The commingling train is well and truly out of the station and rolling now, with the Jockey Club hopeful of HK$30 million in commingled bets from the United States, Australia and New Zealand at Sunday's international prelude meeting.
Another big US name, Twin Spires, may join the list of commingling operators as early as Sunday but is expected to be participating by the end of the month and Singapore comes on line in December, most likely in time for the Longines International Jockeys' Championship night.
The club is hoping for a commingling hold of more than HK$50 million for international day - small beer by our local standards but it starts to add up, is growing all the time and a big boost is anticipated in the US when players have access to more exotic pools.
A launch date for New South Wales in Australia is up in the air while final regulatory approvals are secured, but there will be punters there hoping it doesn't happen.
According to the rumour mill, the betting on Hong Kong races in Australia has risen significantly in percentage terms since the advent of commingling, most likely due to the raised awareness resulting from active promotion by TABCorp.
The TAB has been advertising to punters in Victoria, where they are betting into the Hong Kong pools and receiving the same dividends, but one of the advertisements must be wearing thin with punters.
The ads are promising "more stable dividends" than punters might previously have experienced with much smaller, domestic pools, like the ones still in use on the TAB in New South Wales and TattsBet, the operator in Queensland and some other smaller states.
Some Victorian TAB punters on social media and elsewhere have questioned the stability claim, now that they have been introduced to the "price stomping" that occurs late in the piece here as illegal wagering operators bet back to manage their exposures.
That is not something that goes on much in Australian racing (where the influence of a legal bookmaker market helps to keep odds within reasonably tight parameters) and it probably comes as a surprise as the volume of the betting pools here encourages the notion that it is difficult to shift a price. What that notion ignores is that, the bigger the pools, the bigger the play and the players.
One "God of Lamp" event that brought howls from Australian punters was Star Track's win, when he was crunched in the last minutes from 4.0 to 2.65 and that was the fluctuation on the Victorian TAB divs, too.
Meanwhile, TattsBet and the NSW TAB, not yet commingling, each returned odds of better than 4.0 for the same horse.
What seems to be happening there too is a high proportion of favoured runners are reading out at better odds than Hong Kong on the non-commingled pools and it is the outsiders who are short, giving the impression that commingling has been bad for payouts.
Of course, it has been good for pool size, though. In terms of stable dividends, that Star Track race was holding more than A$4 million (HK$27.1 million) in the quinella place pool on the commingled TAB, but the NSW domestic pool for the same bet held A$944. Stability is a bit hard to get with such a tiny pool, and even if it shows big dividends, it won't if someone bets them.
It's all a brave new world with commingling, there are pluses and minuses.
And while we're on overseas betting, a big hello to the UK-based and Australian-based (is there really a difference these days?) bookmakers who put up early odds for the international meeting.
Anywhere up to 20 horses were listed at 10-1 or less in each race - including many which are not entered and won't be. Really, why bother?
Purton's ban peels back the delicious season subplots
What we love about getting deeper into the season is the layers that are peeled back, the seasons within the season.
It's only as the term starts to unfold that niggles appear, noses get put out of joint, relationships ebb and flow and issues bubble away just below the surface awaiting a trigger.
With the arrival of Mirco Demuro, Umberto Rispoli and Andrea Atzeni, one topic of conversation centres around the whole "manager" thing.
In a good, well-intentioned move a couple of years ago, the Jockey Club enlisted former employee Jeremy Greene, still an occasional commentator on its telecasts, to assist new jockeys with form and introductions to trainers. Hong Kong racing can be confusing to a new arrival, particularly riders who may also have language issues, and it was the right idea to give them some help.
Now there seems some resentment simmering over what stage a jockey has to reach before he has to fend for himself. Certainly, riders on their second or third stint should be fully capable of handling the task.
So that's one little niggle out there.
Obviously, Zac Purton's suspension on Saturday has been something of a talking point, too, among his rivals.
Some felt the goalposts had been moved when Purton was allowed yet another 150-ride "good behaviour" discount, his first ride back from a careless riding suspension which itself had been discounted.
We also seem to remember it being explained differently but there it is if one looks up the original press release announcing the penalty changes on September 30, 2013. A jockey gets the discount to two days instead of three provided he has a RATIO of more than 150 rides for every careless riding ban, with the ratios calculated from the first race of last season, September 8.
So, although Purton has been suspended four times since January this year, he had a big bank of prior clean riding to work against - and the bad news for his rivals is he'll get the discount for the next one as well.
As of now, Purton has ridden 766 times, in Hong Kong, since race one on September 8, 2013, and been suspended four times. Do the maths.
And the other talking point from the suspension? Why was there no suggestion of a protest on behalf of Kingston Jumbo over the interference caused by Purton and which led to his ban.
Careless riding bans and protests are not joined at the hip, they are frequently separate issues, and the margin was a neck but some are saying it seemed strange that nobody, not Douglas Whyte on the runner-up nor the stewards, took a closer look at it.
Ah, the season is just getting warmed up.
