Nearly R500 million bet on Daily News 2000 meeting

GOLD CIRCLE-PHUMELELA MEDIA RELEASE
SUBJECT: Nearly R500 million bet on Daily News 2000 meeting
DATE: Tuesday 8 June
RELEASED BY: Phumelela Gaming

The recent Daily News 2000 race meeting marked the first time South African horseplayers were able to bet into Hong Kong’s mega tote pools on a race meeting in this country and the turnover generated in just a few hours was astonishing.

The Hong Kong Jockey Club classified the 29 May Daily News 2000 meeting as a World Pool event, resulting in punters in Hong Kong being able to take the normal range of Hong Kong tote bets on races two to nine.

Four South African tote pools on the same races were commingled into Hong Kong pools - Win, Place, Swinger and Quinella - with local TAB pools on all other bet types.

Total gross turnover on the eight races was R486 million, comprising R405 million bet by Hong Kong punters with South Africa and other international sources contributing R81 million.

The amount bet must be viewed against the background that it was a stand-alone televised event in Hong Kong and took place in a timeframe from 18:25 to 22:35 in the Far East.

The average pool totals on the four commingled bet types are striking to say the least. Win pools averaged R9.4 million gross, Place pools R10.1 million and the Swinger (Quinella Place in Hong Kong) R13.5 million.

The Quinella (first two any order and the equivalent of the Dupla that was once offered in South Africa) was by far the most popular bet on the meeting with eight pools averaging R15.1 million gross.

Lance Smith, who manages Tellytrack and Phumelela’s international operations, said: “Betting into pools of that size on local races was a first for South African punters and the horseracing industry in this country earned a substantial commission from the undertaking.

“The event was generally well received in Hong Kong and there’s good news ahead because the Gold Cup race meeting at the end of July will also be classified as a World Pool event by the Hong Kong Jockey Club,” continued Smith. “But there are issues to be resolved before then including the length of time taken to declare official results.”

A full breakdown of the tote betting on the eight races is below (four commingled bet types highlighted in yellow). Please note these are gross pools.

i read all that and had only one question. How much extra money was added to the stakes pot because of this partnership, that is did SA Racing benefit financially?

Will be nice if this happens on July day as well.. Should then surpass 1 billion easy...

Anyone knows if this is the pipe line as we edge closer to July day

Must say I enjoyed the SW play with these pools ...
Need to understand how to play the Quinella bet on HWB though ... that baffled me.

Fantastic those pools


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Feel free to call me negative but this exercise looks suspiciously like a mix between the old fable of the Emperor's Clothes and an accountant's wet dream.

The only part of this exercise which seems to me to affect South African racing was the part about the R 81 million as I am sure we benefitted by not one cent from the overall gross pool sizes. This amount INCLUDED bets struck by other racing jurisdictions in addition to South Africa. They avoid naming the 'others' as well as how much they (or we) contributed.

To highlight what a financial non-event South Africa has become let's divide that R81 million by 14 to give it a US dollar value and make it globally relevant : All of a sudden 'guests' only contributed US$ 5,78 million over the entire meeting. I don't recall precisely how many races were affected but let's just say 8 for the purposes of this evaluation. On that basis US$ 722k per race was contributed by a mix of 'guest' punters including South Africa.

As is their custom our operator will go to some lengths to avoid sharing what the actual financial implication (if any!) is for the stakes pool (refer Sylvester above) and only mentions in passing the reality that quite a substantial amount of turnover was probably lost altogether due to the slow settling of winning bets after each race.

As usual they don't let too many facts get in the way of some good sounding spin.

Agreed, the local takeout remains the same, but, we can place a bet of say R10,000 into the world pool without being worried about unsettling the dividends. This then draws money away from the bookmaker into the tote thereby creating a bigger local portion of the global tote pool and consequently bigger takeouts in Rand terms distributed to SA racing. Voila!


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rolands song wrote: Will be nice if this happens on July day as well.. Should then surpass 1 billion easy...

Anyone knows if this is the pipe line as we edge closer to July day

No, the Hong Kong tote can’t cope with the amount of runners

Bob Brogan wrote:

rolands song wrote: Will be nice if this happens on July day as well.. Should then surpass 1 billion easy...

Anyone knows if this is the pipe line as we edge closer to July day

No, the Hong Kong tote can’t cope with the amount of runners

Hi Bob, July meeting into HK is not a field size issue, they can handle 20 runners or more, they take the Melbourne Cup