Oh, okay, I see what you’re saying. Either I’ll finish down $1, or up $20. So it’s like getting 20-1 odds on the exact margin of victory.
I originally mentioned this just as an aside, but I enjoy the digressions on this board.
@Spoons, was my math on the place betting correct, or am I 0-for-2 in this thread?
Yes, I think you’re correct. A little clumsy in your description, but it seems that you’ve got it.
The key is the total amount of the place pool. No matter what happens, it’s going to be divided in half. The Place players on the winner will share in one half; the Place players on the second-place horse will share in the other half. A little math, and there’s your payouts.
I’m trying to keep things as simple as possible in this thread, and it is entirely possible to delve a lot deeper into how mutuel pools work, to the point where it becomes mind-numbingly complex. But if you’re interested, there are any number of resources on this, some better than others; but two I always recommend are Ainslie’s Complete Guide to Throughbred Racing, by Tom Ainslie; and Betting Thoroughbreds, by Steven Davidowitz; both of which contain more than you ever wanted to know about racing and the parimutuel system.
Another good resource, at least in regards to how the math works, is Scarne’s Complete Guide to Gambling, by John Scarne. He covers all kinds of gambling games, and racing only gets one chapter in the book, but he dissects how parimutuels work mathematically. The book is a little dated (my copy is from 1961), but the principles of parimutuels and the math haven’t changed. Bonus: Scarne also covers sports betting.
Hope this helps!
I guess you could look at it that way.
But if you’re going to bet on the margin of victory, then there’s another way offered by the Sportsbooks. I’m looking at DraftKings right now. You can bet on the margin of victory in increments of around 3 points. For instance, you can bet that the Celtics will win by 1-2 points, or 3-6 points, or 7-9 points, and so on. If you think the Celtics will win by 14 points, you would bet them to win by 14-16 points. The odds on that are +800, which means that if you bet that 11 bucks, you will win 88 bucks and have a total payout of 99 dollars.
Want me to place that bet for you?
Close - and, in fact, that’s how I used to think that it worked - but not quite.
First, the track takes a percentage off the top; each state has a different specified amount, but usually it’s somewhere around 15-20%. Let’s suppose in this case that it is 20%; that leaves $8000 in the place pool.
Now, there are two payoff pools - one for each horse in the top two. From the $8000, put the amounts bet on each horse into that horse’s pool. There would be $1000 in the A pool, and $2000 in the B bool, with $5000 remaining; it is this $5000 that is split evenly between the two, so there is $3500 divided among the tickets bet on A to place and $4500 divided among the tickets bet on B to place.
A $2 place bet on A pays $2 x 3500 / 1000 = $7, and a $2 place bet on B pays $2 x 4500 / 2000 = $4.50.
The reason the money bet on the horses is pulled out first is, if you just split the pool in half, there is a good chance that there won’t be enough money in a heavy favorite’s pool to cover the minimum payout, which is usually 5% (i.e. a $2 bet has to pay at least $2.10). When this happens, the track has to pay the difference out of its share; this is called a “minus pool.”
Spoons already described that percentage. It was sloppy of me to leave it out, but that wasn’t what I was trying to ask about.
Let me try to use that same math, in the case that B and C finish first and second. $2000 in the B pool, $3000 in the C pool, $3000 left over. That $3000 gets split so there’s $3500 in the B pool and $4500 in the C pool. A $2 place bet on B pays $2 x 3500 / 2000 = $3.50, and a $2 place bet on C pays $2 x 4500 / 3000 = $3.00.
I hope I have that right. The payout for B bettors is different in the two scenarios; $4.50 or $3.50. That seems very strange to me, and it sounds like you can’t really calculate the odds on a place bet before the race, because the payout depend on which other horse finishes in the top two. If I’m a place bettor, I want my horse to finish in the top two (duh), but I want the other place horse to be a longshot so there will be more money in my portion of the prize pool, and my payout will be higher.
If that’s really the way the math shakes out, that’s fine. It’s a valid mathematical algorithm. Just seems a little odd.
Sportsbooks may offer a direct bet on the point spread like you desribe, but that wasn’t what inspired my question.
What I was describing with the moving point spread isn’t something that can be planned on. If I place a bet on one team, I don’t know if the spread will go up, down, or stay the same. If it moves by more than a point in the right direction, I was just wondering if that created an opportunity to hedge the original bet, and maybe come out ahead.
That’s an interesting question. In the NFL, it seems that there are a couple of games each week where this happens. Might be fun to track these games.
Your numbers are correct, and you are also correct in that you cannot determine what a place (or show, for that matter) bet will pay in advance, unless the track displays them on a screen. I have seen some do it, similar to how they show projected exacta payouts: something like “$2 Place on #1 pays” followed by a list of the other horses and what the corresponding payouts would be. Needless to say, that would be much harder to do with show bets as, even in an 8-horse field, for each horse, there are 28 possible pairs of horses who also finished in the top three.
That surprises me a bit. Spoons described all the information that’s available to handicappers; bloodlines, past performances, and all the rest. It seems strange that they’d accept such uncertainty in what odds they’re getting on a wager.
Well, all displayed odds are necessarily approximate, as I said. Even though the tote displays 8 to 1, the true odds might well be 8.345 to 1. It’s a limitation of the tote board: there just isn’t enough room for all those decimal places.
Similarly with exactor and double probables. Yes, an A-B exactor might pay $24.20 if they come home in that order, but there’s not enough room to display that when the tote is showing probables. So the tote board just shows a whole dollar amount (e.g. $24) that’s close enough.
It’s the nature of the parimutuel system that things change, and they can change quickly. Look at the tote after the post parade and watch how much the numbers change, because that when most of the money goes on, and the odds are going to change. Heck, just last weekend, I liked a D-A exactor that had a probable payout of $50 at five minutes to post, and a probable payout of $30 at three minutes to post, and when D-A came home (which they did), I won all of $9.10.
Point is, that nobody has any certainty at the track. The only ones who can come anywhere near knowing close to what they will get if they win, are the win and exactor players, whose odds and probables, respectively, are displayed, although approximate. There is nothing similar for the Place, Show, Triactor, and Superfecta players; and for Pentafecta and Quinella players, if the track offers those wagers.
So why do people play them if there are no odds or probables displayed? Well, for Place and Show, they’re fairly safe bets, and if you’re new to racing, they are easy to understand. You don’t necessarily need to know the odds; all you need to know is if your horse finishes in the top two or three, depending on your bet, you win too. Likely not much, but you didn’t lose, because you’ll get your original wager along with your winnings.
Exotic players (triactors, etc.) aren’t too worried about odds, because if they win, it will often be a lot. Relatively speaking, of course, a ten-cent triactor wheel won’t pay a lot if it wins, but it will probably pay more than the $2.40 that the outlay cost. Not always, and I once laid out $6 on a box that netted me $4.60. But that’s the way it is.
I think that’s why we get so much information—past performances, bloodlines, win/loss records, money earned, etc.—because the best we can do is to make an educated guess that will minimize our chances of losing. You cannot do that on a crap table or on a roulette wheel. You know what you’re getting there. You don’t in racing, but you get a lot of information to make up for it, and you can come close.
Interesting. When did they start doing this? If I cash in a ticket I don’t want stupid pennies.
I could have swore I read something somewhere about there where penny bets were available at some tracks and people were utilizing them to make multiple bets to try and overcome the $600 tax limit. Wish I could find that article.
Every time I see this thread title, I read it as ‘Mystik Dan and John Ford Coley’.
I would guess just this year, or perhaps late last year, as I’ve never seen it before. Note that it’s not all tracks that do penny breakage; I don’t think Canadian tracks do (it would be pointless, as we don’t have pennies anymore), and from what I’ve seen, most American tracks break to the nickel. A few still break to the dime.
At any rate, it’s not impossible to minimize payouts to the penny. Winning tote tickets remain alive for a long time—at least a year, locally—so you don’t need to cash them immediately after a race. All you need do is hang onto those winning tickets over the course of the day, and cash them all at once at the end of the day. Or after a few weeks. All those $2.43 and $5.12 and $10.78 winnings will add up, and you should never get more than 4c in pennies when you do cash.
Hmmm. I wonder if Brian Hernandez, Mystik Dan’s jockey, would consider changing his name?
I can’t help but think of Lucky Dan, the horse that Lonnegan bets on at the end of The Sting.
I think of Lucky Dan in that movie too. And I loved the ambiguity in the phone tip: “Place it on Lucky Dan.”
Now, did he mean “Put it on Lucky Dan,” meaning, “Bet Lucky Dan to Win”; or did he mean “Bet Lucky Dan to Place”? It’s wonderfully ambiguous.
Beyond that, though, I really enjoy the scenes in the fake race book that Gondorff and Hooker set up. Pretty authentic, from what I understand; with chalkboards and writers constantly updating them. A mutuel teller taking bets. Nice chairs facing the chalkboards. An announcer reading the tape that comes off the wire machine. Not at all like today’s race books, with TVs all over the place and Autotote machines.
Which makes me think of Don.
Oh, deliberately ambiguous, I’m sure. They set up Lonnegan with two bets to win. When Kid Twist says “place it on Lucky Dan”, I’m sure he wants Lonnegan to assume that it’s another win bet, just like the first two.
When Twist shows up at the race book, Lonnegan tells him he put his money on Lucky Dan to win. Twist is aghast, explains the ‘misunderstanding’, and then Lonnegan runs to the cage to try to cancel his wager. Then the police (wink, wink) burst in and all hell breaks loose.
To some degree, it doesn’t add up. They’re taking a chance that Lonnegan will misunderstand “place it”. Lonnegan gives him the perfect opening to reveal the mistake. He would have lost the money to Gondorff fair and square (so to speak), and he’s hustled out of the joint before the race even ends. A lot of things could have gone wrong with that plan if Lonnegan hadn’t walked right into every trap that was set.
None of which really matters much, since it’s such a great film.
Does kinda make me wonder what happened after the film ended. What did Lonnegan and Snyder do, did they ever figure out they were conned, and how? I know there was a sequel, but I don’t remember if it answered any of those questions.
Sure. Win bet, win bet, why wouldn’t the next be a win bet too? Lonnegan misunderstood the phone call, and made an incorrect assumption. As you said, it was a beautifully set up trap, and Lonnegan walked right into it. That was the Sting.
At any rate, Lonnegan wouldn’t have been able to get his money back anyway. Once you leave the teller’s window, your ticket cannot be exchanged or refunded. You’re stuck with it. You should always give your ticket a look before stepping away, just to make sure it’s correct. Errors happen, and they can be rectified, but only as long as you’re at the teller’s window when they happen.
I can’t say for Snyder, but I’m sure that Lonnegan put it down to just the cost of doing business. He had his numbers racket (if you know how that works, you know that it can be very lucrative, even if run honestly), and he was good at cheating at cards. No doubt he had other rackets on the side that we didn’t hear about. He’d suffered a loss, and is naturally angry about it, but he understands how these things work, and he’d come back. His biggest worry would be the hit to his reputation.
Lonnerman. Linneman.
You might think so, but these are professional con-men who can play a mark like a fiddle, and in the (non-fiction) book this is based on, in the model scenario describing The Wire, not only do they get away with it, they subsequently cool the mark out (“When Charley… cools a mark out, he stays cooled out”) and make a second play:
“Some marks have been beaten four or five times on the same racket.”