As you know, I disagree on the Fla Derby, both because Beyer was given unfettered access to the records and because the incident was investigated at the time. In my humble opinion, that incident is similar to the April mdn race at Hol where the horse's odds dropped from 9/2 to 2-5 while the race was in progress as a result of a $118,000 last second bet that went through the Lewiston,Me hub. In both cases, large & stupid bets made by a person or persons who do not understand the basics of parimutuel wagering. If you have a system which updates the odds on a 30 or 45 second cycle(60 secs when the Fla Derby bet was made), and ten times as much is bet off track as on, & win pools which aren't as big as exotic pools, you are going to have early speed favs whose odds seem to drop while the race is in progress. As I've said before, no one seems to remember all the times when the odds dropped & the horse lost, and those that thought they had a 5-1 shot were happy to learn that the horse's odds increased to 7-1 while the race was in progress. I saw it & in some cases benefitted from it at FG & Kee during the yrs when it was happening more frequently, and was actively looking for the tracks where the so called Whale was playing. The 28% number was never verified, and as I have said many times, there have been any number of people who have shown impressive returns using mathematical and other formulas over short periods of time. Talk to me after 5 or 10 yrs. Where is the Dakota whiz today?


Whether I'm right about this does not really matter in the current atmosphere, where perception means every bit as much as reality, which explains why betting at CD tracks is now going to close one min before post. What I think we'll see is late drops in odds which everyone will know about before the gates open. In some cases( I'm going to go out on a limb here and say about 33% of cases) we'll see a horse, maybe even a horse that wires the field, win after the odds have dropped precipitiously in the last minute. In other cases such horses will lose. If I'm right, no doubt there will be many explanations of why this shows that certain of these races were fixed.

To show that I'm a fair minded guy, I copied the following paragraph from a much longer piece on some of the ironic aspects of what has happened:

"Ironic, isn't it, that the web site of the other tote company, Amtote, includes a description of what it was like in the roaring twenties, 'a decade of rampant corruption, unscrupulous gambling operations and quintessential greed.' It was one particularly galling incident which caused a young engineer to start a company which was supposed to restore integrity to racing. What upset Harry Straus so much was that he had made a large bet on a longshot in the last race at a Md track in 1927 at posted odds of 12-1. The horse won, but the payoff was a 'mere 4-1.' Sound familiar?"