142-Day Meet Opens With Larger Purses, Fields

A year ago, Los Alamitos had a horse shortage. The Orange County track opened its mixed-breed season with reduced cards, and bettors were faced with many small fields.

This time, there’s an overflow of horses. Los Alamitos, which opens a 142-night season tonight, had to build 160 temporary stalls to accommodate the more than 1,500 quarter horses, thoroughbreds and Arabian horses on the grounds.

“We wanted to avoid what happened last year,” General Manager Dick Feinberg said. “So for the first three weeks of the meet, there will be a $1,200-a-race purse increase for the quarter horses, and we’ve increased the purses of the other breeds as well. It looks like it’s working, and the difference is like night and day. It’s made us very bullish about the start of the meet.”

Instead of 10-race cards, Los Alamitos is opening with 12-race programs, and tonight eight of those races will have 10-horse fields. The feature is the $20,000 Kaweah Bar Handicap, which marks the return of trainer Blane Schvaneveldt’s 4-year-old, A Dash Of Beduino, winner of last year’s El Primero Del Ano Derby.

Los Alamitos’ Thursday-through-Sunday schedule runs through Dec. 22, when the $300,000 Champion of Champions race will be run. The Los Alamitos Million, with an estimated purse of $1.1 million, will be run Dec. 21. Post time for the first live race is 7:15 p.m., except for Sundays, when the first post is at 5:30.

Los Alamitos is the first California track to offer bettors nickel breakage, which rounds off payoffs to the lowest five-cent level for each $1 bet. Most tracks around the country have dime breakage. With nickel breakage, a $2 bet that pays $3.58 will be rounded to $3.50 instead of $3.40. Track officials estimate that bettors would have received about $400,000 more in payoffs if there had been nickel breakage last year.