You have to fight. You have to offer in-store promotions. We need the best food and beverage, the best in-house promotions, to go along with gambling. We have a 90-foot TV wall. We have a Vegas-style sportsbook that’ s 8,000 square feet. What’ s going to get you off your butt on your couch at home? There are all these angles that you have to work constantly.
Horses Run in the Blood
Alyse Cohen, OTB and sportsbook owner whose family’ s horse finished 6th in 1976 Kentucky Derby, runs the only 100 percent woman-owned retail gambling site in Maryland
BY KATHY URBAN
Childhood memories are powerful. Consider how important Rosebud, the name of Charles
Kane’ s boyhood sled, was to understanding the fictional publishing magnate in the classic film Citizen Kane.
Childhood memories can shape our world view, our behavior, our choice of a career or who, when or if we marry. They provide a sense of self as well as a sense of who we don’ t want to be. As adults, memories can make us nostalgic for a time when we might have been carefree and joyful, with very few worries in the world.
That time of life is a building block to what we value as adults, and it can drive business people to try to re-create a sense of that time in their work.
For Alyse Cohen, head of the OTB, sportsbook and betting site Long Shot ' s, it was memories of the Wilcom’ s Inn, a historic roadhouse found at the end of a drag strip near Frederick, Maryland, that informed her childhood.
Growing up on a horse farm in rural Maryland meant riding to a hangout spot was more than just hopping on your bike or into someone’ s car to go have fun. You could saddle up and head down to the Wilcom’ s Inn and hitch your horse up right outside.
Cohen’ s memories of that sort of place, where everyone wanted to be on Friday and Saturday nights, started her on her current path. Her father Randy used to take her to another Frederick staple called the Cracked Claw, a seafood restaurant turned off-track betting parlor that was legendary in the area.
While she may not have ridden home tipsy atop her horse, the OTB was part of her childhood.
When the family that owned the Cracked Claw closed the business in 2011, the OTB license for Frederick County was available. Cohen, 36, who along with her family had a hotel and conference center in Frederick, felt an opportunity to come full circle with her childhood and decided to acquire the vacant OTB license. In July 2019, she opened Long Shot’ s, a restaurant and OTB. And then 2020 hit.
THE COVID PAUSE
When the Covid-19 pandemic shutdowns began in earnest in spring 2020, there wasn’ t a sector in the country, nor most of the world for that matter, that wasn’ t impacted. While hospitals were overrun with very sick patients and people practiced social distancing, sports and entertainment
You have to fight. You have to offer in-store promotions. We need the best food and beverage, the best in-house promotions, to go along with gambling. We have a 90-foot TV wall. We have a Vegas-style sportsbook that’ s 8,000 square feet. What’ s going to get you off your butt on your couch at home? There are all these angles that you have to work constantly.
— Alyse Cohen, Owner, Long Shot’ s OTB and sportsbook
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26 Global Gaming Business APRIL 2025