Opinion: Why virtuals can complement the Cheltenham experience

When it comes to horse racing, there are a handful of events each year that stand head and shoulders above others when it comes to mainstream popularity. We all know them – Cheltenham, Royal Ascot and the Grand National are three meetings that are ingrained in the national identity.

It goes without saying that this racing trinity presents a massive opportunity for bookies to attract new users, and there’ll be a flurry of free bets offers and bonuses throughout this week during Cheltenham.

Those marketing tools are evidently working – to a degree. New users may be recruited, but initially at the detriment to the margin, and who’s to say they’ll stay on the site, or remain active?

Once the Festival racing stops, or when there’s a lengthy break between races, bookmakers need to find ways to keep players on their sites, spend more, and migrate to other areas.

Creating products that can make operator sites ‘stickier’ is nothing new, but virtuals are defining themselves as that strong product that can provide a reason for racing bettors to stay within a bookmakers’ offering, and also offer a bridge between both the sportsbook and casino.

Moreover, with the introduction of the on-demand capability of virtual games users can now instantly continue their racing experience within the virtual sphere, before picking the Cheltenham action back up once it commences.

That means less dormancy, higher margins and more chance of that user still being on site when the next race starts.

For seasoned racing and betting fans, habits perhaps don’t change dramatically for Festival week. They’ll need to study the form with the same fastidiousness that they inspect the going at Doncaster on a Tuesday.

Virtuals won’t offer the same racing experience to these bettors, but there is still a hole they can fill. Fun, well designed games can help reduce the dormancy of bettors and also prevent them from looking around for the better odds or products with competitors.

For those who rarely bet, or are completely new to betting, the bookmaker’s site can be a scary place. That’s where virtual products can be the ‘in’.

Designing and creating virtual products with simplicity at their heart is imperative. Form, going, trip, flight, yankee and Canadian bets – racing terminology can be terrifying for the non-racing aficionado. But six horses, racing around a track within a random number generated game and using simple fixed odds, E/W or tri-cast bets can be a much more palatable prospect for a new user, or casino migrator.

Then the next step into a bookies’ racing sportsbook becomes all that much easier. Virtuals are a soft taster which can bridge that gap.

It’s that bridging aspect that can prove attractive to international bookies too, particularly new entrants into the UK markets. Non-UK bookmakers, or their customers, broadly don’t have the same focus on horse racing as the traditionally strong bookmakers already active in Great Britain. High-quality, easy-to-understand horse racing games are that introductory product that can lead them to greater familiarity with the sport and then more involvement in that area of sportsbook.

Virtuals may have been around for some time, but it has been in the last two or three years that they have really come on in leaps and bounds. Mobile, in-play and on-demand aspects are all changing the face of betting as we know it, and the way that bookmakers use virtuals. Expect to see much more of them in the future providing that successful complementary product in the bookmakers’ arsenal.