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| By | Horseplayer's Association of North America | |
| jeff 6/16/2008 2:52:26 PM | Horseplayers have become increasingly more and more fed up with the way the industry is being run. Horsemen withholding signals from ADWs, track management's disdain towards the customer, trainers who are constantly rewarded for cheating, and a tote system based on obsolete technology - these facets of the game and more have resulted in an industry that is, to put it kindly, no longer mainstream. An entire generation now exists who could care less about racing. Yet, over the past two decades while racing has been alienating itself from an entire generation of potential new fans, almost all other forms of gambling have seen explosive growth. Go to almost any casino and you will find a young vibrant crowd (the generation that racing failed to win over) having fun feeding tokens into slot machines. There is a formula for success in business that I remember from a strategic management class I took in college. Ok. I turned 50 in the past year so I've been out of college and part of the real world for a while now. But what they taught us back in 1977 is every bit as valid today as it was back then: Define your market space and target customer. Understand your target customer's needs and wants. Figure out how to satisfy those needs and wants and (amazingly) your business will grow. Every successful Fortune 500 company practices this. By itself it doesn't guarantee success. But failure to practice it practically guarantees failure. The reason I get so pissed off at the people who run the horseracing industry is that they so completely fail to put this into practice. And failure to put this into practice just widens the chasm that exists between the industry and its customers. I am both amazed and disgusted by the way that horsemen and track management continually appear so completely clueless that a problem even exists at all. A grass roots effort has been started over at the PA site to organize horseplayers. I have attended two meetings (conducted in the PA War Room) where we adopted a name and agreed to get a website started. I was charged with creating the group's mission statement. The mission statemment that I wrote up has not yet been officially sanctioned by the group. And somebody else will probably end up doing the official site. For the benefit of those interested I've created a mock up web page - a rough draft - that shows what we are working towards. Here's the link: http://www.JCapper.com/hana/hana.html Your thoughts and comments are welcome. -jp . ~Edited by: jeff on: 6/16/2008 at: 2:52:26 PM~
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| dvlander 6/16/2008 10:10:22 AM | Good work Jeff. I'll be happy to join. This may be contained within one of your bullet points but I'd really like to see the subject of breakage brought into modern times. I understand a $2.00 place bet that has a real value of $2.29 paying out at $2.20 but if the bet is $200, pay it out at $229. At least, make the individual payouts in even dollars without breakage. The technology can't be that tough in this day and age. All items on your list are legitimate pain points. Dale
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| jeff 6/16/2008 2:46:24 PM | Dale, Thanks for the feedback. Somehow I missed including breakage in my rough draft. I've since added it. As every horseplayer knows, breakage was originally put into practice as a way to make long lines at mutuel teller windows move faster. In this day and age there's simply no excuse for this practice at all. Breakage is now a mechanism tracks and politicians have of extracting additional money from the player. -jp . ~Edited by: jeff on: 6/16/2008 at: 2:46:24 PM~
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| jeff 7/18/2008 11:22:55 PM | HANA New Member Sign Up Page http://horseplayersassociation.blogspot.com/2008/07/join-horseplayers-association-now.html For those of you who'd like to join... Why wouldn't you? I'm a member. < G > -jp .
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