whenever
you read a story about some politician bitching about race track welfare the story goes away and its back to the
status quo.. until i see some municipality actually stop giving horse tracks welfare money and others follow suit its just
the same rehashed bullshit i read year after year

this is accurate

purses go up, handle goes down, handle means nothing and the tracks allow CAWs into their pools and that hurts the regular bettor

there is no way for any common man money to survive vs late money after the bell

right now-its pretty much cartel vs cartel cannibilism which is the handle you see reported

[seriously]

CAW's and ADW's are evil and horseman are saints. 

The former only do bad, the latter only good. 

Hard work without talents and/or results is all that is needed.  Ingenuity and change are awful. 

Welcome to so many here!

[pocketrocketwinner]

Who ever decided letting the CAWs bet after everyone else, allowing them to analyze human pools and make hundreds of bets in 1 second, legal,,?

It can't be legal

[Grandstand Handicapper]

Some tracks, and you will see more, are starting to cut them off with X minutes to post. So.....CAW is not illegal.....but it certainly isn't equal to the other players. Plenty of major players have met with track management and started saying they will take their business elsewhere. One major player at the Meadowlands did. Another major player at another track told track management he was leaving, he did, and the track cut off the CAW's with 3 minutes to post just to get that player back.

I think every track should have a 3 minute to post cut off for all CAW's. There's an indirect benefit here by the way.....That way the conspiracy theorists can feel they have more credibility when they scream about open windows. LOL. I can only speak to what I know first-hand at the Meadowlands. After making my bones in NY racing, I was at the Meadowlands the first night they opened. And I am still there. I don't bet for fun, sport, hobby or anything else. It is one way I make my living in this industry. So, in 2013, the Meadowlands made a deal with a CAW team ---- some very well known players who hooked up with a few techie guys were looking to diversify their original action. Maybe they were thinking the CAW would become their primary action. I know two of the guys and they both thought different things. Anyway, while I don't know it for a fact, I believe the initial contract called for the team to commit to $250k per card. What I do know for a fact is that the Meadowlands negotiated this deal and did their due diligence over the course of months. This discussion dragged on and it was because the Meadowlands was very slow to say yes. They spoke to the SBOANJ, horsemen, and yes, they spoke to some of their major players.

In the end, they said yes. At the beginning, when they counted up the money----the Meadowlands claimed 50% of the "increase in handle" came from the team. However, I know if that number was legit, I know for a fact that number shrank big time over time. That means the CAW is betting the same amount of money, but there was more money coming in from other sources. That still doesn't make it right or healthy, because the massive last minute odds changes weren't happening initially.

The question really is ---- would the CAW teams bet, and win, without concessions from the track(s)? Bet? Yes, but not for long. Win? No, that's why they wouldn't bet for long, LOL. People don't understand the CAW model, but let's just say they are not looking to make monster scores. They are looking to come out in the black WHEN you factor in the rebate. The margins are small. Frank Fabian probably knows more about CAW than anyone and he's spoken a lot on it. Almost every major player in the game knows him due to his role with the TRPB. He was already on this when the Uvari bust went down, and that was in what, 04 or 05? I met Frank in the late 90's and he was very much ahead of his time, but also whatever was going on at the time. In the harness game, the massive last minute odds changes were not common until recently and they were far more common in thoroughbreds than harness. Yes it has happened in harness racing and while it does happen more these days in harness racing, there are numerous other reasons why it's happening.

In the end, I say 3 minutes and you are cut off. While you are at.....reduce the takeout!!! LOL.

[Papillon]

Some tracks, and you will see more, are starting to cut them off with X minutes to post. So.....CAW is not illegal.....but it certainly isn't equal to the other players. Plenty of major players have met with track management and started saying they will take their business elsewhere. One major player at the Meadowlands did. Another major player at another track told track management he was leaving, he did, and the track cut off the CAW's with 3 minutes to post just to get that player back.

I think every track should have a 3 minute to post cut off for all CAW's. There's an indirect benefit here by the way.....That way the conspiracy theorists can feel they have more credibility when they scream about open windows. LOL. I can only speak to what I know first-hand at the Meadowlands. After making my bones in NY racing, I was at the Meadowlands the first night they opened. And I am still there. I don't bet for fun, sport, hobby or anything else. It is one way I make my living in this industry. So, in 2013, the Meadowlands made a deal with a CAW team ---- some very well known players who hooked up with a few techie guys were looking to diversify their original action. Maybe they were thinking the CAW would become their primary action. I know two of the guys and they both thought different things. Anyway, while I don't know it for a fact, I believe the initial contract called for the team to commit to $250k per card. What I do know for a fact is that the Meadowlands negotiated this deal and did their due diligence over the course of months. This discussion dragged on and it was because the Meadowlands was very slow to say yes. They spoke to the SBOANJ, horsemen, and yes, they spoke to some of their major players.

In the end, they said yes. At the beginning, when they counted up the money----the Meadowlands claimed 50% of the "increase in handle" came from the team. However, I know if that number was legit, I know for a fact that number shrank big time over time. That means the CAW is betting the same amount of money, but there was more money coming in from other sources. That still doesn't make it right or healthy, because the massive last minute odds changes weren't happening initially.

The question really is ---- would the CAW teams bet, and win, without concessions from the track(s)? Bet? Yes, but not for long. Win? No, that's why they wouldn't bet for long, LOL. People don't understand the CAW model, but let's just say they are not looking to make monster scores. They are looking to come out in the black WHEN you factor in the rebate. The margins are small. Frank Fabian probably knows more about CAW than anyone and he's spoken a lot on it. Almost every major player in the game knows him due to his role with the TRPB. He was already on this when the Uvari bust went down, and that was in what, 04 or 05? I met Frank in the late 90's and he was very much ahead of his time, but also whatever was going on at the time. In the harness game, the massive last minute odds changes were not common until recently and they were far more common in thoroughbreds than harness. Yes it has happened in harness racing and while it does happen more these days in harness racing, there are numerous other reasons why it's happening.

In the end, I say 3 minutes and you are cut off. While you are at.....reduce the takeout!!! LOL.

It is not a conspiracy theory when it is true, they most certainly do exist

I can speak to what i know is true--the Lexington hub is not CAW-but the real time satellite feed provides a latency advantage where the players there have sacrificed a big part of their rebate so they can bet after the bell--fact

[Yonkers1A]

I’m going to gen a Nvidia chip and make my own CAW

[Any1Left]

Some tracks, and you will see more, are starting to cut them off with X minutes to post. So.....CAW is not illegal.....but it certainly isn't equal to the other players. Plenty of major players have met with track management and started saying they will take their business elsewhere. One major player at the Meadowlands did. Another major player at another track told track management he was leaving, he did, and the track cut off the CAW's with 3 minutes to post just to get that player back.

I think every track should have a 3 minute to post cut off for all CAW's. There's an indirect benefit here by the way.....That way the conspiracy theorists can feel they have more credibility when they scream about open windows. LOL. I can only speak to what I know first-hand at the Meadowlands. After making my bones in NY racing, I was at the Meadowlands the first night they opened. And I am still there. I don't bet for fun, sport, hobby or anything else. It is one way I make my living in this industry. So, in 2013, the Meadowlands made a deal with a CAW team ---- some very well known players who hooked up with a few techie guys were looking to diversify their original action. Maybe they were thinking the CAW would become their primary action. I know two of the guys and they both thought different things. Anyway, while I don't know it for a fact, I believe the initial contract called for the team to commit to $250k per card. What I do know for a fact is that the Meadowlands negotiated this deal and did their due diligence over the course of months. This discussion dragged on and it was because the Meadowlands was very slow to say yes. They spoke to the SBOANJ, horsemen, and yes, they spoke to some of their major players.

In the end, they said yes. At the beginning, when they counted up the money----the Meadowlands claimed 50% of the "increase in handle" came from the team. However, I know if that number was legit, I know for a fact that number shrank big time over time. That means the CAW is betting the same amount of money, but there was more money coming in from other sources. That still doesn't make it right or healthy, because the massive last minute odds changes weren't happening initially.

The question really is ---- would the CAW teams bet, and win, without concessions from the track(s)? Bet? Yes, but not for long. Win? No, that's why they wouldn't bet for long, LOL. People don't understand the CAW model, but let's just say they are not looking to make monster scores. They are looking to come out in the black WHEN you factor in the rebate. The margins are small. Frank Fabian probably knows more about CAW than anyone and he's spoken a lot on it. Almost every major player in the game knows him due to his role with the TRPB. He was already on this when the Uvari bust went down, and that was in what, 04 or 05? I met Frank in the late 90's and he was very much ahead of his time, but also whatever was going on at the time. In the harness game, the massive last minute odds changes were not common until recently and they were far more common in thoroughbreds than harness. Yes it has happened in harness racing and while it does happen more these days in harness racing, there are numerous other reasons why it's happening.

In the end, I say 3 minutes and you are cut off. While you are at.....reduce the takeout!!! LOL.

It doesn't make sense to me, and I've yet to figure out how places like Elite Turf Club are able to make money. From my understanding, these CAW groups look to exploit overlays, but I only ever see underlays at every track I play. I don't believe in the legitimacy of pools anymore, nobody has proven to me since the breeder's cup pick 6 scandal that anything has ever been done to fix the compromised system. To allow Elite Turf Club free access to the pools is wrong and scary.