"Fed Up With the CAWs..."
 

Pretty much why I quit. At my peak I was only running about $2500-$5000 a week through the windows.

I stopped when the odds started cratering in the first half of every race. I only play on vacation etc. …and every once in a while on big days when I think there is some serious volatility in a race. This years Derby was the first one I’ve bet in years.

I’m guessing more like him will follow his lead.

The most interesting gambling game has now become impossible, and the racetracks couldn’t care less. The “computer groups” aren’t the problem…the RACETRACKS are the problem because they are spitting in the face of the very customers who have been supporting them for more than 100 years. If we continue to give them our wagering dollars…then we are exactly the degenerates that they think we are.

they basically knocked me out as well. the racing game is pretty stupid giving away these gigantic purses as well. the big purses has really hurt the game as much as the CAW gets the bettor.

the big brave owners spend all types of money buying and training their horses because it doesn't cost them anything to be in the game. they can have 9 bad horses that they lose $millions on and get it back on the tenth because of their tax advantages.

so now the little guy has no chance of not being skinned alive betting the horses, and no chance whatsoever to get any money owning them. i met a guy that was part of one of these syndicates, his horses won stake races and he never saw a penny.

i like playing the Mountain these days, because the racing is fairly honest, you have to be able to stomach odds changes there though!

i really wonder why racing ran away from the model that worked forever in favor of ransacking their customers out of every last dime they got in their pockets.

congratulations to the Little Guy on his pick 6 winner, bravo, go get em again. it actually made me feel good that he got the money in that deal against the CAW.

The betting side has CRWs, the racing side has supertrainers where about 5 or 6 guys dominate the sport nationally and every smaller circuit has one or two mini-supertrainers that dominate locally. There really is no place for an average Joe on either side of the game right now and it won't survive unless that changes.

Can you imagine what handicapping systems we would have come up with if we researched sports betting with the same fervor that we did horse racing?

Or stock market/futures/options

I'm not sure you can play this game seriously anymore...unless you're Nitro of course...

Not a good thing when people on this board are not taking racing as seriously as they once did.

Well…no one wants to be made to feel like a sucker…and that’s what we have been reduced to in this game.

Can't argue with that. Has the game become less interesting ?

WAY less interesting, IMO. This is no longer the game that I fell in love with. Not by a longshot.

That's how I felt, but I thought it could be, because I hardly go to the track or OTB.

Even when I went to the track, I could always be found deep in the bowels of the place sitting in front of the TV screens in the simulcast center. My fascination with horse racing always revolved around the handicapping and the betting aspects of it...the "ambiance" of the place never had much of an effect on me. And now...this "fascination" has diminished to the point where it's barely noticeable.

I was just listening to a podcast which I listen to, which normally does other subjects, which for a change of pace talked about sports betting. And they were discussing how because of the financial risk to the books, online books were very quick to decline the action of anyone suspected of having inside information. This, of course, is quite annoying to skilled players, as they sometimes get turned down by sites.

But it made me think about the CAW's. The basic problem is that in the parimutuel system, the track has only one interest and that is maximizing handle. They don't care at all where the handle is coming from. That was an important advance because it meant back in the day that the track had no interest in fixing the races. (I suppose you can argue that a track has a slight interest in the case of a minus pool, but those are rare.)

But it also means they have little interest in stopping computer assisted sharpies from making the game unbettable for smaller players without microprocessors. A bookie booking the action himself would never take action from CAW types if he could avoid it. Which system works better for the average player? Before the advent of CAW's I would have said the parimutuel system, for sure. Now I am no longer sure.

I don't think anyone here would care how much handle came from CAW except for two things:

1. They play at a much better price than we do
2. They get to bet last except in a scant few pools which is a huge edge in parimutuel games