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“How long before other activities that are deemed harmful such as drinking and smoking become subject to affordability and/or health checks?”
You don’t need to ask that question. Smoking will be gone within a couple of decades max. Drinking, partly because the industry is engaging on limiting harm (all those zero alcohol beers, much less advertising to young people) is surviving and will continue to survive.
Gambling needs to choose which path it wants to go down. You can’t really fight tabloid headlines, that is the world we live in for good or bad. It might not be fair and I agree there are proper civil liberties arguments to be had but ultimately they are abstract, gambling suicides are not.
Late to this, I only drop in on this forum occasionally.
In the case of Chris Giles, those checks are almost certainly anti-money-laundering, not affordability checks. It really doesn’t help that the Racing Post don’t appear to have a clue what they are talking about on this issue.
Let’s be clear, people involved in racing are not always the straightest (Vertem anybody?) and there is absolutely no universe in which AML checks are going away: gambling is really obviously a high-risk activity when it comes to money laundering. And if you took your 10k you wanted to put on Bravemansgame and opened a bank account instead, guess what? You’d have to tell them where you got it.
On affordability checks themselves they suck but as an industry racing is going to die if it doesn’t confront gambling harm. There’s only so many tabloid headlines the public will tolerate before we get regulated out of existence. I must admit I have never been asked, but I am only a recreational punter.
Interesting conversation.
Yes it is you vs the odds compiler in the bookmaker. But the idea that it is as simple as that is very naive.
The bookmaker has an entre risk department. He has contacts in yards and at the races that you are very unlikely to have. The bookmaker has hundreds of ‘marks’ that you don’t have. He sees when someone connected with ‘trainer x’ has a sneaky tenner ew on one of x’s long shots at 9am. You don’t.
More importantly nowadays, both you and the bookmaker have the exchanges, which have a habit of accurately forecasting the likelihood of anything specific happening if there’s enough liquidity in the market.
And MOST importantly, if the bookmaker doesn’t like you, he’ll just close your account. It’s not really a fair contest.
IMHO if you want a new challenge I would look somewhere other than horse racing. It is probably the most picked over sport there is from a betting perspective. I do know people who make good money betting, but I don’t know anyone who makes good money betting on horses.
26 2yo starters worldwide in 2018 which is low but not shockingly low (STS 33, Dubawi 43, Galileo 52).
17 wins (14, 28, 30).
In the broader context he’s third in global earnings (all runners) 2018 amongst European sires behind Dubawi and Galileo. Obviously he’s had significantly less runners than either of those two as he only has three crops. In terms of earnings per starter he is second only to Dubawi. Cracksman represents about 20% of those earnings which is low for a top sire (Benbatl represents 25% of Dubawi’s total earnings)
It’s not really possible to continue claiming he has failed at stud. Nor is he ruling the world yet, but he may well do, next year will be interesting for sure.
“No ones paying 175k to get a 10k listed winner”
People do that all the time.
You have a misconception of the success rate of a top sire. There is no sire in the world, and never has been, that only produces top horses. There never will be.
If you are genuinely interested, google “Galileo progeny results” and take a look. Top, top horses like Great Sound, Walter Sickert and Stormbound up there recently! A listed win would be a major step up from being flogged around Brighton to finish last in a 0-70 handicap at the age of 9.
That’s just the way it is. Nothing to do with Frankel, Galileo or any other sire.
Just on a point of fact about group 1 winners, he has three in 2018 to date (cracksman, without parole, mozu ascot) which is more than galileo, dubawi or any other sire in Europe.
This is despite only having 3 crops out there – plenty of g1s are won by older horses.
So the idea that he ‘needs’ group 1 winners or isn’t getting them is fanciful.
I would make one other observation. I am not an expert on breeding by any means, and I certainly don’t have the time or inclination to look through all the mares sent to Frankel in his first year – but I would suspect he was considered a speed influence and was sent mares accordingly. It may well be the case that he is more of an old-school Galileo-type stamina influence, which would in turn explain why so many of his runners appear to want 1m 4f plus.
If that becomes the case or more importantly if the industry decides that is the case, then the type of mares he is sent will change and you might see more speedy types emerge over the next few years. It takes time for people to figure out how best to breed to a particular sire. Another reason why it is far too early to tell.
I don’t normally post but enjoy reading. Hope my comment is taken in good spirit.
Some of the heated debate about how poor or great Frankel’s progeny is, picking through each individual horse etc, appears to be ignoring the fact that records are kept of these things… There is a list of sires by prize money in Britain and Ireland after all, it shows Frankel as one of six sires over the £million for the season, despite having only 2 and 3 year olds in training. http://bloodstock.racingpost.com/statistic/leading_lists.sd#leadingListsTabs=top_flat_racing_sires
Galileo stands alone of course, but Frankel is one of the only other sires giving him a run for his money in terms of £s per runner, excluding outliers like Pour Moi and Scat Daddy. Don’t forget this list doesn’t include international races and thus Soul Stirring (easily Frankel’s biggest winner) is not included.
If I was looking at that list I would wonder how Dubawi can command 250k when only delivering half a million more prize money than Frankel with 2.5 times more runners, and presumably many more mature runners in the big all ages races. I would guess that for the moment 125K looks sustainable for Frankel, but we shall see. To look at another example, Sea The Stars is also 125k, has all ages runners and is well below Frankel in the prize money table, and has less international success this year too.
The big disappointment has to be that as things stand there is no single Frankel colt that you would look at as an obvious sire or at least an in-demand sire, but I am not an expert in these things.
Of course it goes without saying that it is still way too early to tell. You would have to wait until the end of the 2018 season to draw any conclusions.
