The horse, the drone, and the fight for gambling success (2021)
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
However, people courtsiding in tennis matches have been kicked out - and in some places, they've tried arresting them: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32402945
It's sort of a cat-and-mouse game. I think this is the fun of in-play betting for some people. At the individual level, you organize your friends with a cell or have the guy who knows the guy at the race and it makes you and feel like you have an edge against the other bettors and the house odds. Of course you don't, really, just like most gambling. At the larger scale it's old school time arbitrage, HFT style stuff. At that point it's about trying to have the best strategy and shave time off of whatever your opponents are doing.
The track exists, more or less, because of betting, and not just at the track. At least someone sees it as a threat to betting: "[Barry Orr, Betfair’s head of racing PR] worries that the imbalance in information across different bettors could lead to the demise of gambling on horse racing." If this is a legitimate concern, then it is in the track's best interest to make people think everyone has equal info, or else people will stop betting: "Martin Hughes, a longtime gambler based in the northeast of England who is a member of the Horseracing Bettors’ Forum, a voluntary body of gamblers, “I more or less stopped betting, because I'm so far behind it is pointless, really.”"
Rather than surveilling the track for violators, can't they stop taking bets prior to the start of the race?
Well, that would make them less money.
> The track exists, more or less, because of betting, and not just at the track.
Does the track hosting the race get a cut of OTB operations or sell bookies who are working remotely a data feed? So what we're really talking about is the track's CCTV having to compete with some random person's cell phone video or drone video, all of which might be streaming to a casino in Vegas or something?
It seems like that Vegas casino which is hosting gamblers and taking bets also has an incentive to kick somebody out if they see that they're looking at a remote data stream and placing bets, rather than looking at the casino's televisions or whatever. Does that happen?
>> Rather than surveilling the track for violators, can't they stop taking bets prior to the start of the race?
> Well, that would make them less money.
This is the part I don't get. If people are betting in real time during the race, isn't the human bookie a terrible bottleneck in the observe race/adjust odds/take new bets loop the bookie is engaged in? (even if he's just pushing a few buttons on a computer as quickly as possible) I can see how people would want to game this system.
Reason #2 is if they see someone consistently making money, they have to assume that person is rigging the race somehow, even if they can't prove it. Sure they want you to play, win, and have fun. But they dont want you to do it as a career. That exposes them to liability: say a jockey/owner/trainer sues the track after rigged races were discovered. They could point to a professional gambler and say "you should have known that this guy was involved because he turned an enormous profit over time. You turned a blind eye to fraud, profited from it, at our expense. we want damages".
Third reason is they dont want people selling their "systems", which only leads to problems and fraud. Someone who won a lot (or appeared to always win) could show others at the track and say "I'll let you in on this system too, for a price".
Fourth reason would be anti-money-laundering. Even if you (somehow) found some rinky-dink "system" that made a nominal amount of money, higher-level criminals would absolutely jump on it to launder drug proceeds.
This is a clever move from the racetracks: they can sell this data, there are customers for it, and it saves them from fruitlessly trying to stop the drones.
However, the data is expensive, and if you are buying it then you are going to be competing against the other buyers of it, who will be trying to place the same bets as you, so the edge isn't going to be too great. Kind of like HFT, where everyone races to keep up with the technology spending of their competitors.
2. He might be selling the footage, but doesn't want to admit to doing so (since that would be more likely to get him into trouble)
McCool, I can get you up to 50ms latency streamed over cellular, plus the horse tracking capabilities, if you want to hustle together ;)