Saving the marriage in Jackpot bets

“The effective takeout on Jackpot bets is criminal, and telegraphs a disrespect for the harness racing bettor that is unfathomable,” says harness racing fan Benjamin Medich.

CRIMINAL. DISRESPECT. UNFATHOMABLE.

Wow…

It’s a rare occasion in which I open an article with a quote.  This response was to a social media post where I asked racing fans in several different groups for their input on Jackpot Bets.  Rainbow Bets.  Unique Winning Ticket Bets.  You know, the bets where you have to hold the ONLY winning ticket in the entire wagering universe to win the advertised “carryover,” or, “jackpot.” It is such a powerful and emotional statement, I didn’t want it to get lost in a sea of words.

Powerful. Emotional. Heartfelt. Invested.  That’s the definition of a horseplayer. Have you ever visited The Meadowlands, or Freehold Raceway, or Yonkers on a Saturday in February?

It’s cold outside, its wet, the wind has the hood of your coat blowing sideways and smacking you in the face as you make your way from the parking lot into the warm refuge of the racetrack lobby. You brush your hair away from your eyes and get yourself composed. You wade into the sea of mostly middle-aged patrons screaming at television sets as if their life depended on it, you’re more than ready to join the party. This is what it feels like to be alive.

There’s only one other place, one other time, one other situation that ever provided me this type of passion, and that was in my marriages. In my relationships. Watching two horses battle down the stretch, head-to-head, nose-to-nose, is as hot as kissing my young bride on the Asbury Park shoreline at dusk, feeling the cool waters of the Atlantic cascade over our feet.

The relationships between man and woman, or man and man, or woman and woman, or someone who identifies as a light post and someone who identifies as a flower pot (this is 2023, to each their own) are the same as the ties that bind racetracks and their customers.  In each case the two partners expect, and deserve, honesty, respect and fairness, at the minimum.

When I first pitched this story to my editor I envisioned it to be a finger waving, harsh, admonishing rant about why Jackpot bets are no good.  About why they are a borderline fraud.  About why they are, like Mr. Medich said, “Criminal.”

The more I thought about his statement, the more my two ex-wives invaded my brain.  I thought about the middle of the night fights standing on opposite ends of a dimly lit kitchen table, complete with all that finger waving, and all that harsh admonishment.  Arguments which accomplished just about nothing except hurt feelings, crying, and a whole lot of resentment.

Then I turned to the good things from my marriages, and all that my wives and I were able to accomplish.  Beautiful children, successful businesses, and travels around the world, to name a few.  These were the outcome of discussion and focusing on the positive, not taking advantage of each other and putting one another down.

Woodbine/Mohawk has presented a fabulous on track product recently. Canadian Trotting Classic, She’s A Great Lady, Elegantimage, Mohawk Million and Metro Pace stakes races saw approximately four million dollars in purses awarded.  Did you catch the International Trot at Yonkers?  Italy’s Vivid Wise As captured the prestigious event in gate-to-wire fashion. Freehold recently held the $100,000 Garden State trots. Super horse Confederate continues to dazzle.  And, The Little Brown Jug was quite a spectacular “Show.”

There is so much positive to promote in harness racing right now, it basically sells itself. With this being said, why are some tracks focusing on jamming this ultra-seedy, very misleading, sometimes-coming- dangerously-close-to-being-a-complete-and-total-fraud bet down the throats of their customers?  Of their spouses, per se?  Of their beautiful brides?

Like all great love stories, this needs to be told from the beginning.

Jackpot bets, what are they?  There are different types of Jackpot Bets being offered at North American Racetracks right now – Pick 5’s, Pick 6’s, Jackpot Hi-5’s to name a few. For the purposes of this article I’ll focus on Woodbine/Mohawk’s Jackpot Hi-5 which recently had an advertised carryover, ummm, excuse me, jackpot, of over $500,000.  Woodbine Entertainment Group (WEG), Woodbine/Mohawk’s parent company defines the bet on their website as such,

“A Jackpot Hi-5 Bet is a betting transaction in which a purchaser of a ticket undertakes to select the exact order of finish of the first five runners in the specified Jackpot Hi-5 race. (The) jackpot portion of the pool will only be paid out. If there is a single winning ticket. If there are multiple winning tickets that have correctly chosen the first 5 runners of the race, they will (split) 50% of the pool for that day. The other 50% will go over into the jackpot carryover.”

Let’s point out the obvious concerns – Jackpot only gets paid out if there is a single winning ticket and if there are multiple winning tickets, they split 50% of that day’s pool. Oh boy…

The Jackpot Hi-5 itself has a very fair take out of 15% and is offered in a .20 cent increment, which in the industry is known as a “micro bet.”  The takeout is the fee that the track takes for organizing the bets and putting on the races.  The problem I see is not in the traditional takeout that goes to the track, it’s in the other 50% takeout which gets added to the carryover if there is more than one winning ticket.  A .20 bet increment, which WEG clearly states on their website “(puts) more combos in the pool,” their words not mine, makes it virtually impossible, yet still mathematically possible, to hit.  In other words you have the same chance of hitting this jackpot as the Toronto Maple Leafs do of winning the Stanley Cup – almost none.

I did some crude, elementary math – 15% takeout and 50% carryover take equals 65% total takeout and asked the Canadian Pari-Mutuel Agency (CPMA) the following question,

“This withholding basically creates a 65% takeout to the daily player, do you think that is fair to your customer?”

They got indignant, “This is not correct. On days when the pool is not won with a unique winning bet, 42.5% of the pool is distributed (ie, (100%-15%)/2 = 42.5%). The ‘take-out’ for the day (again, as defined by the reporter) is therefore 100-42.5=57.5%; not “65%”.

Huh? My head hurt after reading that. I felt like Sheldon Cooper was responding.

Congratulations to the CPMA on your advanced mathematical skills, but you failed to answer the other part of the question –“DO YOU THINK THIS IS FAIR TO THE CUSTOMER?,” referring to the exorbitant takeout.

Crickets. Nothing from them.

When the agency which oversees the fairness, the legality, the relationship between racetrack and customer won’t answer the question of whether or not the bet is fair, well, draw your own conclusion.

I asked the same exact question to WEG and received a fast and courteous response from Mark McKelvie, Woodbine Entertainment, Senior Manager, Communications.

“The Jackpot Hi-5 wager was introduced to our Woodbine wagering menu in October of 2013 and has been offered since on both our Standardbred and Thoroughbred product. The wager is regulated and approved by the CPMA. All the regulations are printed in our daily racing program and posted to our website.”

Still, the question remains unanswered from the people offering it and the people approving it – IS THE BET FAIR? Well, no answer sometimes is the strongest. But, congratulations Mark, if the racing gig ever falls through you have a certain future as a used car salesman.  If I ever went to buy a 1980 Lincoln Continental and asked the salesman how it ran and he in turn referred me to the owner’s manual, I’d run.  Far and fast, just like I do from this bet.

So, if it takes a miracle to actually hit this jackpot, how it does it more commonly get paid out?  That’s where the Mandatory Pay-out comes into play, as was the case Saturday night, September 16th at Woodbine/Mohawk.  The mandatory pay-out occurs when the track decides they’ve teased you enough with six figure pay-outs that you are not going to hit (although, again, mathematically possible) and, more importantly, they don’t want to risk getting too close to the point where every possible combination may be covered by multiple bettors, making the bet an actual fraud, and illegal.

I asked both WEG and the CPMA how a mandatory pay-out date is selected, and, not surprisingly, they did not respond.  I did find the answer though, from a fella named Martin Andersen, the CEO of a Danish company named JackpotBet.  Ironically named, Mr. Andersen’s company is not the company who created the bet in question, but rather a nice alternative to it which we’ll address in a minute.  Mr. Anderson told me, “It (is) the track who chooses when to do a mandatory pay-out.”

Prior to this latest mandatory pay-out the bet was last hit on July 7th for $41,801.60, according to WEG.  So for a little over 2 months they built a carryover pool by holding bettors money at an astronomical rate and advertised a huge pool set for the final race on September 16th.  A 12-horse field.  The only 12-horse field on the card. Insert eye roll here. We’ll address this another time.  The mandatory pay-out produced over $1.3 million in new money, plus the almost $600,000 carryover, creating a nearly $2 million gross pool.  This brought nearly $200,000 in revenue for WEG.

I listened to the shills on the in-house broadcast tell me all night how this is a chance to make a big score.  Only, that didn’t happen.  The bet paid just short of $2,300.  A far cry from the hundreds of thousands in jackpot money that they’ve been titillating us with for months.

So is the bet a fraud?  Is WEG using deceptive advertising practices?  Most importantly, IS THE BET FAIR?  You tell me.

Don’t fret WEG, you have other fine bets to offer your customers such as the Pick 5 which, according to your program, has a VERY FAIR takeout rate of 11.7% – one of the best in the industry.  It even came with a $100,000 pool guarantee, Saturday night.  Maybe advertise THAT instead of wasting our time and picking our pockets with carnival-like Jackpot Hi- 5. And, if that doesn’t work for you, give a call to your comrades just outside New York City at Yonkers Raceway to learn about a refreshing new, exciting, creative bet they recently offered their customers.

Yeah, I said it, Yonkers. Creative. Refreshing. New. Exciting.  All in the same sentence. I know, shocking. I give credit where credit is due. Yonkers Raceway recently created a buzz during International Trot week with an experimental bet called the Lucky Pick 5.  The wager is a non-jackpot pick 5 which has a $5 minimum bet and 20% take out.  It is a basically a traditional Pick 5, which calls for the bettor to pick winners in five consecutive races and does not hold back money for a jackpot pool, with a higher bet minimum which has handicappers relying on their skills rather than including horses because a micro bet allows their bankroll to do so.

I asked Alex Dadoyan, Director of Racing for MGM Resorts International, the parent Company of Yonkers Raceway, “Why did Yonkers choose to offer this bet as opposed to a Jackpot bet?”  “We never really considered offering a jackpot wager.  The problem always is the Yonkers races are too easy, too many favorites win,” he explained and continued, “A jackpot bet just takes money from everyone each day because it’s almost impossible to have a single ticket winner. The higher minimum (bet) brings difficulty to the sequence while still giving the chance to hit it.”

Good decision, Yonkers.  The first two days of this wager created a traditional carryover (meaning the bet wasn’t hit by ANYBODY, never mind multiple tickets, so it was added to the next days pool) of approximately $130,000 and had a mandatory pay-out day on the third day, the International Trot card, which added an additional $300,000 in wagers to the pool.  Read that, WEG? The mandatory was held after two days, not two months.  The winning combination paid almost $10,000 to multiple happy bettors.

So, Jackpot Bets, who exactly is seeing the pot of gold?  If you’ve come this far, I think it’s apparent, is it not?

Someone out there may be saying to themselves, “If you don’t like the bet, don’t play it.”  Don’t worry, I won’t. But, what about the guy who takes his wife to the track on a Saturday night date and sees the six figure jackpot advertised on the in house monitors? He sees the possibility of riches and makes a bet he understands little about.  Don’t we have the responsibility to protect our fellow citizen from deception?  As an industry, don’t we have a responsibility to ourselves to make a new customer? Jackpot Bets are not the answer.

In the States, the government seems to want to protect the bettor.  That’s what they told us anyway when they decided we couldn’t play internet poker in our homes, several years ago. Taking their word at face value, call your local Congressman and bring attention to what WEG and other tracks are doing to their customers in regards to Jackpot Bets.  Your Congressman can’t outlaw it in Canada but he can prevent outlets in the U.S. from taking the wager.  Without American money, the bet goes bye-bye. And, if you think the bet is fair, continue playing it at a 57.5% takeout rate and let me know how that works out for you.

Let’s save this marriage, the marriage between racetrack and customer, and stay together for decades to come.  To do so, the husband must stop taking cash from his wife’s purse and telling her it’s for her own good when he gets caught.

Until then, here’s one from Mr. Springsteen, “Would they ever look so happy again, and handsome groom and his bride? As they step into that long, black limousine, for their mystery ride…”

by Jason Rogers, for Harnesslink