By Trey Nosrac
Several thousand word article by McKay Coppins in the March issue The Atlantic is a difficult read. The title is Soccer, My Year as a Generator Gambler. The piece is an in-depth experience/narrative about the past, present and future of gambling. of the Cliff notes The story can be reviewed – Deliberate online gambling is already a huge problem at many levels in the world, and is growing rapidly.
Reading the story made me think back about 15 years, to the days when horse racing was the only legal sport in town. I attended Gamblers Anonymous (GA) meetings to do some research for a magazine story. I will never forget those exciting sessions and can only imagine the increase in attendance at GA sessions now that algorithm-driven gambling and prediction markets are running rampant.
Horse racing did not get a mention in the article, nor did I hear a single mention of horse racing at the GA meetings I attended. I was particularly fond of talking to a man in a cigarette group before sitting in the parking lot and asking him about horse racing. His response was a nonsensical joke, “I tried it once. It was too slow. The race just didn’t get my juices flowing.” Some of the most addictive hobbies I’ve heard of are poker games, lottery tickets, the stock market, and surprisingly, bingo.
Despite the demise of our beloved sport in both Atlantic The article and my GA meeting, if you squint, it can be interpreted as a plus. Problem gambling happens in horse racing, but it almost seems strange when compared to everything else on the gambling menu today.
Recent research on gambling behavior, and there is much more, suggests that the activities that cause most problems are not slow, once every few minutes horse racing. Much of the problem comes from the rapid-fire, immediate outcome conditioning that pumps dopamine and never gives the addicted brain time to cool down.
Online sportsbooks, casino apps, and in-play betting markets are carefully engineered for speed. You can bet on the next pitch, the next possession, the next hand, the next spin, anything else. The result comes in seconds, and the next bet waits before the first one takes place in your mind. Psychologists call this a “short reward cycle,” and it turns out that short reward cycles are what make modern gambling difficult to control.
Horse racing, for all its faults, has never done that. Our gamblers are referred to as hand dealers. The races they play take time, sometimes forever. A player will handicap, wait, watch the tote board, and then watch the horses heat, parade, row and race. Then you wait again. There is space between the terms. Even if you have a menu of potential racetracks and races on your iPad, we have a built-in speed limit that most people need time to consider based on racehorse ability, driver and post position.
Horse racing is something of an outlier in modern discussions of problem gambling. People who study addiction are looking at mobile apps, live betting, and algorithm-driven wagering platforms, not a man with a program and a pencil trying to figure out if a rail horse has enough speed to hold position in the first turn.
And this changing world of gambling leads to what we address in this column – the idea that the future of harness racing may not depend on faster, louder and more aggressive gambling on horses. It may be about doing the opposite—creating spaces where there is race, there is competition, and there is horse ownership. But if there is a bet, it sits on the side instead of the center.
If re-engineered sports were built around privately funded purses through memberships, sponsorships, and pay-per-views, no one would need to design a wagering product to get people clicking every 10 seconds. No one should invent new ways to keep attention at any cost. No one should turn a horse race into a slot machine. The pressure to create an addictive product is lost when the survival of the sport no longer depends on the next bet.
Ironically, what some people say makes horse racing less exciting – the leisurely pace, guesswork – may be what makes it healthier. This may sound like an odd place to be in business, but we will have a difficult time competing with a gambling world that is growing faster, louder, more isolated, and constantly evolving. Perhaps the best future for our sport is to take our beautiful pets, go against the thugs, and escape the chaos of addiction. We must accept our intentions.
The real gamble in harness horse racing is standing at a yearling sale, looking at a young horse that has never stepped in a harness, and deciding to put his hand up. A bet that doesn’t pay off in three seconds, it takes at least nine months, if it pays off at all. Our gambling on young horses requires patience, thought and nerve. Owning a racehorse is closer to a long-term investment than gambling. If the sport leans toward ownership, programs, and memberships, the excitement comes from watching the horse grow over time.
We live in a modern gambling world of a young demographic built on speed, repetition, and constant action. Buying a yearling, paying the bills, watching a horse improve everything is a gamble, but it’s a slow gamble, the kind that forces you to think before you act.
It’s hard to imagine people ruining their lives by taking a year off and training, especially if they share the cost with friends. But their lives can be ruined with the tap of their fingers as they bet that the next pitch will be a strike or a ball.
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