THUNDER BAY - Off-track betting in the city has gone online.
For the last five years, Galaxy Lanes has been the only site in the city to offer off-track betting and now they’ve gone digital.
“People in the old days used to come to the counter and the girl would take your bets. You would watch the TVs and see which races were coming up. You could buy programs where you would watch the history of all the horses and make your best bet of which horses were going to win,” said Galaxy Lanes owner Ted Ciotucha.
After the race, people would check to see if they had won and then get paid out by a machine.
But now Woodbine Racetrack, the Toronto-based company that contracts all off-track betting in Ontario, has gone automated with online self-betting tills.
“Once you know which horse you want to bet, which race, you go in there and type that in. It gives you a little voucher. After the race, you put (the voucher) in, it tells you if you won. You come see us and we pay you out,” said Ciotucha.
Galaxy Lanes is having a grand opening for the new betting system on Saturday with festivities and prizes and some Woodbine representatives to show people how the new equipment works, but Ciotucha said most of his customers have already picked up the system quite easily.
“It’s really not much to it and we get a lot of people who were here in the old days and they’ve taken to the computers very easily. It’s very user-friendly,” he said.
And while regular customers have been using the system for the last month, staff have noticed some new people coming in lately.
“A lot more younger people,” said Ciotucha. “Because they’re in tune with the computer age.”
