Fantasy racing company Stable Stakes offering free-to-play contests

A new company has soft-launched a daily fantasy sports contest involving racing that will seek to succeed where others have failed.

Stable Stakes, a company founded by an investment manager and longtime racing fan, Rawleigh Ralls, is currently offering several free-to-play fantasy racing contests in the hope of building a fan base and ironing out tweaks. It’s a somewhat bold endeavor – despite several attempts over the past two decades, fantasy racing contests have never gained a strong foothold among the sport’s players.

Stable Stakes, however, has jettisoned a core component of its predecessors. In its contest, you don’t pick individual horses. Instead, you build lineups based on jockeys, trainers, and sires, hoping to score points when any of those individuals are connected to a horse who finishes first, second, or third during the day.

“I didn’t want it to be a handicapping contest,” Ralls said in a recent interview. “I wanted it to be a totally different experience.”

The site is currently offering two games, one featuring head-to-head matchups during selected races called Pickz and the other allowing players to build a fantasy lineup for the day called Draft. In both, you are competing against other players to score the most points.

In Draft, the player selects a mix of jockeys, trainers, and sires, heavily influenced by the number of “connections” on the card. For example, if a selected jockey is riding a horse whose broodmare sire is a selected stallion and whose trainer also is in your lineup, you would have three “connections” to a single race performance.

Salaries are determined by a computation developed by Ralls involving the morning-line odds of all of the horses connected to the pick. If a selected rider, for example, is riding several morning-line favorites among his mounts for the day, the salary will be far higher than a jockey who is riding mostly longshots.

Obviously, the selections are based on handicapping the horses, since a player only earns points with in-the-money finishes. Still, the emphasis on finding the most connections to the horses favored by the players – at the most efficient salary – gives the game a much different feel than just trying to pick winners.

“This is where we are way more like the daily fantasy games that 60 million people already play,” Ralls said. “This is a space that racing isn’t in right now, and it’s a space that racing should be in right now.”

The games are currently available to play in 24 U.S. jurisdictions, including Texas and California, two states where sports betting is not legal. That’s because the format of the games – pay-to-play, against other players – falls under daily fantasy sports regulations, at least according to Ralls’s legal counsel. Most states either explicitly allow fantasy contests or haven’t made a big stink over them – like Texas, where Stable Stakes is incorporated.

In the background, Ralls has been working on getting all the permissions needed to obtain broadcast and data rights for races included in the contests. He said he’s already gotten the tracks controlled by Monarch Content Management, the simulcast-marketing company owned by 1/ST Racing and Gaming; the New York Racing Association; and Penn Entertainment Inc. on board.

Ralls grew up in Hot Springs, Ark., home of Oaklawn Park, and over the years he’s dabbled in horse ownership. He’s always been a big fan of the game and a regular handicapper. Now 58, he decided to develop Stable Stakes because he said it’s not only a fun twist on handicapping, but because he thinks it will draw people into a sport that he wants to thrive.

“I think we need a platform like this,” said Ralls, who has 100 percent ownership of Stable Stakes. “This is something I think can build and build and build and give people a chance to become daily players. I’d love to think this is something the industry can embrace.”

Editor’s note: Daily Racing Form has a marketing partnership with Stable Stakes.

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