The Racing Partnership (“TRP”) is delighted to announce that it will be featuring Towcester Greyhounds within its new service every Saturday morning from 10 December.
The fixture will be featured on a trial basis for an initial six month period. Each meeting will comprise eight races with eight dogs in each race and the first race going off at 9.34am and the last at 11.29am. The eight-dog races will provide more betting opportunities, including three places for each-way punters and will be seen as something new and innovative for betting shop customers on a busy trading day, before existing UK greyhound meetings have traditionally started.
Over 1,800 betting shops have signed up for the TRP channel that launched on 1 September. This includes over a thousand independently owned betting shops, including Boylesports, Jenningsbet, Stan James, McLeans, Mark Jarvis and Toals bookmakers, as well as 600 Paddy Power Betfair shops in the UK and Ireland.
Since September the TRP channel has been broadcasting hoseracing from South Africa. This will be joined by race meetings from all 15 Arena Racining Company (“ARC”) owned-racecourses and seven independent racecourses from January 2017.
Director of The Racing Partnership, Mark Kingston, said: “The initiative has been undertaken with the full consultation and support of the Bookmakers Technology Consortium, as well as other independent bookmakers in both the UK and Ireland. All of the team at Towcester are committed to deliver a compelling betting product that adds value to betting shops. The whole process in getting to this point with the bookmakers and Towcester has been extremely open and collaborative, and we will all do what we can to make this venture successful and add real value to our bookmaking partners.”
Chief Executive of Towcester Racecourse, Kevin Ackerman, said: “We are really pleased to sign this deal with TRP and it represents a major step forward for us as a business. It gives us the opportunity to showcase a new UK-based eight runner greyhound offering to all customers on the busiest trading day for our betting shop partners, and starting at a time where there is no other UK greyhound racing.”
Director of the Bookmakers Technology Consortium (“BTC”) and Managing Director of Chisholm Bookmakers, Howard Chisholm, said: “We are very pleased that BTC was consulted from an early stage when the new Saturday morning greyhound meetings were proposed by Towcester. I am sure that the new format of eight runner races will prove popular in the betting shops on what is the busiest morning of the week.”
