Real 2017 Florida and U.S. Handle

[Dick Ciampa]

To get the real handle in Florida I totaled the handle on Jax, PB and DL for the 2016-2017 fiscal year. When I say I totaled I went day to day on the results charts since they show the handle for the day. That handle includes the out-of-state bets from the simulcast/ADW sites. Jax totaled $90,530,670. PB totaled $155,671,152 and DL totaled $90,902,925.

That is a total of $337,103,947.

I also know by subtracting the PB, Jax and DL totals from the Florida Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering site that the remaining tracks did $91,065,519.

www.myfloridalicense.com/dbpr/pmw/documents/Stats/H17-18/Handle2017-2018_YTD.pdf

That is a total of $428,169,466 and that doesn't include any ADW money for those remaining tracks.

Going back to Jax, PB and DL we know those three tracks did $337,103,947 in total handle of which $120,857,169 was shown as bet within the state of Florida on the FDPMW site. That means $216,246,778 was bet out-of-state from ADW's. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to assume those remaining tracks, that did $91,065,519 within the state of Florida, did $100,000,000 from simulcast/ADW sites, in fact it might be low.

Using the 100,000,000 estimate that would bring the total amount of money bet on Florida tracks to $528,169,466 in the 2017-2018 fiscal year.

Looking at a national handle, these tracks would be for the calendar year 2017, I know the Southland handle was $97,374,736. I know that Wheeling and Tri-State handled $111,803,546. Texas did $508,080 on their short live season. Dubuque did $4,655,033. This leaves Birmingham which doesn't show charts with handle anymore. I know last year B'ham did an estimated 20 million in handle so I will estimate they did 12 million in 2017.

This would be a total U.S. handle of $754,510,861.

You have to wonder how many three quarter of a billion dollar industries are people trying to put out of business? While G2K likes to show when this industry was a 2 billion dollar a year industry in the 90's what they can't and won't tell anyone was there were 51 tracks operating to generate that 2 billion dollars. We had 19 tracks generating over $750,000,000 in 2017.

The fact that "live" handle is down is a result of the changing ways we shop and bet. "Live" in house sales of every major store and industry in the country would be down from the 1990's or even the early 2000's. People shop online and people bet online.

[dad2paisley]

That's alot.Doesn't look like the industry is dying like Grey2K says. I wish we could bet online here in Md. We have 2 big casinos here, but no online betting.

[greydaddy]

So these politicians are willing to give up all this money to keep it on the ballot.

[Dick Ciampa]

The problem is Florida doesn't get any tax money from the ADW sites.  However, this isn't the greyhound industries fault.  Florida needs to figure out a way to do this.  I don't care if Florida taxes that money and I actually encourage them to do so.

The funny thing about the ADW sites is the Oregon hub, which is the largest ADW site in the country, has a company named U.S. Off Track as part of their hub.  U.S. Offtrack is owned by the Palm beach, Derby Lane and Jacksonville tracks.  So you can go to these tracks, watch the races live and bet through their hub.  Those bets are not recorded as "live" on track bets because they through the hub.  The kennels and dog owners get nothing or next to nothing, the tracks might throw us a bone of 1/2 of a percent, from these bets.

the Oregon hub started in 2001 and handled about 200 million dollars.  In 2017 they handled 3.7 Billion dollars and in 2018 they are on pace to handle 4.2 Billion dollars.  Most of that money is money bet on the horses, but it shows how the landscape of betting changed.  people in states with no live racing, horses or dogs can bet through the hubs, unless you are in Maryland.  LOL  I think there are other states that this is also illegal, but not many.

[dad2paisley]

Thanks for this. I know MD has no online betting. We do have 2 casinos.