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Letter of the Week

Punters aren't rational

How many more tired, cliched articles are we going to read about cobalt/integrity issues threatening to end racing as we know it? A recent example is Michael Lynch’s “If it’s not believable, why bet on it or watch it?” (The Age, 16/6).
These writers pen away seemingly oblivious to the need for any kind of empirical evidence to support their claims, supremely confident in their assumptions regarding the average punter and his sensibilities. They rarely if ever even bother to appeal to anecdotal evidence from their own circle of punting friends and acquaintances.
Well, my anecdotal evidence is almost totally at odds with these writers; virtually all punters I know simply don’t rate the cobalt issue as a reason to stop punting. It may mean that for them the odd result here and there appears less than above board, but they’ve forever believed this to be the case with racing. In the long run it sometimes favours them, and sometimes goes against them; there is no inherent disadvantage.
And if we do attempt to be more objectively empirical? Well, it’s my understanding that there’s just no solid evidence to suggest that turnover is affected by issues such as the cobalt one.
A difficult thing to show, I concede, but wouldn’t you at least think that the issue of whether (and how) we can know that turnover is being affected should be canvassed before the cliches come out?
So why are these articles so predictably disappointing in their blatant disregard for the very evidence needed to support their opinions?
I think the answer is obvious: the elephant in the room for ages now has been the total myth that punters are “investors”, that racing is like the stock market, a “product” with its “customers”.
The reality is that punting is a zero-sum game, that it depends upon punters losing, and that the only rational explanation as to why punters continue to allow a certain percentage of their income to drain away over time, where in any other financial sphere of life they’d have stopped ages ago, is the diagnosis of mild addiction.
“Problem gamblers” are a minority, and racing does its moral duty regarding them, but would racing admit widespread addiction, even of a mild kind, in its punting population? No way.
Articles like Lynch’s are informed by a fundamental misunderstanding of the average punter, pretending him to be a rational agent with a similar moralistic sensibility to those of the author — the disconnect between the two is striking.

Michael Barton
Parkville (Vic)
Today's Racing
Friday 29 March
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