Back in the parimutuel Stone Age, most American tracks offered only one multiple-race wager: the daily double on the first two races. Late arrivals often sprinted from the parking lot to avoid being shut out.
Believe it or not, the New York Racing Association didn’t introduce the Pick 6 until 1985. Two years earlier, you couldn’t bet an exacta on the feature at Aqueduct, Belmont Park, or Saratoga. Four decades later, how the gambling universe has changed. Win, place, show bettors are fossils in an era in which many players ignore straight bets in favor of the Pick 3, Pick 4, Pick 5, and Pick 6.
Sometimes it’s hard enough to find one winner, let alone a bunch of them in a row. But when you hit three, four, five, or six consecutive races, the payoff is glorious. Playing that way can lead to many near misses and extended losing streaks, but one big score can make up for all the frustration.
For example, ponder the results of the all-dirt, all-stakes pick 5 May 3 at Churchill Downs, a 50-cent base wager ending with the Kentucky Derby (G1). The first four winners weren’t hard to have -- two favorites and two co-favorites returning $5.60, $6.84, $9.08, and $7.48. The only double-digit winner was Kentucky Derby hero Sovereignty, third choice behind favored Journalism and the wildly overbet Sandman. Sovereignty, one of the two top contenders, returned a generous $17.96.
If you used only the favorite and second choice in the first four races plus Journalism and Sovereignty, it would have cost only $16. Here’s the third-grade arithmetic: 50-cent base bet x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2. And how much would your puny $16 investment have returned? More than $6,500 -- $6,594.38 to be exact. Strange but true.
The payoff was inflated to the max because Derby Day brings out clueless newbies who squander silly money. That’s certain to occur again this week, when NYRA will provide endless multi-race action at Saratoga’s five-day Belmont Stakes Festival. If you like betting a little to try to win a lot, there’s relentless temptation from Wednesday through Sunday. Besides the standard schedule of exotic plays on the same card, there are three two-day pick 4s from Wednesday to Thursday, Thursday to Friday, and Friday to Saturday.
The most intriguing and potentially most lucrative challenges are a two-day All-Dirt Pick 6 with a 20-cent base bet and a two-day All-Turf Pick 5 (50 cents). The all-stakes dirt sequence begins Friday with the Bed o’ Roses (G2) and Ogden Phipps (G1) and picks up the next day with the True North (G3), Met Mile (G1), Woody Stephens (G1), and Belmont Stakes (G1). The turf extravaganza starts Friday with the New York (G1) and Just A Game (G1) and resumes Saturday with the Jaipur (G1), Pennine Ridge (G3), and Manhattan (G1).
If your Friday picks are right, you’ll sleep peacefully and dream of riches. When you wake up, you’ll be holding live tickets and humming “What a Wonderful World.”
Now, for some betting advice. I’ve hit a few four-digit payoffs on the Pick 3, 4, and 5 but have lost far more often than I’ve won. That’s to be expected, because there’s only one way to be right. Here are some of the many ways you can go wrong – by leaving out logical runners to save money, spreading too much in some races while not spreading enough in others, and the worst: picking a winner but putting the wrong number on the ticket. (Full disclosure: I’ve committed all those sins.)
So, take your shot at big bucks, but don’t bet more than you feel comfortable losing, because the odds are stacked against you. It’s so hard to figure out which horses to leave in and which ones to leave out. But if you can blend sharp handicapping with racing luck, you could have a golden moment.
