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Why Doesn't Anybody Go to the Horse Races?It pays to stay home.

By Edward McClellandPosted Thursday, May 1, 2008, at 4:28 PM ET

Also in Slate, Dan Schar documents Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum's fruitless, billion-dollar quest to win the Kentucky Derby, and Magnum Photos presents a gallery of racing photos.

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T.D. Thornton explained why you can't give your Thoroughbred an obscene name. Ted McClelland wrote that a synthetic surface called Polytrack will change horse racing forever. Meghan O'Rourke investigated America's obsession with Barbaro. In 2004, O'Rourke confessed her childhood love of horse racing. Tommy Craggs debunked the myth of the blue-collar racehorse. John Williams argued that breaking up the Triple Crown will save horse racing. In 1997 Joel Achenbach chronicled the disappointment throughout the horse-racing community upon discovering that a famed Thoroughbred shot blanks. Check out a "Today's Pictures" gallery on horse racing.

Since rebates were first offered at Las Vegas sports books in the mid-1990s, they've changed gamblers' habits immensely. Maury Wolff, a professional horseplayer in Virginia, quintupled his action once he started getting rebates. He also stopped going to the track almost entirely—you'll see him there 10 days a year. "I'm exclusively out-of-the-house now," says Wolff, who was a 200-day-a-year racetrack regular a decade ago. "It's way more efficient."

At the track, Wolff has to wait in line for tickets and copy exact prices off a TV monitor. At home, he can watch the odds on his computer and get a bet down with a mouse click. Plus, he has piles of handicapping records on his desk—take those to the track, and you'll look like Groucho juggling tip books in A Day at the Races.

For some guys, rebates mean the difference between feeding bales of cash to the horses and staying at home and watching baseball on Thursday afternoons. Dana Parham, who may be the biggest whale of all, bragged to a University of Arizona symposium that, thanks to rebates: "I am directly responsible for over $2.4 billion in handle since January of 2000. One hundred percent of this is new money that would otherwise not be in the pools at any level."

What's happened here is a market correction in racetrack takeout. For years, gamblers have complained—and rightly so—that a 20 percent bite made winning nearly impossible. But there was no way to change it. The track and the OTB were the only places to bet, and their rates were set by state racing boards, controlled by politicians who sin-taxed gamblers as hard as drinkers and smokers. Now, phone hubs, whales, and the racing industry have worked out a new arrangement. It leaves out the $2 patzer, who doesn't bet enough to qualify for rebates, but so what, goes the attitude. The biggest customers get the best deals.

As a result of hubs, the horse-racing network TVG, and online gambling sites like YouBet and Xpressbet, attendance is down, but wagers are up. According to the California Horse Racing Board, the state's railbird population dropped 26 percent between 1996 and 2006, but wagering on California races increased 17 percent. It's just easier to get a bet down. Last year, I wanted to play a Pick 4 at Arlington Park, but I couldn't get to the track because, tragically, I had a job. Thankfully, I was able to turn my desk into a miniature OTB. I read the program on my laptop. My desktop played streaming video from the track. Just before the first race, I ran outside with my cell and called in my wager to a YouBet operator. (I was reluctant to actually gamble on the company's computer.) I lost the bet, and, eventually, I lost my job—not for playing the horses at work, but for reasons somewhat related to the anti-authoritarian traits that make me a devoted racetrack bum.

Now that I'm unemployed, I have more time to go to Hawthorne and to wonder if, someday, I'll be the only one there. When I started following horse racing, I was 29 years old, and I was the youngest guy in the grandstand. Now I'm 41, and I'm still the youngest guy in the grandstand. When bettors stay home, they follow the big tracks—Keeneland, Saratoga, Gulfstream. As a result, racing fairs and small-town bullrings are closing. Last year, we lost Great Lakes Downs, the only Thoroughbred track in Michigan. Where will the next generation of pathological gamblers come from? Nobody gets hooked at an OTB or a Web site.

As a writer, I also have to mourn the decline of the racetrack culture. The track and its characters—misfits, losers, and dreamers every one of us—provided the casts for Charles Bukowski's Longshot Pomes for Broke Players, Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls, and Jay Cronley's Good Vibes, which became the movie Let It Ride. A few years ago, I wrote a book called Horseplayers: Life at the Track, the story of a year spent trying to beat the races and all the oddballs I met along the way. That was 2003. Finding those characters is tougher today. Hawthorne is so empty that management has sealed off half the grandstand. The Handicapping and Business Center, where I met so many of my subjects, has been stripped of everything but a few TVs. The Professor, a former b-school dean who taught classes there, now holds court at an OTB. His sidekick, the Stat Man, handicaps for a tout sheet, leaving his apartment only to hit the Wendy's drive-through. He now places bets on his computer. Somehow, I can't see myself writing about a guy leaning toward a laptop screen, squinting through his glasses and shouting, "Come on with that nine!" at a horse the size of a scampering vole. It wouldn't make much of a movie, either.