Personally I think any further amalgamation of the TABs would be an extremely bad thing for punters. The TABs already treat the average punter as a source of money rather than as a valued customer. At least with 3 TABs there is some level of competition that stops any one of them from increasing their deduction rates - if they amalgamated how long do you think it would be before the deduction rate from the Win/Place pools gets increased to 20% (or worse)??? As to the argument that a single large pool would advantage us in some way that is ridiculous. As you say you can currently gain an advantage by betting with the highest paying TAB - if you want to place really large bets just put 1/3 with each TAB - problem solved!

As to the government/TAB/racing industry reducing their take - if they had half a brain between the lot of them they would probably be able to work out it would have very little impact on the bottom line. Gambling is not like a normal purchase where their is a limit to how much the customer will buy - effectively with gambling MOST people will simply keep gambling until they have lost the amount they allocate for the purpose. eg. If customer walks in to a club with $100 set aside for pokies they will keep going until it is all gone (unless they have a really big win - small wins will be reinvested). Therefore the "deduction" rate for most gamblers is effectively irrelevant - the club will still end up with the punters $100 regardless of whether the machine is paying out 90%, 95% or 98% - the only difference will be the amount of time it takes the gambler to lose their money. Of course the longer it takes the more "value" the gambler perceives they have got for their money and the more likely they are to come back next time they have some money to "invest". I think you will find most punters at the TAB are the same (with the obvious exception of the very small % that actually win). They will keep betting until they have lost their weekly allowance ($100, $200, whatever) so the TAB/Govt/Industry will end up with roughly the same amount of money regardless of the deduction rate. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if total TAB revenue went UP if they reduced the deduction rate substantially. If you were a punter currently losing say 4% LOT but you suddenly started making 4% POT instead do you think you might invest a lot more money through the TAB?

Of course as you say I am probably in la-la land expecting any of this to happen but I can always dream :smile:

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