Jimmie says | Commingling naivety?

BEING a hoarder of horse-racing literature, Sunday’s lockdown resulted in a barnyard find, a paper titled ‘The Competition Implications of Commingling Arrangements on Local Horse-Racing’, dated January 29, 2010, prepared by Kevin Harriott, Ph.D., competition bureau chief, Fair Trading Commission (FTC).

Interestingly, the paper, based on the date, was completed three weeks after Richard Lake, a former Caymanas Track Limited (CTL) board member, had made a heated presentation before a special select committee of Parliament examining the Betting, Gaming, and Lotteries Commission (BGLC) Act and the Casino Bill.

In the blue corner was William Chin See, himself a former CTL chairman, boxing out of the Jamaica Racing Commission (JRC) gym, acting as counsel for the besieged horse-racing promoting company, with JRC chairman Rudolph Muir as his cutman.

Lake, The Gleaner reported, “complained that his company was being prevented from succeeding where the CTL board failed as his request for a licence to operate simulcast facilities (was being targeted)”.

The whole shebang had to do with Lake’s company, Fortune Gaming, a non-promoter of local racing, “trespassing” on CTL’s double-edged holy grail, applying for a licence to not only operate pool betting, but doing so by way of local bettors commingling wagers in rich overseas pools, simulcast racing, which had then become, and still is, the life-support of local racing, minus the commingling aspect.

Muir, The Gleaner article said, “raised concern about what he described as the likely adverse effect which the proposed amendments would have on local horse racing for which CTL holds the promoter’s licence’, summarising with: “The racing commission wants to ensure that exclusive right of CTL be preserved to operate pool-betting business on horse racing (local and simulcast).”

Even though the FTC paper concluded that “an enhanced competitive environment for pool-betting services, such as that which would result from the introduction of commingling agreements, does not necessarily represent a threat to the local horse-racing industry”, Lake ran into further red tape cited by the BGLC, primarily the non-existence of a taxation regime governing such activities.

NATURAL DEATH

Lake’s simulcast-commingling plans, it appears, died a natural, possibly unnatural, death but were somewhat reincarnated recently when local bettors in touch with Jamaican pals overseas learnt that exotic-betting payouts on Caymanas Park racing, account wagering with Xpressbet, was yielding the equivalent of millions of Jamaican dollars, dwarfing the payouts in the local pool.

Saturday’s Reggae 6 returned approximately US$45,000 (around J$7 million) on Xpressbet as opposed to Ja$416,597 locally at Caymanas Park, its online account-wagering MBet platform and off-track betting parlours.

The kicker, though, which the FTC paper had pointed out from 2010 as a key reason why it didn’t believe granting a pool-betting licence for commingling would have affected CTL’s business, was the per-ticket cost (minimum stake) to wager in overseas pools, pointing out that ‘the disposable income of punters betting in overseas pools is likely to be higher than that of punters betting in local pools’.

Using the current exchange rate of approximately US$155 (J$14,000) to Ja$1, an average J$1,500 Reggae 6 wager, 150 combinations at J$10 per line, would cost US$300 (J$27,000) at $2 per line on the Xpressbet platform. That is J$46,500. Flip the script and imagine a local bettor wagering the Jamaican equivalent of US dollars on overseas racing in a commingling pool.

The FTC paper stated that in 2010, a Super 6 bet comprising 216 combinations would cost US$432 (J$38,880) on Fortune Gaming’s commingling product but only J$1,080 on CTL’s simulcast product.

It added, “A bet that costs J$1,080 on Fortune Gaming’s product would allow only six combinations compared to the 216 combinations allowed on CTL’s simulcast product, and therefore the chance of winning would be significantly reduced.”

It, therefore, begs the question: Which demographic of CTL’s business would Lake’s commingling pool betting on overseas racing have affected, and did the promoting company miss an opportunity to barter for a share of the spoils from the licensing agreement instead of circling wagons with the JRC?

Ainsley ‘Jimmie’ Walters has been covering horse racing for more than 25 years for the Gleaner Company (Media) Limited and is the editorial and production coordinator for the Track And Pools race form.