TUCSON, Ariz. – A collection of sports-betting operators appearing on a Tuesday afternoon panel at the Global Symposium on Racing urged the racing industry to quickly embrace fixed-odds betting as a way to keep pace with the meteoric growth of sports betting in the United States, although they also acknowledged that the prospect is more complicated than a simple decision. The panelists, some of whom work for several of the largest sports-betting companies in the United States, said that the customers they are attracting to their sports-betting apps are overwhelmingly betting on fixed-odds events. If racing does not offer a comparable system of betting, then “racing is going to watch all those people go over the horizon, and have no way of catching up,” said Richard Ames, chief executive officer of SIS Services, which provides content and data services to race and sports books. Christian Stuart, chief executive officer of BetMakers, which has a long-term contract to manage fixed-odds betting with Monmouth Park, said that the customer rolls of sports-betting operators have exploded over the past two years. “If you want that same expansion,” Stuart told the racing officials in the room, “you have to do fixed odds.” Fixed-odds wagering on horse racing has a long tradition in England and Ireland, and Australia added it to the mix more than a dozen years ago alongside its long-running parimutuel market. According to bookmakers, the addition of fixed odds in Australia has been a win-win for both bet-takers and the racing industry, but many racing constituents in the United States remain wary that offering fixed odds will dramatically lower industry revenues. “It does have to work for everyone,” said Andrew Moore, director of horse racing for FanDuel, the owner of TVG. “It does have to work for the content provider, it does have to work for the customer. And that’s a very difficult balance.” For the time being, most racing operators have struck deals with large sportsbook operators to offer parimutuel betting on their products, largely by attaching their existing account-wagering operations directly to the sports-book app. But the panelists said that strategy falls short of introducing racing to a much broader customer base. “It’s been a service to clients who want it,” said Matt Cosgriff, director of retail wagering and customer analysis at BetMGM, which has a deal to offer the NYRA Bets ADW on its mobile site. “But racing’s best chance to go forward is to engage with fixed odds. You need to put it up there and let the customer decide.” But the panelists also acknowledged that racing will not gain a foothold among new customers unless there is fixed-odds betting available on racing nearly around the clock. That would require an enormous infrastructure that U.S. racing currently does not have, with market makers setting and adjusting lines constantly in the 24-hour run-up to the race; the distribution of content agreements aggregating the signals from dozens of tracks; and the establishment of payment services to make sure content providers and their constituents get their cuts of the revenue agreements. “This will be a long-term project,” said Ames, of SIS Services. “This isn’t going to take a year or two.” Moore, of FanDuel, said it might be worth it for some large racing companies to experiment with their schedules, noting that the most high-profile races are almost exclusively held on Saturdays and Sundays, when competition with other weekend sports is fiercest. Moore said that existing racing customers on the TVG platform “will always find good racing content,” but those customers are vastly outnumbered by the FanDuel bettors who are only betting on sports they are familiar with. “There’s only one football game on Thursday night, so maybe you look there,” Moore said. “Or maybe it’s a Tuesday or Wednesday night when there’s no football on. But that might be a good experiment instead of competing with 30 college football games on a Saturday afternoon.” At the same time, the panelists acknowledged that the sports-betting market has grown in ways few foresaw after the 2018 Supreme Court decision allowing states to permit the practice. Paul Hannon, senior vice president of corporate development for PointsBet, which has an agreement with 1/ST Racing to offer its ADW on their app, said that racing needs to maintain a seat at the table as the industry shakes out. That means “dipping a toe” into fixed odds. “I don’t think anyone can sit in this room today and envision what our market, our industry, is going to look like even five years from now,” Hannon said. “What I do think is going to happen is that there is going to be an evolution, and that horse racing doesn’t reach its full potential over the long-term unless fixed-odds betting becomes the new standard.” :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.