Horse Racing Gambling Machine
Inspired by the story of Bill Benter, a gambler who developed a computer model that made him close to a billion dollars1 betting on horse races in the Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC), I set out to see if I could use machine learning to identify inefficiencies in horse racing wagering. Kit Chellel, The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code, ↩. The wheel in horse race betting The Wheel Bet is a very fun and practical way of making multiple exotic bets on a single ticket. There are two versions of a wheel bet: full and partial. Northern Virginia gaming business to open slot machine parlor for horse race betting. Of old horse races, and the machines provide an option — rarely used — to make the wager based on.
In a unanimous decision announced Thursday that could result in a large cuts to purses in the state, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled that Historical Horse Racing (HHR) Machines do not qualify as pari-mutuel wagering and are therefore illegal under state law.
The decision directly covered only one form of the machines, the Encore or Exacta system, but it appears that it will be applied to all forms and brands of HHR.
The plaintiff in the case was the Family Trust Foundation of Kentucky, a conservative group which describes itself as a foundation that “has stood as a continual bulwark for families and the values that make families strong.” The Family Trust Foundation appealed after losing its fight against the HHR machines in a lower court, the Franklin Circuit Court.
Majority Floor Leader and racing advocate Damon Thayer was quick to lash out at the court.
“It is a devastating decision made by a Kentucky Supreme Court that continues to deliver bad decisions,” he said. “It's wrong. It's irresponsible. If not remedied, this could be a devastating blow to Kentucky's racing and breeding industries.”
Because casinos and slot machines are illegal in Kentucky, the HHR machines, which resemble traditional slot machines, were only allowed after receiving a green light from the Kentucky Racing Commission which authorized them on the basis of them being a form of pari-mutuel gambling. The Kentucky Supreme Court disagreed. In an opinion written by Laurance VanMeter, whose brother Tom is a Kentucky-based bloodstock agent, the court said it found that the machines do not meet the legal definition of pari-mutuel wagering because customers were not wagering “on the same discrete, finite events.”
“Because we hold that the Encore system does not create a wagering pool among patrons such that they are wagering among themselves as required for pari-mutuel wagering, the trial court misapplied the applicable regulation as a matter of law,” read the ruling.
WDRB.com's report on the ruling included a quote from Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who said: “Historical horse racing is an important part of Kentucky's economy that supports jobs and contributes over $21 million to the state budget. We are working with various partners to find a path forward.”
It was not immediately clear what steps would follow the ruling and when, but should the tracks be forced to shut down the HHR machines, it would be a huge blow to the industry. With the machines soaring in popularity, the state's tracks have been able to substantially bump up their purses in recent years.
Starting out at Kentucky Downs in 2011, the machines are now either at every Kentucky track or one of their satellite facilities. In July alone, the machines across the state handled $270 million, which resulted in gross commissions of 22,722,679. During the fiscal year that ended in June, the gross commissions on $2.2 billion in handle was $188.9 million, of which $15,577,748 went to the Kentucky Thoroughbred Development Fund.
“This decision is obviously devastating for everyone and is something that no one was expecting,” said Kentucky Equine Education Project Executive Vice President Elizabeth Jensen. “Several racetracks have made significant investments based on the success of Historical Horse Racing over the last few years. I think this blind sided pretty much everyone. It's hard at the moment for everyone to get their arms around the long-term impact of this. Immediately, you have the hundreds of people working at HHR facilities that will be losing their jobs. The amount of money going to the purses will also be lost.”
Spokespersons for Kentucky Downs and Keeneland issued only brief comments Thursday, both saying they are evaluating the court decision.
Churchill Downs Vice President of Corporate Communications Tonya Abeln issued a statement making it clear that the racing and gaming company was exploring its options.
“CDI does not use the Exacta system in any of its HRMs in any facility in Kentucky,” she said in an email response. “We will work within our legal rights and in coordination with Kentucky legislators to ensure the ongoing legal operation of our HRM facilities in Kentucky so that we can continue to provide critical funding for the equine industry and support the citizens in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Although CDI does not use the Exacta system in question at any of our HRM facilities, we appreciate Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear's support of the industry in his statement regarding Historical Horse Racing today.”
Should the tracks be ordered to shut off the machines, it is not clear when that would happen.
With the highest court in the state having ruled against the HHR machines, the racing commission and the racing and breeding industries will likely have to look outside of the court system if they are to find a path to the keep the machines going. One avenue could be to craft and have legislation passed that would permit their use. In its ruling, the Court hinted at just that.
“If a change, however, in the long-accepted definition of pari-mutuel wagering is to be made, that change must be made by the people of this Commonwealth through their duly-elected legislators, not by an appointed administrative body and not by the judiciary,” the ruling read.
Jensen said it was too early for racing interests to have crafted a new plan of attack.
“What can we do? What can be done? Those are the questions of the day,” she said. “We are still researching that. We are working with the tracks, talking to legislators and people in Frankfort to try to figure out where do we go from here. I don't think anybody has that answer yet.”
Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence is widely used in time series analysis & forecasting. With help of several historical data & computing power, ML & AI models sometimes will produce very useful insight & guidance to horse racing odds for today betting decisions.
When using machine learning and artificial intelligence models for horse racing we rightly require a little way to access how successful they are. Horse race betting will be different in predicting the face recognition or cancer diagnosis as these applications are about the accuracy of the predictions. With horse racing betting, accuracy has an important part to play, however, it is not a complete picture.
The less accurate model can be more profitable & for this reason, we focus more on the profit. The common profit measurements will be variable stake profit and flat stake profit. The variable staking profit means we will place the stake set for winning £1 as per the odds. The flat stake profit means placing £1 on each selection, like top-rated in ratings Thus, for instance, 2/1 shot will have a bet of 50p on it. Obviously, in both the examples stake will be whatever you would like it to be.
Challenges: Support betting with the online models
Just like other AI-backed services, companies providing live betting will benefit from the online models that generate predictions and help to determine the live odds in sports betting and races. The online models need several input features that will make accurate predictions, which include low latency access of features, which are computed from the historical data. These kinds of features are very complex to compute in an online application themselves as well as are not possible to reuse in case they’re embedded in the applications. Nonetheless, the classic classification models aren’t suited for the betting strategies, so one has to use the custom loss feature in his network to attain better profitability.
Once you implement the feature computation in the online application, then you need to make sure consistency of an online feature implementation with feature implementation that is used to produce the train or test data for this model (training data pipeline). Many different ML and AI learning approaches are applied to horse racing like Artificial Neural Networks & Naïve Bayes Classifiers.
ANN Horse Racing Predictions
The Artificial Neural Network is trained on the input data. For horse racing, input data is the large corpus of the race results. But, the tricky part is to determine which metrics you must include in an input training data like win % on X number of horse races, jockey, trainer, gender, going, and more. We’re constantly refining these metrics used in the system with different sets of metrics that are used for the flat racing, steeplechase, and hurdles (we have seen a huge difference in the performance of the metrics between the racecourses – this might be because of issues with the source data).
Horse Racing Gambling Game Machine
When input data is prepared the artificial neural network will be trained. This neural network is generally initialized with the input node representing every metric and output node as finish position refactored like 0 for the last and 100 for the first. It is one example of supervised learning as the right output is known while compiling input data. This network is well-trained by presenting input data and making incremental changes to the configuration of a network till output matches its target very closely. The neural network is well-suited to the task since it will handle an inevitable freak result, which appears in input data.
Final Words
Horse Racing Gambling Device
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have impacted everything across us as well as have gone through many criticisms too. But, over the past many years, this new technology has delivered most of the promises in different industries such as finance, healthcare, and more. With artificial intelligence starting to impact the sports betting industry, it’s promising the legal and accessible way to bet through these Sportsbooks that is the billion-dollar industry allowing the players to bet right from their phones or laptops safely. With this scenario available to you, soon artificial intelligence can close this gap that comes between gambling & investing.