Caught this one?
We have what may be one of the biggest frauds pulled off in horse
racing going on right now. A few people have asked me to explain it, so
I’ll write it all up to make sure I don’t miss anything.
The brief upshot, for those too lazy to follow through on the links,
is that certain individuals appear to have gotten into the computer
system for tallying horse bets and written themselves some winning
tickets– specifically, the Pick Six at last Saturday’s Breeders’ Cup,
which would pay about three million dollars. How? First, some
background.
The Pick Six is like the Daily Double times three: you have to pick six
winning horses in consecutive races. A horseplayer can select more than
one horse per race, but adding contenders increases the amount of the
bet. For $2, a bettor can choose one horse in each race, for example,
but if a bettor chooses two contenders per race, the wager increases to
$128.
As you can imagine, this can get complicated (and expensive) quickly. I
know people who regularly bet over $5000 just in $2 combinations for
one day’s racing. But the payoff can be huge. Hundred thousand dollar
Pick Sixes are common, even hitting the Pick 5 (five out of six
winners) will net in the low five figures. On this day, a day with over
$4.5 million bet on the Pick Six, the numbers would be huge– and
because it’s an event day in racing, all the money would have to be
disbursed to winners that day. Normally, the handle for the day’s Pick
Six bets would be split, with 75% going to the winner(s) of the Pick
Six and 25% to the winner(s) of the Pick Five. If there is no winner of
the Pick Six that day, they would carry the pot over to the next day
until there was a winner of the Pick Six. But this day, if there’s no
Pick Six winner all the money would go to the multitude of Pick 5
winners.
Now, what apparently happened here is that some mook named Derrick
Davis had a winning ticket for the Pick Six– but it was an odd bet.
First, it was for $12 combinations. Second, the bet consisted of
singletons (only one horse picked) in the first four races, and then every horse
in the last two races. Third, it came in from a phone bet, and the
account for Davis had only been created two weeks earlier. Fourth, two
of the first four winners were long shots– 26-1 for Domedriver and
13-1 for Starine.
The final tally? 6 $2 Pick Six wins at $428,392 each ($2,570,352) plus
108 Pick Five wins at $4,606.20 ($497469.60) for a grand total of
$3,067,821.60. Nice return on $1152 of bets.
Except now it appears that the bets aren’t legit. It appears to have
been an exploit of really bad computer design. Once a Pick Six bet is
closed, a track or an OTB reports only how much was bet on the wager at
its facility. They are not required to report the actual numbers of the
horses used on a ticket until after four of the six races have been
run. In this state of limbo, someone who had the password to the data
system could alter the ticket after the results of the first four races
of the pick six were known.
Further investigation has discovered that Davis had a frat brother who
works at Autotote, which processes just that information, although not
anymore– he’s been fired.
And now, unfortunately, it seems that it’s happened before. At this
year’s Saratoga meet, an individual bettor held the only winning
tickets on the Aug. 4 Pick Six, which paid $421,998, and the Aug. 17
Pick Six, which paid $330,389.
Which could be BIG trouble. In the case of the Breeders Cup, the 78
other winners should be findable and they’ll receive a windfall of
$39,331 per ticket. But the people who should have won at Saratoga are
out of luck.
And, believe it or not, this is why we need to legalize Internet
gambling– because it’s going to be the only way to have some degree of
accountability in the system. If this can happen in a regulated case,
how bad is it out in the unregulated wilds? (And for that matter, why
would someone be so STUPID as to bet someplace where they can’t trust
the house? And what happens to horse racing if bettors cant trust the
track?)
UPDATE: Looking back, I didn’t explain the significance of the $12 bet
sufficiently. The amount was crucial in that it was an odd enough
number that doing a search on all the bets placed would allow that one
to be singled out, because we have to assume that there’s no
identifiers on the bet itself so that an inside guy could say, “Oh,
this is Derrick’s, I’ll change this one.” But a $12 bet with that type
of betting pattern– four singletons and then everything in the last
two races– would be unique. And perpetrators could explain away a $12
bet by saying they mistyped a number, as Davis has claimed.