With rolling doubles available at many tracks (or at the very least early and late doubles), there's a good way to get around being left in a position where you’re shaking your head at heavy late action.

Around 40-50% of the win pool money comes in between the time the horses are gathered in front of the gate and the time the bell rings. The shrewdest handicappers don’t want to tip their hand, so they put their money down at the last possible moment, but they can’t hide their action in the Will Pays of course because those bets have to be in before the start of the prior race.

Nine out of ten times, a horse that’s 7/5 in the Will Pays but is hovering around 2-1 or 5-2 as they’re about to get into the gate will end up going off pretty close to that 7/5 number. And if you check the marginal odds associated with that last 30 or 40% of the win pool money, it looks even worse - you’ll see that the horse’s marginal odds are around 4-5.

I’ve seen horses go into the gate at 6/5 that were 3/5 in the Will Pays and watched them end up going off at 1-2, with their late marginal odds being around 1-5 (I think a horse named Might Be was a recent example, I remember saying to myself at the time, “this Might Be the greatest horse that ever lived.” – a Rudy first-off-the-claim if I recall).

None of this is to imply that there’s anything nefarious like rampant past-posting going on, although there’s always the possibility with such large pools of isolated win bets being posted after the gate opens. I’ve checked the marginal odds on the money associated with the very last flash of odds on heavily bet horses that either beat the gate (for bet downs) or stumble badly (for cancellations) and so far results are inconclusive.

Most of the time what appears to be past-posted late money is simply associated with the lag on cable and internet feeds. I’ve found the lag to be around 8s on the best internet feeds like TwinSpires, and up to 25s(!) on the worst feeds like NYRA HD, where you can listen to Serling still capping the race while they're going around the backstretch on TwinSpires. But I found last fall at the Spa that if I’m physically at the track looking at the infield tote board, the final odds are pretty much set when the bell rings.

If you’re a board watcher, there’s a not insignificant disadvantage to playing off-track due to the latency issue, but if you know the odds based on the Will Pays, you can get a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen in those last couple of flashes before the bell rings.

That fictional MTP countdown at GP on the other hand, is a total mystery. 0 MTP usually means something closer to 15 MTP. It’s a freakin’ joke – may as well just get rid of it altogether because it serves absolutely 0 purpose as it stands now.