I'll tell you what else is very annoying to me after a browse of another board - the type of stuff coming from the HANA folks.
Yes, handle is down over $200 million in just 6 months in California since the takeout hike - and the majority of that decline has come on weekends when field sizes are better... big deal.
That takeout hike is MUCH more devastating in the long term than the short term.
$207 million lost in handle over 6 months - is just a squirt of piss in a very big bucket. No big deal compared to the massive self inflicted setback of making the game more of a suckers game for new bettors than it was six months ago.
There was a time when baseball, boxing, and horse racing were the three big sports in this country. And coincidentally, I'm sure, some of the best horse bettors of that time made the equivlent of tens of millions of dollars in their best years, some of them dated well, and others were tabloid figures that newspapers obsessed over.
Go and look for them now! They don't exsist anymore.
A good portion of society today views horse bettors as lonely senior citizens or degenerate scumbags. ESPN tries to push the sport - and one of their guys like Mike Wilbon (Wilbon's own father loved horse racing and he was strongly exposed to it as a kid) can justifiably sh!t all over the sport. Do you think actresses still want to fucl< horse bettors?
In so many ways, the sport is MILES better now than it was a hundred years ago ... but because they've reduced it to a suckers game - it suffers.
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