by Trey Nosrac
A multi-thousand-word article by McKay Coppins in the March issue of The Atlantic is a troubling read. The title is Sucker, My Year as a Degenerate Gambler. The piece is a deep-dive experiment/narration into the past, present, and future of gambling. The Cliff Notes recap of the story could be – the intentionally addictive online gambling world is already a huge problem on many levels, and growing exponentially.
Reading the story caused me to think back about 15 years, to the days when horse racing was the only legal game in town. I attended three Gamblers Anonymous (GA) meetings to do some research for a magazine story. I will never forget those heartbreaking meetings and can only imagine the increase in attendance at GA meetings now that gambling and prediction markets propelled by algorithms are running rampant.
Horse racing did not receive a mention in the article, nor did I hear a single mention of horse racing at the GA meetings that I attended. I specifically recall talking to a guy at the pre-meeting cigarette group in the parking lot and asking him about horse racing. His reply was a dismissive scoff, “I tried it once. It was so damn slow. The races just did not get my juices flowing.” The wagering passions of the addicted people I listened to were poker games, lottery tickets, the stock market, and, surprisingly, bingo.
Despite the snubbing of our beloved sport in both the Atlantic article and my GA meetings, if you squint, this can be interpreted as a plus. Problem gambling on horse racing does happen, but it seems almost quaint when compared to everything on the gambling menu today.
Recent research on gambling behavior, and there is a lot of it, suggests the activities that create the most problems are not the slow, once-every-few-minutes wagers like horse racing. The majority of the trouble comes from the rapid-fire, instant-result betting that pumps dopamine and never gives the addictive brain time to cool down.
Online sports books, casino apps, and in-game prop bets markets are carefully engineered for speed. You can bet on the next pitch, the next possession, the next hand, the next spin, the next anything. The result comes in seconds, and the next wager is waiting before the first one has even settled in your mind. Psychologists call this a “short reward cycle,” and it turns out that short reward cycles are exactly what make modern gambling hard to control.
Horse racing, for all its faults, has never worked that way. Our gamblers are referred to as handicappers. The races they play take time, sometimes an eternity. A player will handicap, wait, watch the tote board, and then watch the horses warm up, parade, line up, and race. Then you wait again. There is space between the bets. Even if you have a menu of possible racetracks and races on your iPad, we have a built-in speed limit in that most people need time to consider the ability of the racehorse, the driver, and the post position.
Horse racing is a bit of an outlier in modern discussions of problem gambling. The people studying addiction are looking at mobile apps, live betting, and algorithm-driven wagering platforms, not a guy with a program and a pencil trying to figure out if the rail horse has enough speed to hold position in the first turn.
And this shifting world of gambling leads to something we have been kicking around in this column – the idea that the future of harness racing may not depend on making gambling on horses faster, louder, and more aggressive. It may depend on doing exactly the opposite – creating places where racing exists, competition exists, and horse ownership exists; but if the wagering exists at all, it sits off to the side instead of at the center.
If the re-engineered sport is built around privately funded purses through membership, sponsorship, and stakes payments, then nobody has to design the wagering product to keep people clicking every 10 seconds. Nobody has to invent new ways to hold attention at all costs. Nobody has to turn a horse race into a slot machine. The pressure to make an addictive product disappears when the survival of the sport no longer depends on the next wager.
Ironically, the very thing that some people say makes horse racing less exciting – the leisurely pace, the anticipation may be exactly what makes it healthier. That may sound like a strange niche for a business, but we will have a difficult time competing with the gambling world that grows faster, louder, more isolated, and relentlessly. Maybe the best future for our sport is to take our beautiful animals, go against the grain, and run away from the addictive chaos. We should embrace our deliberateness.
The real gamble in harness horse racing is standing at a yearling sale, looking at a young horse that has never taken a step in harness, and deciding whether to raise your hand. A wager that doesn’t pay off in three seconds, it takes at least nine months, if it pays off at all. Our gamble on young horses requires patience, thought, and nerve. Owning a racehorse is closer to a long-term investment than gambling. If the sport leans toward ownership, stakes programs, and memberships, excitement comes from watching a horse develop over time.
We live in a modern gambling world of younger demographics that is built on speed, repetition, and constant action. Buying a yearling, paying the bills, watching the horse grow into whatever he is going to be is a gamble, but it is a slow gamble, the kind that forces you to think before you act.
It is hard to imagine people ruining their lives purchasing and training one yearling, especially if they share costs with friends. But their lives can be ruined with a tap of their fingertip as they bet whether the next pitch will be a strike or ball.