I know that casinos can, and often do, ban players who consistently make lots of money at the games. They don’t need evidence of cheating or anything like that; they can just say “We’re tired of giving you our money” and show you the door.
Can horseracing tracks do the same? If I go in with my DRF, calculator, slide rule, laptop, etc. and win every race, can the track get sick of paying me and do the same?
I don’t see how it’s possible, or even beneficial, for the track to ban me. In a pari-mutuel systme, the track gets their cut every race, regardless of whether I win or lose, so it’s not like I’m taking any money from the House.
I’ve heard the opposite: that, absent any suspicion of cheating or counting cards, big winners are actually encouraged to stay, sometimes being given a free room, free meals, etc. The logic there is that casino games WILL take your money in the long run, so winners need to be encouraged to stay for the long run.
Consistently (i.e., over a period of weeks or months) winning lots of money at the games would be evidence of cheating in and of itself. Because, statistically, you CANNOT win at those games in the long run. The exception is if you count cards in blackjack, of course. And people suspected of counting cards ARE asked to leave.
Tracks don’t ban big winners. There’s no need to. They use parimutuel wagering, which means they take their cut off the top. They get a percentage of the total amount wagered; the rest goes back to the winners. Whether it’s one winner or a thousand doesn’t matter (except in cases like minus pools, which are rare).
You can hit the winner every time, and the track still makes as much as if you never had a winning hourse.
Just to explain: a minus pool sometimes occurs when there’s a small field of horses and one very strong favorite. People put a lot of money on the favorite to show. The track is obligated to pay 2.10 for every two-dollar winning bet, but the money in the show pool under these circumstances is not enough to cover the payout. The track has to make up the shortfall.
These are rare, but there’s very little the track can do. In a very small field (I think it’s four or less), they are allowed not to offer show betting, but if there’s enough horses so they can’t legally refuse to take show bets, there’s nothing they can do. It may happen once a month or less, however, so they live with it.
Or they will make sure that the local media runs a story about “Joe Schmo, local homie, wins $xxx thousands at Race Track!”. They can count on that story attracting lots more people to bet, most of whom will not win all the time. And the track will do just fine from this, even after paying you for your wins.
You can start selling tout sheets yourself; most of those are not connected with the track.
And you don’t need to be all that successful. Pick your top three horses in each race, plus a “saver.” If any of the four comes in, count it as a win. Then, the next day, you shout, “eight winners yesterday” and people will buy.
They don’t have to; there aren’t any winning players.
Actually, according to a TV show I saw some years ago, there is supposed to be one (1) handicapper in the U.S. who actually turns a profit betting on horses. But they are apparently extremely rare.
Counting cards, of course, is not illegal. They can’t take your winnings or anything like that (and honestly, I don’t think it’s really worth trying to count cards anyway.) But the casino is perfectly in its rights to ask you to leave or make a condition of your continuing to gamble there to be staying away from the blackjack tables or at least the ones where you actually have a chance to count cards. For example, there is no way you can count cards when they are coming out of a four-deck autoshuffler.
