Ideas from Sheriff Gural, Deputy Cherry or the Constables in the HRU feedback section each week to make the sport more exciting might seem crazy at times, but they come from a good place.

by Dean Towers

During the last decade we’ve heard the criticisms in harness racing over and over again.

“If you got down to the half in :58 at Roosevelt, Herve [Filion] would be moving three high swooping the field and the crowd would roar. This doesn’t happen anymore.”

“Wait-until-next-week harness racing is a bunch of 2-5 shots winning race after race.”

“Everyone gives holes to their buddies. It makes the racing boring.”

“These races all look predetermined.”

Well, I’m here to report we’re not the only game in town with these problems.

Chess can be traced back close to 1,500 years, with the modern version of the game being played since about the year 1700. Since that time, the players have gotten better and better, where the current World Chess Championship isn’t much more than memorized sequences, resulting in “boring slogs, rather than duels of offensive wits.”

Increasingly, fans have been turned off the sport, and interestingly enough so have the players.

This week the world chess championship in Singapore, despite its $2.5 million top prize, won’t have the five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen participating. At a separate event, he’ll be playing the number two player in the world in a brand-new chess format.

Fischer Random Chess is a speed-game that involves a unique puzzle that can’t be gamed-out easily. The uncertainty has changed the game and it’s enthralled both players and spectators.

“[Chess] should be more free flowing,” said Carlsen. “People find it [Fischer Random Chess] fascinating that top players are almost as clueless as they are at home.”

At Chess.com, 13 of the top 20 matches watched online are Fischer Random or a facsimile. If you pop on YouTube, you’ll see young players plying their trade on these new forms of chess as well, some to millions of viewers.

When eyeballs are attached to something we all know the money tends to follow. This new format just attracted $12 million in venture capital for a new circuit called the Freestyle Chess Tour.

The greatest chess player of all time (along with fans and other grandmasters) was bored with the game of chess. So, they changed it.

Harness racing is not as much a game as it is a business. If Dexter Dunn and Yannick Gingras are bored with driving horses a certain way, they aren’t going to change the framework. When Diamond Creek or Ron Burke invests millions in buying and selling yearlings while making thousands in stakes payments each year, they aren’t going to inject randomness into the North America Cup just to make it cooler.

However, when we hear a suggestion to eliminate the giving of holes to make the racing more interesting; when we listen to an idea to handicap strong favorites with the second tier or a staggered start; when a salvo is thrown out to pay part of an overnight purse to the leader at the half; when cries are heard to blow up condition books; or a change in a rule where drivers have to declare intent is offered — the list can be sometimes endless — I think it’s important to know there’s a method to the madness.

No matter how silly or undoable some suggestions are, they are desperately trying to address real problems in the sport.

Stakes races that are snooze fests, overnight races with a string of 1-5 shots resulting in $12 payouts in a Pick 4, opening a program and fighting traffic for (if we’re lucky) one or two betable races a night to the harness racing posse are traditional chess.

And the sad reality is: In 2024, traditional chess doesn’t seem to work anymore.