Saturday Rainbow Pick 6

[sekrah]

Effin Brutal Card!! Get your dart board out, they aren\'t giving anything away tomorrow.

[Lost Cause]

throw in the monsoons and uncertainty of the course and you have a horror show tomorrow

[sekrah]

I seriously bought the card planning a four-figure attack on this mandatory payout. I might just take my ball and go home.

The only logical thing to do is play the verts.

[Mathcapper]

So the thing paid $89.5K, while the takeout-adjusted parlay came in at $52.9K.

Pretty lame for a mandatory payout day where the value is typically much higher due to all the untaxed carryover money in the pool, but for those that hit it, still a nice score for a $.20 wager.

[FrankD.]

Rocky,

The only one who hit it for $.20 was your Green Mountain date; after you she only gave out 6 digits for her phone number when asked!

[mjellish]

That was as tough a sequence as you will ever see.  Not one single favorite.

[miff]

Mott/Alvarado won 3 of the 6 legs.

[Topcat]

Take a shot at very, VERY few of these, but swung at this one.   Had 4 of 6, singled the wrong chalk in the stakes, and reluctantly tossed the bomb because of the jock, despite the eminently-respectable number that one hung up, last time out.  Coulda hit it for <$600, but c\'est la vie.

Thank Secretariat for the tenth race on the card, which made eminent sense, once one decided all the speed was likely to die.

[TGJB]

I guessed it at 65k, based on the number of live tickets, after they crossed the wire.

Put in a lot but had it, along with at least two others who post here. Obviously, the key was the maiden claimer won by the bug. Greg, who does the GP analysis, had 5 of 6 on a $68 play.

I needed it after the Dubai Debacle. I don\'t know if I\'ve ever won on that card. After I do the day we\'re going to take a look at the Japanese figures, may make them a little faster.

Interesting that after Kiaran\'s horses ran well in the preps there, none of them fired.

[mjellish]

I missed it.  Punched out 3 tickets, a main and two backups, about $900 worth, and didn\'t have the 3 horse with the bug boy on it in the 3rd race of the sequence on the same ticket with the winner in the last race of the sequence.  Was pretty upset that they never showed the will pays going into the last race.  They have that info and for whatever reason chose not to show it to the public.

[Mathcapper]

Congrats Jerry and to the others on the board that had it.

Once the official pool numbers came out, I was able to get a better handle on the value of payout, and it turns out it actually came in surprisingly close to expectations based on the takeout-adjusted win parlay.

The payout was $89,456 to the 147 winning tickets. The pool was $10,782,375, which along with the $4,503,332 carryover, produced a total pool of $15,285,707 (shattering the $10.8M record set on the triple carryover at Hollywood Park back in 2007).

This was a rare situation for horseplayers. In terms of takeout, things were flipped completely upside down. Horseplayers usually face a roughly -20% blended takeout at the track. On Pick 6 carryover days, it\'s usually less because of the carryover money, but it\'s generally still a negative expectation bet because the pools swell so much that more money is still taken out than is put in, not to mention the fact that there\'s an additional 25-30% rake imposed on the Pick 6 winners that is distributed as consolations to the other 99% of players who only managed 5 of 6 winners.

But on this day there was 0.2*$10,782,375 = $2,156,475 subtracted from the pool in the form of the 20% takeout and $4,503,332 added to the pool by the carryover, for a net addition of $2,346,857, with NO takeout for a jackpot pool and NO takeout for consolation tickets. This meant that horseplayers were dealing with an unprecedented +$2,346,857/$10,782,375 = +21.8% positive advantage.

The $.20 parlay on the bet was $21,629, in which there is an inherent -17% takeout in each leg. But since you only get hit with the takeout once in the Pick 6, and because in this particular case the effective \"takeout\" was actually a positive 21.8%, the expected payout was 1.218/(1-.17)^6 = 3.72 times the parlay, or $80,500.

On mandatory payout days, I\'ve seen it pay anywhere from a little less than twice the takeout-adjusted parlay to (more typically) up to 10 times the parlay, but at 4.1 times the parlay, this one came in almost right where expected.

[mjellish]

Rocky,

You are definitely the man when it comes to this stuff.  Without taking into account how many tickets were still alive as they announced going into the last race, I was thinking it would pay about $2,000,000 if this were a normal $2 pick 6 pool, given the difficulty of the sequence.  So I figured the 20 cent wager would pay about $200k.  So to me, I thought the final payoff was a bit light by about half.

I am curious if you have looked at any data regarding minimum wager amounts and how that affects payoffs.  For example, if the track offers a 10 cent superfecta, do these tend to pay less than they would have had the minimum been $1?

[FrankD.]

One thing no one has mentioned about the payoff?

In race 9 the 3rd leg the 1 horse Prime Time Tommy was the 8/5 favorite who was annihilated at the start by the 2 horse. He was knocked sideways and spotted the field several lengths. Amazingly he rallied for 2nd and was flying through the lane. If he wins the heat the sequence probably pays less than 10K as he was a probable single on many smaller tickets making it a losing or small ROI proposition for many heavy hitters.

[Mathcapper]

mjellish Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I am curious if you have looked at any data
> regarding minimum wager amounts and how that
> affects payoffs.  For example, if the track offers
> a 10 cent superfecta, do these tend to pay less
> than they would have had the minimum been $1?

mj -- not from what I\'ve seen.

I've never looked specifically at variations in payouts based on base bet size, but I have looked at actual vs. expected payouts for all exotics wager types, both vertical and horizontal, for which the base bet varies from $.10 (superfectas) to $2 (traditional pick6).

It's more difficult to isolate the effect of base bets on vertical payouts like the superfecta, because the calculation isn\'t as straightforward as it is for the horizontals, where you can just compute the takeout-adjusted win parlay.
 
Verticals are trickier because horses don't run second, third and fourth at the same rate that they win. The lower the finishing position, the more compressed the probability range becomes (ie. a longer-priced horse becomes more nearly as likely to run fourth as a shorter-priced horse). So you have to apply coefficients (using what's called a discounted Harville formula) to the equation that reflect this reality, which is at best an inexact science.

That, along with other inherent biases in superexotics in general, like the public's tendency to overbet favorites and underbet longshots, leads to fairly wide variations between actual and expected payouts for  individual superfecta results, making it difficult to isolate the effect of specific variables like base bet.

Having said that, after adjusting for the indicated biases and looking at the payouts for exactas vs. trifectas vs. superfectas, and Pk3s vs. Pk4s vs. Pk5s vs. Pk6s, with all their varying base bets, they all seem to converge on the expected payouts based on the win probabilities for each entry.

The one place payouts may be influenced by bet size is the Rainbow 6 and other jackpot-like bets. Since many players are trying to be the lone jackpot winner, there may be a tendency to spread deeper, resulting in favorites being underbet and longshots overbet, which may in part explain why the day-to-day payouts tend to offer so much value vis-à-vis the win parlays.

[Mathcapper]

FrankD. Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> One thing no one has mentioned about the payoff?
>
> In race 9 the 3rd leg the 1 horse Prime Time Tommy
> was the 8/5 favorite who was annihilated at the
> start by the 2 horse. He was knocked sideways and
> spotted the field several lengths. Amazingly he
> rallied for 2nd and was flying through the lane.
> If he wins the heat the sequence probably pays
> less than 10K as he was a probable single on many
> smaller tickets making it a losing or small ROI
> proposition for many heavy hitters.

Just for kicks, I ran the numbers based on the takeout-adjusted win parlay.

If Tommy gets up, the expected payout goes from $80.5K to $13.7K.