Remington Mystery Solved

[Dunbar]

Originally Posted by Rupert Pupkin

I finally solved the Remington mystery. If you add up the amount bet on each horse to win, you come up with a different total than what they show as the pool total. I have no idea why their pool total is wrong, but it definitely is wrong.
If you look at the final odds that each horse goes off and then do the math, it is clear that they are only taking 18%.

For example, the 1st race today at Woodbine was a seven horse field. Here are the odds that each horse went off at:

On Silent Wings 10.25
Geniver 3.80
Sunadir 12.10
Gold Quill 6.05
Elusive A.C. 4.65
Straightlittlelady 2.20
Lucky Jen 3.90

When you do the math, you can see that this adds up to an 18% take. The thing that is so confusing is that the pool numbers are wrong. When I called the track the other day to check the numbers, they assured me that the numbers were right, but they are not. In that 1st race today at Woodbine, youbet.com shows the total win pool as $23,839. It shows that the winner(Straightlittlelady) had $5,100 bet on her to win. If that were correct then Straightlittlelady would have gone off at 2.80-1 and not 2.20-1. If you add up the amount bet to win on each horse in the race, the total comes out to $19,779, not $23,839. I have no idea where they got $23,839.

Anyway, the bottom line is that these tracks are in fact taking 18%.

I don't consider the mystery solved. How do we know that the "error" is in the pool total. Maybe there is money in the pool that has not been allocated to any individual horse for some reason. I'm not asserting intentional fraud, I'm asserting incompetence. And incompetence can result in certain bettors unintentionally getting screwed.

Someone in authority at these tracks or at YouBet ought to be able to explain why the pool total is NOT the sum of the individual amounts.

--Dunbar