When visitors are expected to return to the Birmingham Race Course next month, they will find some changes. While live greyhound racing is gone, there will be more models of a new betting machine introduced last year.
The race course has not yet announced a reopening date. The Jefferson County Department of Health’s most recent order prevents entertainment facilities from opening before June 6, as the number of coronavirus cases has been increasing in Jefferson County.
The race course’s operator says it has also instituted new safety procedures in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. Its president, Lewis Benefield, said spreading out machines and people is not a problem in a facility as large as the race course.
“We know how much suffering this virus has caused, and our first priority is protecting the health of our customers and our employees,” Benefield said. “We’ve been using this shutdown to make sure we are moving forward in a way that makes sense for them, for us, and for the city of Birmingham as a whole. We are ready to get back in business and to put our people back to work."
Among the new procedures will be screening employee temperatures upon entry, restricting occupancy, frequent cleaning of surfaces and steps to limit physical contact during purchases, betting and payouts,
In April, the race course announced it was discontinuing live greyhound racing to rely on simulcasting. This was after receipts in recent years from live greyhound racing had become “embarrassingly low,” Kip Keefer, executive director of the Birmingham Racing Commission, said.
However, during the shutdown, Benefield said the venue has added another 300 models of a video betting machine that was added in October 2019. The machines, known as historical pari-mutuel betting, allow users to place wagers on horse races that have already taken place. The machines use historical information from previously run races, allowing betters to pick the favorites or handicap for themselves.
A user puts in money and follows the instructions, which allows him or her to bet on a horse race that previously happened, probably sometime in the last five years. For obvious reasons, the user doesn’t know ahead of time where and when the race took place, or the names of the horses. Graphs instead of numbers show different categories of information, such as pedigree, form, earnings, pace, class, speed, and trainer/jockey.
Anyone using the system can choose to watch the actual race from start to finish, or the last four seconds. Or users can just learn the outcome on a graphic interface that looks like a slot machine. However, the game isn’t a random generation of numbers.
Benefield says the race course now has 550 of the machines, and expects to have 1,000 by the end of the year.
When the race course reopens, Benefield said it will have 350 employees, the same number on payroll when the shutdown happened. And the race course hopes to eventually return live greyhound racing to the track, he said.
“Our business was growing and thriving before COVID-19,” Benefield said. “While we’ve been closed to the public, we have not been idle. We have been working to make sure we will return even stronger than before. We look forward to seeing all of our guests and employees soon, and we will be ready for them when they arrive."
"course" - Google News
May 27, 2020 at 12:03AM
https://ift.tt/2M1WeVm
Birmingham Race Course adding more machines for eventual reopening - AL.com
"course" - Google News
https://ift.tt/35q9ps5
https://ift.tt/35rCFi1
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Birmingham Race Course adding more machines for eventual reopening - AL.com"
Post a Comment