A warning to the wise. The future of off-shore sportsbooks = NO CLERKS

PUBLICACDO ORIGINALMENTE EN "THE PRESCRIPTION"
http://www.therxforum.com/showthread.php?t=193657

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A wagering floor can easily be defined as an ineficient way of doing what the internet does. Anything that can be done by a clerk can be done by a computer at a fraction of the cost to the bookmaker. Off-shore bookies love players that are electronic. They wire the money in, set up accounts through email and bet online.

Think about it. No phone bills have to be paid, this alone runs in the millions of dollars a year for decent-sized operations. No rent is due on humungous office-space complexes. Anybody that has seen the instalations used by NASA, CRIS, JAZZ, etc in Costa Rica will tell you that this is no laughing matter. No extravagant payroll for hundreds of clerks has to be handed out. There goes another couple of million dollars. Human resources gets simplified, so the small armies of administrators, supervisors, accountants, lawyers, etc come off the payroll. NO CLAIMS. This alone is worth it. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars get handed back to the players every year due to clerk mistakes?

A lot of players call in their bets. Be it because they sit on the far side of the digital divide and are not comfortable with computers and the internet or because they just don't have acess at the time they want to place a wager (WAP-enabled websites take care of that one since thay can be accessed froma cell-phone, but that is another story). This forces bookies to literally hire small armies to answer the phones on an NFL sunday.

But, are the clerks really necesary? Aside from specialized phone stations such as customer service, claims, horses, linesmen or managers most clerking stations can be easily replaced by voice recognition software. A player calls in, the computer picks up the phone, he gives his account and password, asks for the lines and places wagers, all handled by a centralized server. Cost is reduced to a sufficiently powerful server, phone and software.

Voice recognition isn't quite ready for an off-the-shelf application for sportsbooks. It has to be trained to recognize the inflections of a particular voice. This is done now by having the person read some lines into a microphone so as to train the algorythm (neural networks?? sounds like it). Once this step is accomplished, voice recognition is remarkably accurate.

This learning curve hazzle is now being fazed out. If you call directory assitance within the US you get asked to state the category and location of your query by a computer, which recognizes what you say and shuttles you to the respective operator.

In a short time (5 years, maybe sooner) voice recognition engines will be powerful enough to substitute the clerks on a wagering floor. Let me repeat that: THERE WILL BE NO CLERKS ON THE WAGERING FLOOR. There will probably be no wagering floor either. Clerks are the first to go to the inevitable technical progress in our industry. They certainly won't be the last. Line movers (not line MAKERS) are another endangered species.

Thus my warning. A lot of my friends work at clerk level positions in the gambling industry. MAKE A 3-5 YEAR PLAN TO REMOVE YOURSELF FROM THE WAGERING FLOOR AND ACT ON IT!! Start studying now, learn a skill, assure yourself portability to another field of employment. Take advantage of the flexibility of schedule that you have now and the economic resources to propell yourself to another career. Bookies directly employ around 7,000 people in CR during football season. In 4 years, when 5000 of those are fired they will all have similar work experience, similar training, similar skills and they will all be looking for the same jobs. How are YOU going to compete?