What's next for Colonial Downs? Casino-style gambling.
They’re choosing their words carefully at Colonial Downs, where casino-style gambling will soon be available, no matter what anyone prefers to call it.
For starters, it’s an attempt to revive Virginia’s only real horse?track. Opened in 1997 with high hopes and much hand-wringing, Colonial Downs was the state’s first foray into parimutuel betting — a big deal in the conservative commonwealth.newest online casinos
But the track limped along for years, unable to draw steady crowds, or deliver the promised tax windfall or support funds for the state’s once-legendary thoroughbred farms.It’s been shuttered since 2014 — a lemon in full view of traffic on I-64, a black eye on the homeland of Secretariat, the greatest race horse of all time.
Tracks in many states, faced with their own hard times, have pumped up revenue by adding full-fledged casinos. For states that don’t allow such things, the gaming industry has developed a work-around: historic horse racing, or HHR in the industry's lingo.
HHR machines look, sound and feel like traditional slots, complete with “entertainment” themes that run in the foreground — angels, pirates, cartoons, movies — but their inner workings operate on a different system.
With classic slots, players bet against the “house” and “random number generators” determine where reels stop — a game that’s considered “chance” and therefore still illegal in Virginia.
With HHR, machines are linked into a parimutuel pool that’s similar to live horse racing — where players are actually betting against other players — and reels are controlled by an algorithm that’s based on the results of old horse races, which are fished from a database of tens of thousands of unidentifiable races.
As with slots, most people simply hit play and watch symbols spin, letting the machine’s “auto-handicap” component do the work behind the scenes, trying to predict the outcome of races and where reels will land.