Building Better Racing - By Bob Kulina (Monmouth)

[andymays]

http://cs.bloodhorse.com/blogs/finalturn/archive/2010/06/08/building-better-racing-by-bob-kulina.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentMessage

Excerpt:

Granted, it’s only been five days, but it looks like we might be on to something that would benefit New Jersey.

The experiment being carried out now at the Monmouth Park spring/summer meet is exceeding our best expectations. Very conservatively, we had hoped by racing only three days a week and boosting the purses, we would increase everything—handle and attendance—by 20%. After the first five days of the meet, ontrack handle is up 51.8% to $4.86 million compared with the first five days of 2009. Total handle on our races sent to other tracks is up 137% to $36.4 million, and attendance is up 26% to 64,946.

http://cs.bloodhorse.com/blogs/finalturn/archive/2010/06/08/building-better-racing-by-bob-kulina.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentMessage

[andymays]

He says it's only been 5 days. Am I missing something? The article was posted today so hasn't it been more like 8 days? I hope they're not starting with the spin stuff........

Maybe it was written last week for the June 12th issue of the BloodHorse. :confused:

I'm kind of interested in last weekends numbers to see how they did.

[alhattab]

He says it's only been 5 days. Am I missing something? The article was posted today so hasn't it been more like 8 days? I hope they're not starting with the spin stuff........

Maybe it was written last week for the June 12th issue of the BloodHorse. :confused:

I'm kind of interested in last weekends numbers to see how they did.


Att 30,800 (2010) 24,700 (2009)
Handle
-ontrack $1.8 million (2010) $1.4 million (2009)
-offtrack $18.1 million (2010) $8.0 million (2009)

Comparisons are tough to make for 2 reasons:

1. It rained for almost the entire 2009 weekend and there were many off-the-turf and wet track races (same will be true for every weekend save for the last one in June 2009).

2. Jazz and Blues festival at Mth in 2010 but not 2009. Hard to gauge how that affected attendance figs as I'm not sure how the track counted the concertgoers. It appears they may not have been as the per capita was a paltry $60 or so both years. Or, maybe horseplayers' per capita grew but that was offset by lack of music lovers' betting

Offtrack growth was at least in part due to the weather. Round numbers in 2009, for the nice weekends you could figure offtrack of $3 million for Fridays and Sundays, and $4 million for Saturdays. Friday's figures were strong b/c Mth did not have twilight cards, while everyone else did. Thus from 12:50-2:45 Mth was the only game in town.