TUCSON, Ariz. – A rare panel at the annual Global Symposium on Racing focusing on the concerns of horseplayers turned out several recommendations for racing executives and horsemen, and most of them involved the need for racetracks to level the playing field for all bettors and lower the price of betting. The panel included Pete Fornatale, who runs the “In The Money” podcast and who is a familiar voice for horseplayers across the United States; Marshall Gramm, a professor of economics at Rhodes College in Tennessee who has parlayed his love of betting into a sizeable racing and breeding stable; and Jessica Paquette, the track announcer at Parx Racing who has had a long career as a public handicapper for multiple tracks. Paquette also acted as moderator. Paquette set the tone at the beginning of the session by requesting that the panel be “more than horse racing Festivus, just an airing of the grievances,” by asking Fornatale and Gramm to focus on both the positive aspects of horse betting and the bad. Both credited racing for the development of remote-betting technology and the expansion of rebate programs that lower the effective cost of betting for regular horseplayers. But technology and rebating also were a source of concern. While technology has enabled betting to expand well beyond the property lines of a racetrack, it also has allowed betting teams who have developed sophisticated computerized robotic systems to place thousands of bets in the final seconds into wagering pools before the pools close, leading to dramatic late-odds changes and the perception that those teams have advantages not available to other players. “The advantages [the computer players] have is just too much,” Fornatale said. Gramm, who teaches a class at Rhodes on the economics of betting markets, had a slightly different take, saying that he welcomed the technology that enabled computerized robotic wagering but wanted the same access to be extended to players like himself. “I want uniform access to betting pools,” Gramm said, contending that regular players are limited to the submission and processing of a bet every three seconds. “I’m pro computer player, but I also want everyone to be a computer player.” Gramm said that he used to bet $50,000 a year until he began to get rebates that turned him into a net-positive winner. Now, he bets more than $2 million a year, but he said that he still supported an industry-wide effort to reduce takeouts across the board for all players, rather than doling out rebates to select players. Limiting rebates to computerized robotic wagering teams and heavy hitters has only served to weed out casual players and left the most sophisticated bettors with the biggest rebates to fight over the scraps, Gramm suggested. “The game is a lot tougher for core players,” Gramm said. “We don’t have as much dumb money in the pools. They’ve been siphoned away to more lower-cost opportunities” like slot machines, sports betting, and lotteries. Fornatale said that he worries that racing offices aren’t thinking about bettors when they are putting together their racing programs, citing the persistence of short fields at most racetracks. He blamed some of that on the expansion of conditions for races that give horsemen more options to game the entry box to find softer spots for their horses. “They really need to think about creating more interesting races,” Fornatale said. “The core customer wants full, competitive fields. The racing offices these days give trainers way too many options. People will wait on races [instead of entering], where they can be 3-5.” Both Fornatale and Gramm also contended that the racing industry’s reliance on casino subsidies has distracted both racetrack management and horsemen from focusing on horseplayer concerns. In many jurisdictions, racetracks have either been granted monopoly power on casino gaming or benefit from subsidies from monopolies granted by state legislatures to limited licensees. In reference to the hundreds of millions of dollars that flow annually to racing purses and have led to record average purse distribution, Gramm said that racetracks and horsemen should be embracing initiatives and changes that seek to increase gross betting. “It’s baffling to me with all these tracks that are being subsidized, no one is taking a chance,” Gramm said. Fornatale seconded that notion, noting that millions of new gamblers are being produced annually by the widespread legalization of sports gambling across the United States in the past four years. Increasing handle “is not going to happen magically,” he said. “Start thinking about making the pie bigger. I really do believe this is an opportunity to safeguard the health of this new game by reaching out to this new audience in the right way.” :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.