I agree, which is why I was very surprised that Matt did not get the Eclipse for his coverage of the fix six scandal. Perhaps he would have if he had done the article on how easy it is to hack into Catskill OTB from the outside.

One thing from the article(http://drf.com/news/article/43492.html) which I found both interesting & a little implausible was the Mgr's claim that 60% of RGS' customers were not horseplayers before they came to RGS, which has only been in existence for 5 yrs. I think that the learning curve is a lot longer than that for an avg player, let alone someone who is betting $4.7 million a yr. It also would have been of interest to me know what handicapping products & betting strategies the 120 members use, where they concentrate their action, what kinds of bets they focus on,etc. At the very least, you have to admire these guys for their stamina, as the sums they are wagering would not appear to allow for much in the way of gambling downtime.

What the article did address, for the 1st time to the best of my knowledge, are actual results of the supposed "cream of the crop." The daily settlements originally referred to by Ray Paulick show that RGS' bettors recieve back 90% of their gross wagers, as opposed to 80% for similar operations. In other words, the RGS bettors are only able to break even because of the rebates, hardly a ringing endorsement for the claim that they are best "professional" gamblers in the game. Unless I'm missing something, it makes no sense to claim that one is a "professional" in a money making endevour when one does not, in fact, make any money. And wouldn't it stand to reason that this group would be doing better than losing 10 cents of every dollar if they could take advantage of past posting or some other edge?

For as long as I can remember, racing books have fairly consistently claimed that 2-5% of horseplayers either were making money or making a living betting, which are obviously two entirely different concepts, which itself makes the claims suspect. Just as consistently, no one has ever offered any indication of where these nos. came from or how they were derived, so that I have come to believe that this is just another instance of something gaining credibility for no other reason than the fact that it has been repeated over many yrs. Now that we have some actual nos., it appears that many players have been doing a lot better than they thought.