Race Tracks Soft-Sell Their Most Lucrative Attraction

By the traditional standards of the racing business, this will be an ordinary day at Pimlico. There are no stakes races or notable horses on the 10-race card; there are no special promotions, no tote-bag giveaways.

Yet the atmosphere at Pimlico, and at the Laurel simulcast, will be crackling with excitement, because of a $228,814 jackpot that has amassed in the double-triple. A bettor who correctly picks the one-two-three finishers in both the third and fifth races could win more than $300,000.

There is nothing that will generate fan interest, publicity and wagering activity more than such an opportunity to win a spectacular sum of money. Laurel demonstrated this in memorable fashion in late 1988, when its double-triple carryover grew into seven digits.

“That was by far the most profitable week any track in Maryland has ever had,” said Jim Mango, the track’s vice president for operations.

And yet the racing industry has devoted almost no effort to developing and promoting exotic wagers. Some tracks’ managements (Santa Anita’s, for example) act as if there is something vaguely distasteful about the wagering part of their business. And most are utterly oblivious to the fact that exotic wagers are potentially their most important product.

Consider for example a couple of events at Gulfstream Park this winter. The track paid Bill Shoemaker to make a stop on his farewell tour, and promoted the event relentlessly in the local media. This great expenditure of effort and money may have added a paltry few thousand dollars to a normal Saturday handle at Gulfstream, yet this was the kind of traditional promotion that track marketing people love.

On the Sunday of the next week, Gulfstream’s pick six had built into six figures. If nobody hit it, track officials thought a carryover would boost their handle the next racing day by as much as $600,000. Yet on that crucial Sunday, the racing secretary foolishly carded a pair of small fields with overwhelming favorites as part of the pick six -- enabling several bettors to hit it and killing the carryover jackpot. (Elsewhere on the card, there were three open 12-horse fields that probably would have foiled bettors if they had been part of the pick six.)

If anyone in Gulfstream’s management had chosen to think even briefly about the pick six and its importance, the track would have had its carryover and its resultant bonanza the next day. But nobody did.

The reason is that racetrack-marketing departments are in the habit of promoting giveaways and special events like the Shoemaker tour, but they don’t market gambling. Few track managements have even tried intelligently to answer the basic question: What makes a good exotic wager?

Tom Aronson, a Washington-based consultant to racetracks, has analyzed the subject, and he said, “Bettors have a very keen ability to decide when they’re not being paid enough for predicting an improbable event. Some tracks tried offering a pick six without a carryover and people wouldn’t bet it; they said, ‘If I’m going to pick six winners, I’ve got to get back more than $3,000.’ But to attract racegoers to a bet, it has to be within their field of logic. If you ask them to pick six winners in a row, that’s plausible; if you ask them to pick nine in a row, it’s not.”

For this reason, California’s pick nine, Hialeah’s pick ten, and various tracks’ trifecta-superfecta combinations generally have not been popular. The pick six and the double-triple are the only exotics that have had widespread success. Fans think it is conceivable to hit them, and they like that there is a reasonable consolation payoff for a near-miss. But no significant new forms of exotic wagering have been introduced in years.

“State lotteries understand that every game has its limits and they have to keep introducing new things to keep people’s interest,” Aronson said. “But there is a limited understanding in horse racing of product development.”

Where can exotic wagering go from here? Aronson likes the idea of guaranteeing the minimum size of the betting pool to make it build faster. People don’t bet much in the double-triple when there is no carryover because there isn’t enough economic incentive. But if Laurel guaranteed a pot of $50,000, they would bet from the outset and the pot would grow faster.

Mango thinks a better variation on the current theme would be to change the size of the wagering unit. He said, “The common thing I hear is, ‘Make the double-triple a $1 bet.’ But you’d never build up a big carryover, and you’d allow the big syndicates to play three times as many combinations (thus giving them an even better chance of tying up all the logical combinations). I’d like to experiment with the size of the base wager. Suppose you guaranteed the double-triple for $250,000 and made the base wager $5 or $10?”

One dog track in Florida has devised a successful variation on the basic exotic-wagering theme with a $1 wager. The object in Hollywood Greyhound Track’s tri-super was to pick the first three finishers in one race and the first four finishers in the next. But when the carryover reached $100,000 it was “capped” -- no further money was added to the jackpot pool.

This might not seem to make sense from the track’s standpoint, but Hollywood had found that when a jackpot grew much higher, syndicates would make such large investments that they would almost always hit the bet. But these syndicates weren’t going to invest, say, $30,000 in the tri-super to win $100,000. The effect of the “cap” was to keep the tri-super jackpot alive, night after night.

The possibilities are endless, if only more racetrack managements would start thinking about them and engaging in “product development.” One day somebody is going to conceive of an exotic bet that will generate the excitement of Pimlico’s $228,814 double-triple carryover on an almost daily basis.