GP P6 carryover

[philcski]

Originally Posted by Calzone Lord

What type of multi-win wager, even over just a 3-race sequence, doesn't pay well over the parlay?

Who, of sane mind, would ever make a parlay on six-straight races on a card?

Phil, of course one 52% bite is better than six separate bites of 16%.

However, neither option is even remotely attractive...EVER.

I get your point, there is a lot of people sending in foolish and excessive coverage ... that still is merely lipstick on a pig.

How do the 50-cent pick 5's perform versus the parlay? Obviously MUCH, MUCH, MUCH better ... and it's over one-less race.

Originally Posted by Calzone Lord

Very low standards.

And those are brutally difficult sequence of races they use.

The Pick 5's at Santa Anita, for instance, are the opening five races and offer a lot of smaller fields and sometimes non-competitive races.

Look at the last completed card at SA for instance, March 24th.

Race #1: 4 horse field, winner is 6/5
Race #2: 8 horse field, winner is 5/1
Race #3: 4 horse field, winner is 9/5
Race #4: 6 horse field, winner is 9/5
Race #5: 10 horse field, winner is 11/1

The pick 5 pays $6,331.80 for $2 ... or $1,582.95 for fifty cents.

Instead of five very shabby races... Gulfstream gives you mostly tough races with larger fields and invites people to stupidly spread.

Actually it isn't that low of a bar. I did the math here:
http://www.derbytrail.com/forums/sho...1&postcount=44

Comparison to parlay is simply a way to normalize the results and compare different horizontal wagers against the same bar. Obviously nobody actually does a 6 race parlay these days, no need to (although as recently as 2007 you actually could if you wanted to with a punch card at NYRA)

The average pick 3 only pays about 1.3X the parlay. In the data set I looked at, at Aqueduct (which obviously has robust pick 4 pools), the average pick 4 was 1.91X the parlay.

As for your question about SA Pick 5's, the one in you stated paid 2.2X the parlay ($716.86/.50)- a pretty normal amount for that wager. Over the past 15 racing days the average has been 2.3X the parlay, with a low of 1.06X (March 8th) and a high of 3.68X (March 22nd). Oddly enough, the second lowest payoff was actually the day they had the carryover- March 1st, where the payoff was only 1.4X the parlay.

My point is this- despite the seemingly criminal takeout for the average player, it actually stacks up favorably well to other horizontal wagers. Not to mention with the low entry point it gives said average player an actual chance of feeling the sweet success of a pick 6. So many people just automatically assume it's terrible by just looking at the takeout and bash away, which frustrates a math guy like me.