First up best of luck to Squire at Sandown today. I'm going to Limerick races tonight and what struck me was the future for smaller on course bookmakers. My reason being pretty much all my bets are done. Primarily for two reasons 1) you get better odds especially with the likes of bet365 who price Irish racing in particular all wrong. 2) frankly it's safer and more private than carrying cash around. This lead me to think if that's unusual or do the on course guys have any future? They are integral to racing but they just cannot compete on price. I'm not sure if it's the same in Britain but just thought i'd get a bit of a debate going on it....
Good post If I am at the races I usually place my bets with the rails bookies. Whilst I will spend a few minutes watching the market and trying to find a price I am happy with, I do not generally bet the sort of money where half a point makes any significant difference. At the Cheltenham festival I usually have a few ante post bets riding but place the majority of my bets with the on-course bookies on the day. I don't have loads of on-line accounts and the value hunting that some seem to cherish is not really important to me on-course - I prefer to spend my time getting the next Guinness For smaller e/w dabbles I do use the tote on-course, you often get nicer returns. One experience I will relate - at Aintree a few years ago (Thursday of the 3 day Grand National meeting) we were in the Queen Mother Stand with access to the balcony to watch races. We had a bar in the stand and a tote window so I did all my betting on the tote, out of convenience. Before the first race, my brother-in-law wanted to lump on Big Bucks for the 3 mile hurdle (the last one he won). We spent a good 20 minutes walking up and down the rails trying to find the best price. Everyone was going 1/5 but we found one bookie going 2/9, which my brother-in-law took. I backed Big Bucks on the tote and the win paid 1.30. **** happens In summary, I wouldn't miss the rails bookies and I'm not sure the sport necessarily needs them does it? The online prices could be beamed into betting booths on course, or you could limit people to tote betting on course. SP settlement could be done based on the last shows of 4 or 5 major bookies, job done.
I don't get to the races much these days but part of the fun is watching the prices and grabbing a good price from the bookie with the best odds.. They're down at the start, 2 more to go in. Panic, this bookie is going 2/1, ****ing queue, panic - just in time. Oh no, he's rubbed it out. ****ing 7/4; could have had 15/8 with the one next door but he's now wiped his board. They're off. Bollocks. Photo. Second. Yippee
Many moons ago, while living just down the road from Rollingstone, we sent a greyhound North to Cairns. I couldn't go so I sent $500 with a mate. Expecting each way odds, I told old mate to take $250 win and place, even if as low as 3-1. It opened up at 6-4 and ended up as top price. Mate being an honest bloke thought it best to do as advised, so took the each way at 6-4. Dog led to the last hop and was caught right on the line. Dead heat. What a ****in' disaster.
I have online accounts and a local bookie very close by that I use from time to time but when I am going racing I tend to do my betting there as I enjoy it more. Unless I had word that one might be punted throughout the day etc. I would generally wait until I got to the track. It's always particularly nice on the rare occasion that you keep taking money off the same on course bookie, he smiles wryly at you whilst wishing you well, but inside he's thinking 'you ****ing lucky ****' ! The interaction between punter and bookie is more enjoyable at the track for me. Watching the fluctuations in the market and possibly getting 'word' on track and then watching it get well backed ( hopefully to win). In the main though I think the on course bookies are obviously really struggling, at some meetings I am at the ring is dead with just the odd big bet stuck here and there and it's not surprising given the advantages some off course branches offer compared to the 1/5 off the odds and that they offer.
It is hard to answer this one satisfactorily because the original question seems to be based upon Irish racing, about which I have no practical experience (been to Ireland but never to the races). Anecdotal evidence would suggest that the on-course Irish bookmaker probably has less of a future than his British counterpart. In my time observing bookmaking practises, I have noticed that Irish racing generally tends to have a much bigger over-round percentage (i.e. more in the bookmakers’ favour than the punters), which would lead me to believe that the off-course bookmakers are going to find it easier to undercut their on-course rivals. As Exotic Dancer stated, it was easy to get better odds off course. Simple market forces would dictate that the on-course operators are going to struggle to survive in such circumstances. The future for British on-course bookmakers is quite possibly limited and I think this is quite age related. The simple fact is that young punters do not bet on horseracing, so they are much more likely to get the mobile phone out at the races and look for odds online. A big part of the atmosphere at British racecourses comes from the betting ring, the punter with his ticket in hand cheering his horse on. I do not see the punter waving his mobile phone at the horses and cheering. Many young racegoers seem to be there to socialise, not for the sport. Go to the small midweek meetings and the crowd is usually bereft of young people. Other than the Arc meeting, when half the crowd are from Britain and Ireland, French racing is totally soulless and on many occasions virtually unattended. If British racing goes this way it is finished as a Tote monopoly funding racing works in France because they have never had bookmakers in the Nanny State. The Tote in France is like the football pools used to be in Britain; but youngsters now bet football fixed odds with bookmakers so the football pools have dwindled. The funding model of British racing means that if attendances dwindle, the sport will too. The genie was let out of the bottle fifty years ago and it cannot be re-corked. I do not see how having off-course betting broadcast to the courses to form the market would work. Why bother going to the racecourse at all if you can get the best odds on your digital device and watch the race somewhere where you are guaranteed to stay dry and warm? Perhaps my opinion here is entirely coloured by the fact that I go to the races generally to see the best horses compete (i.e. the actual sport) irrespective of the odds offered by the bookmakers. I am not a typical punter. My attendance at the races has dwindled in the last ten years because of the changes to the race programme. How or where I bet has not been a factor. If Racing For Change have not attracted enough new young punters to replace those of us they have disenchanted, this is going to become a very minority sport. Last Saturday in the high street betting shop at 3pm, there were 9 people playing FOBTs (mostly Roulette) and 7 people betting on the horses and dogs. I have to say that most of the 9 were not British (I would guess former French colonies in Africa) and most of the 7 were older than me. Maybe that tells its own story...
I definitely think race courses would loose a lot of the atmosphere if you took the betting ring away. But the way it's going it seems only a matter of time. The online prices the evening before/morning of the race are so much better than what you'll find at the track. In fact you can see it already happening, there are much less bookmaker pitches than there were 10/12 years ago when I'd have first started going racing. The prices of them have dwindled hugely too.
The only time I ever use the on course bookies, is if I'm taking a new bird racing and I want to impress her by how much I hopefully win off them, though that has backfired a few times, and she's seen that I've lost a fortune Other than that I use regular bookmakers or the exchanges online, as they offer better prices. The regular bookmakers also offer double result if there is an amended result which the oncourse bookmakers don't, so it can prove very costly betting with them instead of the mainstream firms
I always have at least one fairly large (by my modest standards) cash punt on the rails when I go racing, but that's certainly not for the value. At the smaller meetings especially, the bookies appear genuinely grateful for your business, which can't be a good sign from their point of view. But I like doing business with small firms and private individuals. I've also been in hospitality where hardly anyone ever leaves the box or tent. The other guests are either playing with their phones or betting on the Tote. The Betfred Tote, I should say. My anecdotal conclusion - in this walk of life as in most others, the independents are going to have to work very hard to survive, especially in an age when Joe Corals gets eaten up by Ladbrokes. They can't possibly compete with the behemoths on price, their only hope is that some people still value a personal service over the impersonal corporate experience.
Corals haven't been eaten up by Ladbrokes, the 2 company's are joining forces. It's not a case of either buying the other out
You said the other day you stopped bothering with the 7% body fat because your married now and don't care about maintenance any longer. Yet you are taking new 'birds' racing
Ive not been racing for a few years now, so wasn't talking about recently. I'm not married either, I've just been with the same women a while now. I've just always referred to any women I'm with as my mrs
No he probably wouldn't be impressed. I've always got the impression that of the big 3 Ladbrokes are the ones who are struggling the most. All there shops look run down, with hardly anyone in them, and there prices are usually the least competitive, so I can't imagine there online business is booming either. So I reckon Ladbrokes need the merge with Corals more than Corals need to merge with Ladbrokes
I can remember when the Big Three were the Big Four. In my betting lifetime, I have noticed that Ladbrokes always seemed to be going shortest odds on whatever I wanted to back; and that usually turned out to be good business on their part as quite a lot of them won so they avoided the liabilities. I think Mike Dillon still works for them and I remember a decade or so ago that it was always a good idea to check which of Aidan O’Brien’s runners Ladbrokes were shortest about because he used to hang around with the Coolmore owners and knew which ones were well regarded. In terms of online presence, out of the old high street Big Three, William Hill have been miles ahead of the others for quite a few years. That was because their management realised early on that the internet was the place to be for attracting new young punters, so they had a very aggressive acquisition policy snapping up loads of smaller bookmakers that had a fledgling online presence.
