The racino is a facility that mixes dog or horse track activity with casino-type activities.
For myriad reasons racetrack entertainment has experienced a steady decline over the past several decades. There have been many efforts to stem the ongoing decline. For the most part, however, these efforts have not achieved desired goals. During the 1990s a new solution received considerable support from track interests as well as political leaders in many jurisdictions. They recommended that tracks become venues for other forms of gambling, specifically gaming machines – video poker and slot machines. The policy recommendations have become manifest in several states and provinces. Six states (Iowa, Louisiana, West Virginia, Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Mexico) and four provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario) have permitted gaming machines to be installed at racetrack facilities. In addition California’s Hollywood Park has a very large card room casino. A racetrack in Omaha offered keno games; however, racing activity ceased after the keno operations began.
The tracks have particular advantages as casino-type venues. They have large parking areas, they are separated from the core urban populations by natural land barriers, and they have space that is underutilized. On the other hand, critics suggest that the facilities may prey too much on local habitual gamblers, as very few racinos are geared to attract tourists. Additionally there is debate over whether the casino-type gambling can add to the profitability of racing activity or whether it merely offers more competition, hence hastening the doom of the racing events.
Richard Thalheimer conducted an in-depth economic analysis of market demand forces, a type of investigation he has followed also in analyses of other innovations such as simulcasting, offtrack betting, and exotic betting as well as impacts of lottery and casino gaming on track operations. He found that the introduction of machine gambling results in decreased pari-mutuel wagering and decreased pari-mutuel revenues. But overall, revenues at the tracks increased as the machines more than made up for the deficit in pari-mutuel activity. He concluded that the issue of importance that must be addressed is just what share of the machine profits are assigned to the track and to horsemen either in purses or through other means. Thalheimer found that the regular horse players at the tracks did play the machines; on the contrary, however, those attracted to the track to play the machines did not tend to make wagers on horse races. His data are confined to Mountaineer Park in West Virginia.
Track dynamics are such that pari-mutuel gambling is not fully compatible with machine gambling. Seasoned horse players are renowned as cerebral, educated calculators of odds and probabilities that particular horses may win a race. For them, information is critical. Their activity requires a considerable amount of entry knowledge. Learning is a long process. One gaming executive commented that “betting on horse races is a game of skill, unlike the mindless tapping of a slot machine button, and our philosophy is that the customer must be gently educated on how to study form before he places his bets”.
Features of the style of horse-race betting can be found in some other games. For instance, persons betting on other sports events often use great amounts of information in calculating their betting activity. The same is true in the live casino game of poker. Most casino games, however, require almost no skill. Wheel games and dice games require no skill, as the result of the game is determined fully by chance. Machines call for almost no skill in play.
Wherever machine gaming is introduced, it seems to dominate other gambling products. Inside Las Vegas’s most plush casinos, machine revenues now exceed revenues from tables that cater to high rollers. The Oregon Lottery introduced video lottery terminals (VLTs). According to information in International Gaming and Wagering Business in June 1994, revenues from the machines quickly dwarfed figures from traditional lottery products. Machines have brought in 90 percent of the lottery revenues in South Dakota. Governments seem to enjoy the opportunities to expand budgets as a result of machine gaming.
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