While some of our local counterparts have been full of praise for the new betting terminals sprouting up at Happy Valley and Sha Tin, we have just one question about the whiz-bang new-fangled ticket eaters. Who did the relevant study and came up with the plan to buy machines which are so delicate in their dining habits? Unlike the dinosaurs which have occupied the on-course self-service counters for quite some years, the new machines might look sexy but they fall down in an area that should have been an obvious requirement - batch feeding. Punters with multiple tickets have to feed them to the machines one by one. Perhaps it's a lesser requirement nowadays. Perhaps club research has found that punters only place single bets now. Or that, with punters having so many electronic avenues through which to place their wagers, it isn't important. We just would have thought that it was a fairly obvious consideration when purchasing an entirely new system.
