What’s a Player to Do?

By Jude T. Feld

What actually happened:

Chalk City at Belmont – Four straight favorites and a 2/1 shot followed by a 19/1 beast dq’d into the victory. That made the payout $14,026 but if the 3/1 Our Top Cat had been left up, you could have hit the Pick Six and lost money on your ticket.

Hollywood was more of the same – 2/1, 4/1, 7/5 and then three straight 3/1 shots for a paltry $5,193.

Churchill’s card looked best on paper and it turned out that way. Two 5/2 non-favorites follwed by 18/1, 3/1, the even money favorite and and 8/5 in the last for $41,722 payoff. That’s not a life changer but it’s more than a year’s pay for millions of folks!

There are three Pick Six carryovers on Wednesday, in three of the biggest racing states in the Union. Here is the rundown:

$183,033 at Hollywood Park

$97, 352 at Churchill Downs

$72,599 at Belmont Park

Pick Six addicts will want to have action at all three tracks, but although the Pick Six can be hit on a modest investment, most of the time, you need to pony up at least $96 to $144 to have a better than decent chance of cashing. That translates to wagers of between $288 and $432 to play them all.

What’s a player to do?

1) Cut your tickets down. This usually spells disaster. “I didn’t want to play that big of a ticket,” the horseplayer laments. “Curvy Mistress was the last horse I took off the ticket and she won. I feel like an idiot.”

2) Go for the gold. Hollywood Park’s pool is the biggest, so concentrate there. Good idea if you are a regular Hollywood player, but if you bet on NYRA tracks all year long and bet the Pick Six at Hollywood just going for the life changer payoff – fuggettaboutit.

3) Play to your strengths. If you love turf races, Belmont has three on the card. If synthetic tracks are your thing, play Hollywood. Better on the dirt? Churchill has only one turf race in the Pick Six sequence.

4) Play the ticket you like best. This is really gambling at its peak. How often have you “loved” a card and gotten buried? Some of the best days at the track are when you are iffy on the races. That’s where the prices come in ‘cuz everybody else is iffy too.

5) Play the ticket with the best chance of a big score. This makes more sense. It is “value betting.” If three favorites look like locks in the Pick Six, surely somebody is going to hit the thing. If you have a solid longshot to single and a couple of fuzzy races that a mid-priced horse might win, that might be the ticket to treasure.

Carlo Campanella, a very savvy professional handicapper suggests the following:

“When I play the Pick Six when several tracks have carryovers, I often gravitate to the smaller pools, thinking the big players and the big tickets will be shooting for the major payouts. I’d rather be a big fish in a smaller pond.

The other thing I look for is value. Do I have a chance to be the only winner or maybe one of two or three winning tickets? Often on huge carryover days, there are several Pick Six winners at a Southern California track and the payout is way less than if you had the only winning ticket at Hawthorne or Churchill Downs who are offering smaller pools and less competition.

Just like any other racing day, solid handicapping and luck will be factors. I don’t need the action, so if I don’t have a positive expectation of winning a lot of money, I just wait for another day. The worst thing a horseplayer can do is blow his bankroll taking a shot and then be tapped out when a great opportunity comes along.”

Value, positive expectation and patience – hallmarks of a professional horseplayer.

Good luck on Wednesday.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 9:57 am and is filed under Featured Articles. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.