A new card room has opened near The Villages retirement community - Oxford Downs.

Under Florida's gaming laws, a card room can only operate if it is attached to an operating race track. To fulfill this obligation, Oxford Downs built a small racetrack behind the card room building, and has been running races throughout the month of June. I went there Wednesday to check it out.

The card room itself is pretty nice. It has about 25 tables, and the reviews have been pretty positive. I'm not a card player, so I'll take their word for it.

The chips have the usual assortment of denominations - $1, $2, $5 and up. They would only sell me one $2 chip, but the rest were readily available.

Now for the fun part - the horse racing. A racing performance consists of 8 races, utilizing 8 quarter horses. I didn't recognize any of the jockeys or trainers. The horses probably came off some of the farms in the local area.

Each race is a 110 yard match race between two horses. Race one has horses 1 and 2, race two has horses 3 and 4, race three has horses 5 and 6, and race four has horses 7 and 8. The losing horses from races one and two come back in race five, the winners from races one and two come back in race six, the losing horses from races three and four come back in race seven, and the winners from races three and four come back in race eight. There is win betting only on each race.

There is a big tiki hut next to the track which has the lone betting window, and tables and chairs to sit and eat. You can see the betting teller standing and the computer monitor that serves as the tote board on the left side of the picture below. Food and drink from the card room inside is available from the server on duty.

You can see the track in the following picture. The stand has the judges and the photo finish equipment on the top level. The announcer is in the open area underneath. The little black pole on the track is the finish line.

The 110 yard races take about 5 seconds to run. There is about 5 or 10 minutes between races.

There were about 25 people there, betting about $50 total each race. The win payoffs ranged from $2.20 to 5.60 for the races I saw.

Overall, it was a fun experience to see how low Florida racing has sunk to. I made $1.60 betting, so it wasn't all bad.

p.s. I don't have any chips available for trade. The ones I obtained have already been spoken for.