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The state of Illinois has been toying with making changes for a while now. Over the past few months, the racing industry has been suffering greatly. If you look at the various problems in the market, you can see that most of them stemmed from the recession. Prior to it, things were working with relative ease. The gambling market was at a growth rate that it was comfortable with. People had the funds to venture to online casinos and land based casinos as they saw fit. Gambling companies were reaping the benefits of a wide-open market and taking on their own growth spurt as a result. Once the recession happened though it stifled everything. The market was hard hit on many levels and the rippling effect of the recession was difficult for gaming companies to deal with. Their entire market was built on people’s discretionary funds and entertainment needs. Once people were hard-pressed for income, they immediately eliminated entertainment and vacations from their overall budgets. This was the beginning of problems for casinos. They had to make due with their revenues and work with drastically diminished ones. It was difficult for them. Some gambling entities fared worse than others though.
Racing was severely hit. At least gamblers kept casinos going with their lower-wager bets and playing smaller games. They still portioned part of their revenue to gambling, but on a much smaller scale. Casinos in the past had such a field day though that they were able to manage by moving around expenses and changing their operations. Race tracks were not so lucky. They depended on their wagering dollars to create the big purses that would continue to bring in the next round of customers. It was difficult for them to create the same level of gaming, and that caused people to stop coming. Now Illinois is looking to revive its famous racing market by bringing slots gaming to their race tracks like Arlington. If a bill is pushed through, then by mid-2011 it could be that slots are financially carrying much of the racing market within the state. This hopefully would be temporary. The goal is to bring in money once again and then create big purses to attract that many more customers. Only time will tell whether or not that bill is going to be passed, but so far it looks like this is the option Illinois legislator are going to go with.