The friends I grew up with are gamblers.
From marbles and hockey cards to annual rotisserie baseball pools, they graduated to card games in their parent’s basements, to regular trips to the first charity casinos. Before long, most of them were tapping into online poker and sports, and some got into trading stocks and currencies.
Business and economics majors, the gamblers I know don’t play slot machines or roulette. They play games they can win, and have for years poured hundreds of millions of dollars into gambling – some of it the ‘respectable’ stock trading or venture capitalist kind, and some of it poker and sports.
For as long as I can remember I have urged my friends to come to the track with me, open up a betting account or put a few dollars on the North America Cup. For years, they have laughed at the proposition, pointing out the flaws in pari-mutuel betting, the small pools, high takeout, and the inability to make a profit.
But consistently there has always been one exception to my friends’ collective unwillingness to bet money at the races – when there was a carryover pool.
If I sent out an email right now to 15 friends, some of whom I haven’t spoken to in five years, that there was a $1 million carryover pool at Woodbine and I needed $250 from each of them to invest, I’d probably have $2,000 in betting money within an hour. And I’d likely have five of them asking me to take them to Woodbine to watch the races – something they haven’t done in years.
Sadly, that won’t happen, because earlier this year, Woodbine eliminated its Pick 7 wager because of a lack of interest and the inability to grow the pool. In fact, no Canadian harness track has a carryover jackpot pool anymore. It’s hard to believe that the one bet capable of generating hundreds of thousands of dollars bet has been phased out.
To Woodbine’s credit, they have rolled the dice a few times on the big carryover pool. They introduced a $10,000 guarantee which failed to capture the imagination of horseplayers. They even experimented on the thoroughbred side with a $150,000 guaranteed Pick 6 pool – an experiment that cost Woodbine dearly when the pool failed a few times to carryover.
As I see it, the problem can be summed up with one word – math. Even if every horse has the same probability of winning, a Pick 6 with nine horses per race has 531,441 possible combinations. Once you add in favourites, the odds decrease dramatically, making a Pick 6 a bet that will rarely create life-changing payouts.
So Woodbine, here is my suggestion. Change the last six races on your card to Jackpot races. Each event will be 1 3/8 miles, with 20 horses. Assuming the races are scratched down to 18 horses per race, that’s 34 million possible combinations in your Pick 6. Some bettors may reject these races but most will not. Single file racing will disappear, life changing payouts will be a regular occurrence and you will be a leader in creating a different product on the track. Everyone talks about the need for major change, yet actions speak louder than words.
As for getting horses, there are enough racehorses in Ontario to support this initiative. It may take adding hitching fees, changing classes or reallocating purse money from other tracks, but the obstacles are actually not significant. Surely with a wagering crisis facing all of racing, moving some of the horse population to the nation’s leading track won’t be an issue.
Can we win over the skill-based gamblers? I sure hope so because, I don’t like racing’s chances if we can’t.
Darryl Kaplan
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