FrankD. Wrote:
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> Rocky(mathcapper) has 2 formula's for DD odds, one
> is quick and easy, the other bit more complicated.
> I had a couple discussions with him about
> protecting sequences in motion. I don't do it
> often but yes especially at the Spa you almost
> always get 2 maiden races in the pick 5 sequence
> so the wise guy horse can easily be missed. TGJB
> will attest I'm sure to Rocky's incredible
> accuracy in nailing the odds that a horse will go
> off at, conservatively I'll give him 95%.
> Especially if you missed a live horse in the final
> leg or even one that's a bit disportionate to a
> legitimate ML!!!! Per Rocky " you are clinically
> insane if you don't protect anything with a pulse
> with win bets if you are alive for big money".

I wish I could take credit for that last statement, but I was actually paraphrasing a comment Steve Crist made over 20 years ago(!) during his brilliant “Pick Six Betting Strategies” presentation at the ’93 DRF Expo. He prefaced that statement by saying that in general, players hurt themselves though saving – what you end up doing is reducing your profit edge so heavily through those savers that you negate the power of your original bet.

But in a bet like the Pick 6 (or Pick 5), if you get into a situation where you’re alive to 3 of the 6 horses in the last leg and you know the thing is going to pay between $20K and $40K, and you’ve put in $1K, he said you’re crazy not to spend as much as $2K making win bets on the other 3 horses.

This brings up the other topic of his presentation – how to estimate Pick 6 payouts. If you’re in a situation like that, he said you better know whether those Pick 6’s are going to pay $4K or $40K. If they’re only going to pay $4K, and you’ve put $1K into it, you certainly don’t want to spend $2K on saver bets on the horses you didn’t like in the first place. But if it’s going to pay $40K, and you can dutch your bet so that for $2K you’ve got to get back $6K, whether in the long, long run that turns out to be profitable, in the short run, in terms of mental stability and cash flow, you really should make those bets.

With Pick 6 Will Pays now available after the penultimate leg, the ability to accurately estimate Pick 6 payouts is no longer as critical, but it still applies to situations when players have gotten home enough long priced horses before the penultimate leg that it may warrant hedging in both of the final two legs, either via win bets or through DD bets.

Steve said he played around with all kinds of ideas on how to estimate Pick 6 payouts (mostly centering around how deep one had to go in a race), none of which were remotely accurate, before going back to where he said he should have started - an estimate based on the equivalent win parlay.

It seems obvious in hindsight that payouts for multirace bets should simply be a reflection of the horses' win probabilities, but until he laid it out and showed how accurate the estimates were across an entire meet, no one really knew how to do it.

That presentation by the way, was also where Steve derisively coined the term “caveman” tickets and introduced the concept of the multiple ticket approach, which he likened to old Chinese restaurant menus. It wasn’t until many, many years later that he made this (ABC) approach available to the masses in the form of DRF’s TicketMaker.

To this day, that presentation is one of THE most influential talks on horse racing I’ve ever been privy to. It provided me with the foundation to create takeout-adjusted payout estimates for all exotic wagers, both horizontal and vertical, as well as the ability to estimate horses’ final odds based on the DD Will Pays. Without Steve's presentation to guide me in the right direction, I don’t know if I ever would have become “mathcapper” ;-)