Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvylxQmOxXM
This race is taking a lot of heat on social media. The winner, Admiral's Win, went off at 45-1 and wound up paying only $58.60.
I don't believe there is any chicanery going on behind the scenes. One merely must understand the modern parimutuel game and the way it is played.
The "whales" have formed syndicates that receive huge rebates. Many of them are simply playing to break even. Do the math. What's a five or ten percent rebate worth if you bet $200 million a year? Some of these groups bet a lot more than that.
Many of these groups are using "black box" software similar to what is used in trading stocks. The algorithms calculate which horses are overlays and the proper amounts to bet. These groups may also have the advantage of getting the last bet, although I do not believe there is any past-posting going on with regularity.
I'll give you some advice if you find this situation bothersome. The computer guys seem to shy away from the tartan surfaces. Thus, the regular player has a better shot at Woodbine and Turfway. I don't include Arlington because the fields are usually so short.
I have read a lot of criticism about Gulfstream, from their chronically late post-times to the past-posting fudging, not to mention the jockey taking a dive when he was riding the pick 5 pool winner at more than $500K, which you brought up a while back, JORR. It's a shame, because you don't find the higher stakes races at other tracks, where there is consistency with the horses, other than mainly Aqueduct and San Anita in the off-season. But there is no question in my mind from the data I've seen in my own modeling, and I'm one of these "black box" guys, that the track frustrates the betters through manipulation of odds through the pool portion of its take-out. In each race, there are usually just one or two horses that have a positive expected ROI (see my site for a greater explanation). The track does care whether you win or lose; it wants you to lose all the time, which is why the favorites typically have negative expected ROIs. Even if you win with the favorite once, if you play the same horse with the same negative ROI odds over and over again, you will eventually lose money. It also means that they don't have to pay as much with the exotics pools, if the favorites are winning more in those bets than the long-shots.
If there is a "sacred cow" track in the country, which is not given to shenanigans, I would like to know what it is.