Good Caton Bredar Blog

[jnunan4759]

Very interesting topic on her blog. She brings up a good issue and how it is handled differently almost everywhere. We could go on and on about this, but it is an issue. Coupled entries are almost always overbet. People just see they get two horses for the price of one and naturally underlay it. NY has it's own way of dealing with it when a later scratch occurs, but in multi-race bets, not sure it gets all the animosity out when it happens. There has to be a good, uniform solution that can be applied across all jurisdictions.

I think these rules go back years and years when the game was different. There are serious PP's now, simulcasting, TV and internet. I think they were trying to defend against betting coups. Plus, wners and trainers also used to use "rabbits" back in the day, but you don't see them much anymore.

There are only certain people who couple entries. My old trainer, Bob Camac never coupled an entry. He told me "Why would I want to enter a horse in a race when I was sure one of them would lose ?" He said if it was 2 owners, one of them would be ticked off at him if the other part of the entry won. He also said that if the weaker part of the entry won, the owners would be ticked if the odds were reduced by the entrymate who lost. So he just never ran them. He said the racing secretary was always looking for horses to fill races and he would just tell him if he had two horses that needed the same class and that he didn't want to race them against each other.

I'm mostly in favor of stripping this out. The "information age" has eclipsed what these rules were made to prevent. All it serves for now is entry manipulation as you see a good deal of entrymates scratched. Not sure what it accomplishes, but Dave Jacobson uses it alot. Others never use it.