Quote:
Originally Posted by classhandicapper
I agree, but I've seen a lot of people do the calculations incorrectly.
They say something along these lines.
Whale loses 5%, gets 10% rebate, profits 5%.
Then they'd say that entire +5% comes out of the pockets of everyone else. That's not true. The 10% rebate came out of the track's pocket. The difference between the track take and the lost 5% is what makes it harder for the rest of us. You and I make it harder for everyone else too.... at least most of the time.
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Just curious. Are you implying that I have ever done the calculations incorrectly? To my knowledge I am the only one in recent years stupid enough to wast hours providing examples to drive home my point. Every example I have ever provided (and there are probably like 50 over the years) is like the ones I have provided in this thread. I try to determine much the rebated money is betting what kind of rebates they might be getting on the wager (obviously a 30% trifecta takeout will give better rebates than a 15% win pool) and use that information to guesstimate what kind of takeout the non rebated public might be getting overall.
Racing knows the score. They know how much each group is working on pre rebate. They know what percentage of there pools these teams make up and they easily can calculate the actual percentage takeout the non rebated general public is paying in each pool. The fact is that when they calculate these numbers they know they are not numbers that are sustainable for business growth (at least on the retail end). My guess is that the wholesale end of their business keeps going up and the retail end of their business probably goes down. Certainly that has been the 30 year trend, I really haven't followed the last few years at all.
The difference between what I think and what they think is that the retail end is inelastic in their mind (thus the entertainment mantra-public loses 45% in some pools, it is okay, entertainment, the cost of admission) In my mind their retail pricing is so high and over the top nobody in their right mind will pursue this game for any significant period of time unless they are that select % that can conquer it and can also transition into wholesale pricing (live in the right state or bet enough or whatever it takes). Either way racing never racing never gets a good retail customer.
Just understand that when racing used a silly rewards program because it was "standard business practice" in other industries, they permanently destroyed pari mutuel betting. You can rationalize that player x bets 10 million a year so he is entitle to 6% rebates and player y bets 10k a year and isn't entitled to crap. But when player X bets 10 million a year uses 6% rebates to profit because he only loses 3% pre rebate (and I am not even going to begin to say that is easy) racing is encouraging this player to add 10 million a year to the pools with the only real benefit to the game being that the pools become larger (which wasn't the problem when this nonsense began) and the takeout for other players will go up because he and others like him are betting significant amounts of money and losing far below takeout.
Until racing can rationally look at the numbers across the board for all players and say that the amount of money players in this group are losing is an acceptable number this game can never grow. The problem is that in their mind they are doing just that. -30%, -40%, -50% is totally acceptable. It is very much like politics (2 trillion, 4 trillion dollar spending bills completely rational.). I have spelled out many times what numbers I think that is. -30 to 50% in any pools in never acceptable. But if they cannot or do not want to figure that out they can never grow. The ones that succeed in this game will become wholesale customers the ones that do not will leave the game. Obviously with some exception, but not a lot.