Bettors Are Leery of Pick Six Payoffs

A Hollywood Park elevator door opened at the third floor Wednesday and trainer Mel Stute started to get on.

“Wait a second,” said Stute, one ear crooked as he got halfway through the door. “I gotta hear this payoff. It’s gonna be a good one.”

Stute heard Vic Stauffer, the track announcer, say that the third-race trifecta had paid $1,354.80. Fully inside the elevator now, Stute flaunted the winning ticket. “This could be the start of a very nice day,” he said.

Stute, 75, has been training horses for 55 years and betting on them even longer. An eon ago, he and three partners cashed a $240,000 pick six ticket at Agua Caliente in Tijuana. This was so far back that the bet was called the 5-10 (the fifth through the 10th races), and the U.S. tracks hadn’t even introduced the pick six yet.

“At Caliente,” Stute said, “you wrote out your own betting slip. It wasn’t always on the up-and-up. They found guys cheating on the pick six even then.”

What Stute was implying, before saddling a horse on opening day at Hollywood Park, was that the alleged rigging of the Breeders’ Cup pick six at Arlington Park last month was not breaking any new ground. There are the cynical horseplayers, some of whom could be found at Hollywood Park on Wednesday, who feel that pick six shenanigans may have been going on in the U.S. since the bet originated at Hollywood in 1983.

“You think and hope that what happened on Breeders’ Cup day was a one-time thing,” said Gary Young, a professional clocker who also bets horses for a living. “But you can’t help but think that these guys have pulled this before. I was born in the morning, but I wasn’t born yesterday morning. It’s mind-boggling, that all of the pick six bets aren’t fed into the [host track’s] system until after the first four races have been run. Then there’s a guy, sitting in the computer room that processes the bets in Delaware, who has the password that gets him into the system. That’s like giving the fox the keys to the henhouse.

“If guys like this haven’t already done this in California, they were surely on their way here. California, after all, is the capital of the pick six.”

As the last race in Wednesday’s pick six approached, it seemed a cinch that there wouldn’t be a winning ticket, which would trigger a carry-over of part of the pool for today’s players. The opening race in the pick six -- Stute’s boxcar trifecta race -- was won by a 41-1 longshot, and the next-to-last race, the Bien Bien Stakes, went to Music’s Storm at 24-1. But after the recent Breeders’ Cup experience, bettors are gunshy.

“Just watch,” somebody in the grandstand said sardonically after the fifth race in the pick six. “There’ll be one winning ticket. Bought by some guy back East at an off-track betting place that nobody’s ever heard of.”

As it turned out, no ticket was sold with all six winners, and one ticket with five winners was worth $35,522.80. The carry-over for today’s card is almost $83,000.

It’s that carry-over that might induce trainer Darrell Vienna to invest in the pick six.

“That’s the only time I play,” Vienna said. “One of my clients will call when there’s a carry-over and suggest that we get together and put in a ticket.”

A few years ago, Vienna was part of a pick six payoff that totaled about $270,000.

“We did it with a ticket that cost only $64,” Vienna said. “One of our winners was an $80 horse.”

At the Breeders’ Cup, there were pick six horses that paid $54, $28.40 and $89, but the six winning tickets, all put in by one bettor and worth more than $3 million counting consolation, five-out-of-six combinations, were guaranteed winners after only four races had been run. The tickets were altered at that juncture, and then the revised ticket included all of the horses in the final two races.

“These guys wouldn’t have been caught if they hadn’t punched in tickets that were so obvious,” said a Hollywood Park bettor who only wanted to be known as Bob. “They could have expanded their ticket and no one would have noticed. But they wanted the whole [betting] pool. It was your classic example of racetrack greed.”

Like Gary Young, Vienna thinks the three suspects had probably struck before.

“I have the feeling that these guys had done this so many times before that they figured they didn’t have to be careful,” Vienna said.