Affordability and Ascot

Two subjects - one overarching theme.

There's always something coming along in our funny little world to undermine the great 24-hour party UK Horseracing COULD be

Twitter @RacingWhat

Transcript

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Hello everybody and welcome to this episode 15 of the Rap What's Racing Amout podcast. And as I always used to say, it's the podcast that tries to help you understand a little bit more about UK and Irish horse racing. We should be celebrating and high-fiving each other with what a brilliant first few months of the year it's been for our sport. I think, and I've said in the past, that Cheltenham was great. I think the general feedback and vibe about it was that it was a great old time. Intriguetto. Certainly this last weekend, wasn't it great? The 2000 guineas, Billy Lochnane, George Bowie, Bo Echo, what a fantastic story, what a fantastic performance. It was, in my view, probably the most, certainly the most eye-catching performance in the 2000 guineas since Frankel. You can nickel and dime it as to the ratings and what time form rated it as, etc. etc. And was it that good and what the horses were in behind it were like. Yeah, that's all for the ratings onanists, but for me it was it was a really great performance. Heart-touching story, and all part of the really sort of great vibes story that's happening in racing at the moment. We're living, we're loving, we're vibing, we're vibing. And long may it continue. Racing being racing, it's never that straightforward, and there is always something coming along to put grit in our Vaseline. And that's what I want to get into in this cast in the shape of a couple of things that have come up. One of which is hitting today, Thursday, what is it, Thursday the 7th of May. We're in the gambling commission, are supposedly today rubber stamping, affordability check, or what they have termed financial risk assessments. They're playing around with semantics, it's affordability check, which is what we've known for about for several years. Before I look at the implications of that, I think that my tribe, my listenership, such as it is, numbering it in the tens to hundreds, not thousands, but I think we are kind of the industry everyman. We bet maybe in 5, 10, 50 quid if we're really going for it. We have an interest in the industry and a very sharpened focus on our sport, and you know, we follow the small P politics of it. We when we bet, we do so with a nuanced and thinking approach to it. So, you know, that for better or worse is what I think we are, what my tribe, what the audience for the rap is. We're not high rollers. Similarly, we are not betting shop fodder that go in and want to put a quid on trap three at Monmoor throughout the card in an afternoon. We're a little bit more nuanced and a little bit more clever and a little bit more subtle and a lot more engaged and interested in racing than that. Okay, uh the reason why I have gone into it at that level of detail is because I'm kind of interested from that perspective and that angle on financial affordability checks and being me and being pretty sort of selfish about it. I want to know how this is gonna affect me. And I genuinely cannot get a handle on this. Am I gonna be subject to financial risk assessment? I don't know. They talk about a certain level of loss, they, the gambling commission, talk about a certain level of loss over a shortened period of time. And I'll be honest, you know, I have lost well, you know, at Cheltenham in bad years, I've lost three or four hundred quid in the space of 24 hours. And if I do that again in the future, am I going to be hit with having to provide data or having to provide information or having any sort of enhanced checks on my ability to sustain that? One would hope not, because there is this thing called variance, which means that over time, and I know this because I'm an assiduous punter, that I am marginally, marginally, over 20 years now that I've been keeping records, I'm marginally ahead of the game. I make have made a marginal profit over that time period. That is called variance, and that is what most punters will experience. It's not a straight line trajectory of wins and profit, ditto, a straight line trajectory of losses. But within that, you can lose the amount that would simul seemingly trigger a threshold for which a bookie would be interested in finding out more about you, or be or would would they actually be mandated to find out more about you and your ability to sustain those losses? Putting a full stop in at this point and going down a little wormhole, the libertarian argument of is this the state slash big corp slash a bookmaker's right, or i is it down to them or should they be able to look at me, a punter, with any kind of assessment as to my ability to maintain a loss? Put simply, isn't it my money to do with as I please? I've earned it, I've paid taxes on it, it's disposable. World fuck off basically. Why can't I spend that on a perfectly legal pursuit, which gambling still is? And is it down to me to basically find out and to say whether I can sustain that any sort of losses or not? In short, it's down to me to assess what I spend my money on. It's no business of the state, it's no business of big corp. Leave me alone to get on with what I want to spend my money on. That argument has been largely lost and certainly has no traction with the powers that be in the gambling commission and their lords and masters in in government. In I was gonna say in just the Labour Party, but there are people in the Conservatives and on the right that you would think maybe more inclined to a libertarian argument. No. You are a punter and basically you are as good as a problem gambler, and you are on the way to Skidrow. You need to be protected from yourselves, because if you don't, suicide beckons. That is a very simplistic argument. Nonetheless, it's one that seems to hold water with the powers that be, the power brokers in that are making the legislation that we are now under, I'm now discussing in this cast. The reason why I've talked about that is because that argument holds no traction. We are now talking about the actual realities of the world and the imposition of financial assessment, financial risk assessments. What are they? How are they gonna hit racing? How are they gonna hit me as a punter? And the short answer is I certainly don't have a Scooby. There's been a press release from the Gambling Commission as recently as last Monday, which says there has been a lot of commentary recently about financial risk assessments, and sadly, much of it has been ill-informed or inaccurate. For example, some coverage has suggested that consumers are currently being driven to use illegal operators as a result of financial risk assessments. This is despite the fact that the assessments are not live and not a single consumer has had any attack, any action taken based on one. That goes against what I know has happened to various punters of uh you know that I know that have absolutely had financial assessments taken. They've had to provide data to prove that they can sustain losses, they can uh sustain what they are putting in with bookmakers. But this has come out from the gambling commission saying that this is not a fact. Where lies the truth? It's a strange world that we're inhabiting, therefore, at the moment, whereby it's like nailing blumang to wall for me as an intermediary level punter, as an intermediary level person with interest in specifically horse racing, but but punting on horse racing. I don't know whether I'm going to be subject to these assessments or not, if my current level of punting will attract that level of interest, if I'm happy to go, if I'm free to go about my punting business. I don't know. Watch this space. And similarly, and an argument of greater interest to us all as punters in horse racing world is the effect that any risk assessment on us as punters going to have on the funding of horse races, horse racing in the shape of the levy. There appears to have been absolutely zero modelling by the gambling commission and government in general as to the effect on prize money via the levy of the risk assessments and the inevitable decline in punting that will take place. There's a guy that you should all follow. He's called Chris Fawcett, he's on X, and he is a stats modeller and a sports betting modeller, and he's the only person that I know that has come up with any kind of modelling. Three years ago, he tried to estimate the potential costs of affordability checks at losses of£1,000 in every 24 hours by a specific punter and£2k in 90 days on British racing. And the conclusion that he came to was that lead to a 24% to£53% fall in the levy and an even bigger decline in media rights fees. So that is him doing his best as a concerned citizen to imagine or model the effects of financial risk assessments on horse racing in the shape of the levy, and how that will then feed into prize money, and then how that will feed into the sport and the funding of the sport as an ongoing viable hobby for us all to partake in. Spectators, breeders, bookmakers, race goers, race courses, how do we continue with that level of loss hitting our industry? There's the Rob. Watch this space, because this is going to be something which I'm going to come back to time and time and time again. If you actually take the time and trouble to go back to the very first rap podcast back in 2020, I think it was, I highlighted this as something that was coming down the turnpike at us. It's arrived, and it's going to hit us smack in the kiss in some way, shape, or form, certainly over the next 24 months, and certainly shortly with the gambling commission rubber stamping, these affordability checks that are going to be taking place. Sort of aligned to this is the second strand that I want to uh look at in this podcast, and that's Ascot. Ascot's decision on Monday announced by their CEO, Felicity Barnard, that they were going to be leaving the Race Course Association by the end of the year. And that was basically to do with their dissatisfaction with how decisions are being made by the Racecourses Association and by the British Horse Racing Association. It was something of an arch statement, in my view, that I read, because they didn't really come up with what they were looking for. Just an announcement they were dissatisfied with the direction of travel and the fact that there seemingly a vacuum in the place left by Lord Allen's departure as to where racing was going. They were dissatisfied with it, so they were going to leave the Race Courses Association. Now, it doesn't take a mental leap of Bob Beaman proportions to think that they, Ascot, the biggest race course in the country, arguably the world, are looking for a greater say in how racing is run in this country. I think, I can't be sure, but I think that they are looking at some level of premierisation similar to what football undertook 20-30 years ago, with large independent LI race courses, them, York, Goodwood, Cheltenham, Chester, you know, the the the big courses being the top tier attracting more money and more interest, and they are then going to be the premier offering to Well, to who? To the media, to aligned partners? And who do I mean by that? Well, do I mean owners? Do we mean specific trainers that train purely for fiction at these courses? Are there going to be a few bookmakers that are purely aligned with these Premier Level courses? Breeders? Who who knows? It's going to be interesting to find out. And what happens to the other tracks? Is there going to be a sort of a mid-tier of tracks that will feed into the Premier League, similar to the championship, feeding into the Premier League via promotion and relegation in football? And right at the bottom, ARK and companies like them that run smaller, you're tempted to say gaffe tracks. What's going to happen to those? Are they going to go their own way? Are they going to be subject to any kind of scrutiny, any kind of overarching legislation? Or are they going to be flapping tracks in all but name? Well, it's going to be an interesting few years. This will probably play out over to see where Ascot and large independent tracks are going and what the outcome of Ascot leaving the Race Course Association fold is going to result in. I tend to be all over it. Watch this space. So, two different strands to this cast. One sort of overarching theme is it's always going to be worrying times. No matter what fun is taking place on the race course, no matter how good we feel about racing, the summer's coming, Derby is just around the corner. There's some really great performances that have been put up in trials. I talked about the 2,000 guineas. Jumps looks to be in relatively rude health, as I outlined. All of that is great. And if you just take that Fotherington Thomas view of hello clouds, hello sky, life is beautiful. Well, good for you, go with your bad self. But we are never far away from the shitty end of the stick. We're never far away from trouble. We are never far away from issues that are gonna come up which are gonna cut the legs off of the fun block party that we're all having at the moment. In the words of Black Sabbath, the end has begun, it's over, it's done. If you listen to Fools, the mob rules. That's probably me. I'm part of the mob. I don't want to rule. Um I just want a good future for racing. Don't we all? Watch this space. That's me over and out for this cast. Be lucky.