Clueless Clowns at it again!

[miff]

Bill Nader, former EVP and COO of NYRA, is the Director of Racing for The Hongkong Jockey Club.While at NYRA, Bill was always available to listen to a reasonable suggestion.

Present NYRA management is smug and takes a \"What the f--k do you know attitude when suggestions are made\"

NY Racing would be far better off with Bill Nader at the helm.


Mike

[Rick B.]

sekrah Wrote:
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> Unplayable 5 & 6 horse fields is why I have stayed
> away from SA.

OK, my suspicions are seconded -- THIS is why I stayed away from many SA races, too.

I guess we were both part of the \"formal boycott\", and didn\'t know it. At least, no one can prove that we *weren\'t* part of the boycott.

[Rich Curtis]

The takeout increase was supposed to increase field size. The Clueless Clowns got that wrong, too.

[shanahan]

Miff hits it right on the head again!  But doesn\'t the question after all the differing views come down to \"why\" they aren\'t listening to the horseplayers?  I really don\'t know myself...what I do know is this:

Oaklawn Park lost 9 days of the 54 racing days scheduled and were up on everything - on track pools, attendance, ...and had 64K people on Derby Day in a town of 38K...yeah, CA gets it alright...6 horse fields is where it\'s at.  Keeps up with Golden Gate that way I guess.  Quite frankly, I find Tampa much more appealing as a bettor.  It\'s not close.

[smithkent]

Sure let\'s close down Santa Anita-One of tHe best places to see a race live. Lets let our game only happen at places like finger Lakes or Turfway- thats where the future is...
California racing has short fields because the number of owners has fallen drastically-there just aren\'t as many folks who can afford to be an owner any more.  the monthly cost is around 3500 per horse- no way you can even break even in this game.  I\'ve always wondered why the state doesn\'t subsidize the owners to a greater degree, since it is a source of revenue for them.  I live in the SF area, and it has been really hard since Bay Meadows closed-the city of San Mateo hasn\'t built any of the development they planned-the old track is a vacant lot-now the local politicians realize the revenue they are missing since the track closed.

[miff]

\"Sure let\'s close down Santa Anita-One of tHe best places to see a race live\"

Smith,

Never, but insisting the Clueless Clowns get it right would help a great deal.Weekend cards at Santa not nearly as bad as being portrayed here, much better than the now \"secondary\" venue AQUEDUCT.

Mike

[Wrongly]

http://www.paulickreport.com/news/ray-s-paddock/does-racing-need-mo-disclosure/

[APny]

What happens when you can start betting Hong Kong here.  What will happen to the pools at Aqueduct and Santa Anita then?  Everyone is so concerned with fixing the racing here..which isn\'t going to happen unless you close 50-percent of the tracks currently operating.

[Rick B.]

Rich Curtis Wrote:
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> The boycott was formal. It was real. I know a lot
> of people who participated in it--real people with
> real names who used to bet real money on SA.

Well, I don\'t doubt that some of you SoCal guys were \"officially\" boycotting SA...but claiming some sort of victory using the overall decline in handle as proof seems somewhat specious to me. Miff was \"certain\" the boycott was working -- so certain that he couldn\'t even make a guess as to the actual percent of handle reduction could be attibuted to the boycott, as opposed to the economy, the horse shortage, further general disinterest in racing, questions over Obama\'s citizenship, etc.  
 
First of all, the boycott simply wasn\'t \"widespread\" -- not if players in as big of a market as Chicago barely heard about it, let alone participated in it. (Yes, we can read in Chicago, but we are pretty used to some group always bitching about something relatively trivial in SoCal, most of the time while we are facing REAL problems, like being ass-deep in snow and freezing our nutsacks off for weeks on end. So we probably didn\'t give the boycott much thought -- or credence -- here.)
 
Second, I question whether a formal boycott was even necessary: as poster Sekrah and I indicated elsewhere in this thread, we weren\'t \"formally\" boycotting SA, per se -- it\'s just that the racing sucked, and we looked elsewhere. Did we help \"the cause\"? Great if we did. Would have been even better if we knew we were helping: were there any interim reports about the boycott after the initial announcement? Where? I must have missed them.

The whole thing kind of reminds me when the NBA banned excessive hanging on the rim after a dunk, and I protested by declaring that I would no longer be dunking when I played basketball -- I was formally boycotting dunks. The NBA acted as though my boycott had no effect whatsoever. Bastards!

[Caradoc]

There is little transparency in American horse racing.  There is no disclosure of the full range of Mo\'s treatments, or whether Sweet Catomine has been snuck out of Santa Anita in the middle of the night to go to a hyperbaric chamber.  As a bettor, you have far more information about the physical condition of the athletes competing when you bet on NFL games by virtue of the injury reports provided by the teams, and you can see how easily those are manipulated by someone like Belichick.

As to Mo, who knows really what is going on? I have no reason to believe that Pletcher would lie directly about any of this, but if a trainer decided to do so -- for purposes of stoking the stud market or otherwise -- we would never know.

[TGJB]

This is legitimately one of the very best articles ever written about our business. Great work by Ray.

[miff]

Miff was \"certain\" the boycott was working


Rick,

\"certain\" ...kinda early to be drinking, never used that word.

Mike

[Rich Curtis]

Rick,

  I posted a link to the boycott website right here on December 27th. That was as far as I felt I should go on this board. The center of boycott talk was--and is--Paceadvantage.com. There was also a lot of activity on the Paulick Report, much of it involving fighting between Paulick and the boycotters. And of course the HANA website had a lot of stuff. The DRF had a little, which was a little more than one might have expected. And Crist mentioned the boycott in a column.

Regarding the cause and effect of boycotts and handle: There is very little that I hate more than the misuse of cause and effect. Therefore, I\'m not going to go any further than this:

 1: I personally know a lot of people who boycotted SA specifically because of the takeout increase. I\'m one of them.

 2: SA had high expectations before the meet began. The meet was a debacle. If SA had it to do over again, I don\'t think SA would have allowed any of its people to publicly laugh at the idea of a boycott.

 3: Please listen to the Byk interview that I mentioned yesterday. That interview needs to be heard to be believed.

 4: Did you, Rick, really bet more money at SA last year, on synthetic, than you did this year, on real dirt? This is the type of question that further complicates the cause and effect--though from the opposite direction. A lot of people were predicting an explosion of betting once SA returned to real dirt. What happened to it?

[Lost Cause]

I know gamblers who were also staying away because they were worried about performance unpredicatablity due to the switch back from Poly to dirt.

[Rich Curtis]

The horses in CA have gone from Hollywood cushion (which JB calls \"dirt\") to Del Mar poly (which trainers call one thing in the morning, a different thing in the afternoon, and a four-letter thing after they lose a race) to Fairplex dirt (which only Martin Pedroza understands) to old SA cushion (different from Hol cushion/dirt), back through the cycle again, then to SA Pro-ride (which Baffert called \"real dirt\" after he won a few races), through again to Hollywood cushion/dirt, and so on, finally arriving at the real dirt at SA, at which point we start hearing the \"Handicappers afraid to bet different surface\" thing as an excuse for why the Clueless Clowns\' higher-takeout meet sucked.