The pick four on a winter Wednesday at Laurel Park normally handles about $10,000, so you can imagine track officials’ surprise on March 9 when the bet generated $203,194 in action.
The robust handle was such an anomaly that the mutuel department immediately began investigating its origin.
“We picked up on it early because we track handle race by race, and when we saw the pick four handle jump to $203,000 we said, ‘That can’t be right,” said Dave Scheing, director of cash and auditing operations for the Maryland Jockey Club. “We started looking into it right away.”
The trail led to the Lewiston Hub in Maine where officials there told Scheing that wagers made through Racing and Gaming Services were most likely done so in denominations larger than intended. Scheing did not know the exact structure of the errant bets, but one possible scenario is that a player attempting a $4 part wheel using 48 combinations may have instead bet a $4,000 part wheel.
Regardless, the beauty of the pari-mutuel system is that the bettor’s (or bettors’) loss was the winners’ gain, as the sequence connecting winners who paid $3.60 (4-to-5), $17 (7.5-to-1), $23.40 (10.7-to-1), and $15.60 (6.8-to-1) returned $37,717.90 on a dollar to four winners. A $1 win parlay on the same four winners would have returned $1,396.27.
“They made out on someone else’s expense, but it was quite a payday,” Scheing said.
Takeout on pick four wagers on Maryland racing is 25.75%, meaning that if the wager had handled $10,000, then four winners on a “normal” day would have received $1,856.25 each.
“We held the prices on the pick four until we could investigate it, but after looking through our calculations we saw what had happened in Lewiston,” Scheing said. “They were aware of what happened and told us to pay the bet.”
I would have liked to seen the looks on these people’s faces when a pick four they kicked off with a 4-to-5 shot ended up returning 35 large.
I feel sad for the bettor who made this costly "mistake". There should have been safeguards for something like this happening since he had huge sums in his wagering account.
ReplyDeleteAs bettors we've all made mistakes puching in the numbers. More than we'd care to admit. I'd love to know the precise way he structured his Pick Four though.
BTW: congrats to the new pop.
I don't get it. How does a $4,000 mistake bet become a pool of $203,000? Did someone really bet $203,000 by mistake? Do you honestly believe that? That person could be out of a home, and who in the hell in Maine has that kind of money in an account. I'm not buying, or I don't understand it.
ReplyDeleteAnon: The $4k part wheel was just an example of what may have happened to create the pool. I have no idea what the actual bet(s) were.
ReplyDeleteThe outlet in Maine ("the Lewiston hub") co-mingles wagers for (among others) RGS, which is a rebate shop that puts money in the pools (as opposed to some other shops that "book" bets). So this wasn't a bettor in Maine; the bet just went through Maine.
The fact of the matter is that betting into a 25.75% takeout on a MD $1 P4 isn't something that anyone should or would be doing for any kind of meaningful money when there is a 15.0% takeout 50 cent P5 bet available on higher class racing (GP).
ReplyDeleteTime was MD had the lowest takeout P4 offered and they got plenty of my action. No mas.