23 May 2009

HANA Pool Party Today: The 8th At Canterbury Park

HANA is beginning to make fantastic strides now. We are getting a lot of attention as well. John Pricci at HorseRace Insider has written a fantastic article; HANA Proving A Positive Force For Industry Change. Great interview with HANA President Jeff Platt.

My favorite part of the interview is in the comments by Douglas Amos and John Pricci:

"Lone Star currently has an attractive reduction on its Win 5. Promote these people....Woodbine, if it indeed seeks to be a leader, could begin by lowering the most exorbitant exotic takeout rates in North America; boycott them."

John Pricci replied "...And it must be killing you that Woodbine has very high takeout rates, it being your hometown track.
Do you hear us now, Toronto? You’re out."


HANA POOL PARTY
Today, HANA will be swimming in Minnesota, at Canterbury Park. We selected the 8th race, which goes off around 5:30 EST. It is an 11 horse grass race for $7500 claimers (fillies and mares). Show your support and bet the race, even if you just bet a deuce. A couple of horses that have a shot at a price are Rossiya and Fancy N Quick.

Free Past Performances and Pace Figures can be found by clicking here. Thorograph data can be accessed for free here (click attachments in the message box).

The free past performances (above) that were donated by TrackMaster have a couple of new additions. They have just added run up distance (the distance the horses go before the beam starts the timer in a race), and the distance that the rail was out in grass races. For a better explanation, click here.

HANA is becoming the go to voice for horseplayers. Recently, there was a past posting glitch at Hollywood Park (betting was allowed to continue after the race at quite a few locations). It was first brought to everyone's attention at HANA's blog by Mike Maloney. The story got legs in a hurry, as Paulick Report quickly picked up on it as well. A similar incident just happened at Penn National on Wednesday night. Lots of pissed off players, who had picked the right combos but were completely disillusioned when the race turned into a complete refund. Many are requesting HANA boycott Penn, but the reality is right now, until HANA gets much bigger, boycotts just won't be on the table. We have to stick with buycotts until membership gets a little more significant. Right now HANA is close to 1200 members who bet $40-$45 million a year collectively. Lots of small betters and a good number of big and medium bettors as well. The reality is that we need numbers.

The greater the amount of voices we represent, the greater the voice HANA will have. Please join if you haven't already (it is free) by clicking here.


Some sad news as Renee Kierans reports on the passing of long time Woodbine trainer Tony Mattine.

2 comments:

Rook said...

HANA has done diddly squat over this PEN incident. You should not be excusing their reluctance to take a stand and get involved. If they want to get horseplayers 100% behind them then they need to learn to use the stick when one of their members is being screwed over by a track.

Read the PA thread and this is an open and shut case that is getting an extremely rare 100% agreement from the PA posters.

If you were the one being ripped off for $1000, I don't think you would be cheerleading HANA while they remain stone silent.

When I was getting shafted by ehorse, I had a website called sportsbookreview that got the problem solved for me in 24 hours. In contrast, HANA has done absolutely nothing for me.

Cangamble said...

Rook, lets not forget that HANA is full of volunteers, and we still don't have a seat at the table. Our strength is being able to voice the wrongs against the customer. The Hollywood incident was noticed by the industry thanks to VP Mike Maloney who wrote an article on the HANA blog.
If what happened to you, happened to me, I wouldn't remain silent (as you know, I rarely keep silent on anything). But I don't think HANA has the strength in numbers yet to coerce Penn into making it right either. I'm not saying we shouldn't, and I'll send Jeff an email right now, and we'll go from there.