1. TAB Rounding of dividends - akin to outright theft in my opinion. Occurs in every race where the exact price of a runner is reduced to 1 decimal place (eg; a horse paying $1.69 will only pay $1.60) which actually means the TAB takeout in each is far in excess of the stated 16% and can in fact be as high as 25%. To rub it in, the excess funds derived from this thievery are not returned to the racing industry but instead added to TabCorp coffers in the same way unclaimed dividends are.
They should be forced to declare the full dividend and only round down if a punter has a small bet that equated to say $1.675 and pay that punter $1.65 - my corner store for God's sake has software in place to calculate rounding so surely the TAB can implement the same. This practice costs punters nationally in excess of $100 million per annum which in itself probably explains why they don't.
Maybe V'Landys would be better off pursuing this money instead of his crusade against Betfair and the Corps which I will touch upon later.
2. Substitute Rule - what a joke this is, punters in Quadrellas and Doubles having their investment placed onto a horse they might not even like and a lot of the time you don't even know what horse you have until after the race. It is time to have a special dividend introduced when a selection is a late scratching.
I can vividly recall investing $1600 on a Quadrella purely on the basis that a horse who was going to start odds on in the 3rd leg could not win. I therefore anchored the 2nd fav who was quoted at around $3.50 (all other runners were $20 or above). My horse kicked the stalls and injured itself prior to the race and was scratched which meant my entire $1600 bet went onto the exact horse that I gave no chance of winning. Sure enough, it got beaten and my horse which was scratched went on to win its next 6 starts.
3. Racing NSW v Betfair - This has been done to death in forums so won't go too much into it, plus I am undecidedly biased on the side of Betfair. Just thought I would list a couple of facts and not go over old ground.
Peter V'Landys always states that by Betfair only paying a % of gross profit that Racing NSW may not get anything. Well Peter, Betfair is an exchange and guaranteed to profit on an event due to the nature of the enterprise. Plus with the continual trading of positions, it is possible to invest huge amounts of money in an event despite a small initial outlay, for example, last Friday night I placed $200 on North Melbourne @ $4.30 to beat Carlton then later in the game I used that position to hold $400 on them @ $1.44. This would obviously lead to grossly inflated turnover amounts ($600 in this example despite only outlaying $200 and this is just a small example) which Mr V'Landys and his merry men fail to understand.
I actually do have some sympathy with him re the Corporate Bookmakers in that they should be paying a turnover charge and not percentage of profits as due to the nature of their industry they may actually lose. However, they have all been lumped into the same category which isn't their fault so I only hope they win.
How he ever got the job with Racing NSW is beyond me. This is the same bloke after all who thought it was a good idea to introduce 12 horse fields into 1700m races around Harold Park. Obviously not a brain surgeon is our Peter.
