Meadowlands Pick-8 makes incidental case for higher minimum wagers

A week after a bettor correctly picked seven of the eight winners, there were two winning tickets that correctly selected all eight winning horses.

by Brett Sturman

Friday’s (Feb. 13) card at The Meadowlands marked just the second night of the $50,000 seeded Pick-8 (PK-8) wager, where there continues to be no shortage of opinions on the new bet.

The debate through the years has been what is the proper minimum bet amount for different wagers. The Meadowlands PK-8 has already proven in just two nights of racing that the current industry standard of ultra-low minimum wagers is not the way to go.

First things first, specific to the PK-8. Even at a $1 base wager over the eight-race horizontal, evidently it’s not as daunting as widely thought. A week ago, with just a small amount of $4,998 bet into the pool on its debut, one ticket had seven out of eight winners right off the bat. And that included winners in the sequence that paid $17, $13, $11, and $19. Seven out of eight with those winners and that small of a pool is nothing short of amazing.

When the PK-8 was hit this past Friday, in part due to an increasing amount of press, handle on the wager nearly tripled from the prior Friday, up to $14,603. That’s still a smaller sized pool compared to what the track’s Pick-4 handles. Two separate winning tickets hit all eight winners. It was a somewhat chalky sequence where four of the eight winners were favorites, three of which were odds-on and one of those was 1-5. But the sequence also kicked off with a 10-1 winner, ended with a 9-2 winner, and throughout the sequence two separate odds-on horses lost. Two winning tickets at a $1 base with less than $15,000 in the pool still seems highly impressive.

A week ago, when I spoke to Peter Kleinhans about the wager, he communicated the internal back and forth he had on whether to make the wager $1 or to make it $0.50. There was a thought in there about even reducing it to $0.50 if it became apparent that $1 was too difficult. The crazy irony in all of this is that maybe $1 was actually too easy.

But what it also has proven in this short time is that this race to the bottom to the lowest minimum wager hasn’t been necessary.

The case for low minimum wagers is that it of course allows for more combinations and presumably an increase to handle, though I don’t know if the increase to handle has ever been proven to be true. But one thing for certain is that the minimum wagers do dilute the winning payouts.

Using Friday’s PK-8 as an example, two winning tickets each received $26,543. If this were a $0.20 or even a $0.50 minimum the payouts would have been far lower. Instead of two winning tickets, maybe there would have been 20 or even more winning tickets.

Ultra-low minimum wagers for bets like a Pick-5 or Pick-6 and even extending as low as a Pick-3 simply aren’t necessary. At the Pick-3 or Pick-4 levels especially, you could easily have a $1 minimum and the sequences aren’t terribly difficult to hit with some level of regularity. But without at least that $1 minimum, there’s not nearly as much degree of difficulty or strategy – in an extreme but real example – with taking down a Pick-3 with a $0.20 minimum base. Anyone can do that, and the small payouts show it.

Look at this way: I sometimes see mention of things that are “inflation-adjusted.” I’ll arbitrarily pick the year 1964, Bret Hanover’s 2-year-old season. The minimum wager for win-place-show then was $2. We’re still at $2 today for the same wagers. But inflation adjusted, $2 in 1964 would be over $20 today. Based on that, you could easily make the argument that our minimums should be at least increased to something greater than $2. Looking at it from the other side, a $1 base wager today would equal 10 cents, and 10 cents today would be a literal penny wager if you were betting on Bret in 1964.

But racing has gone the opposite direction. Now, I understand that a Pick-4 wager didn’t exist then and it’s harder to hit than a win-place-show wager, but they did have other types of exotic wagers in the years that followed and those also were kept at minimums exponentially higher than to what they’d equate to today.

Racing needs the ability to produce large pools and large payouts. In last week’s column I described being in an age today of “slot jackpots and 15-leg sports parlays” and having the potential for continual five- and six-figure payouts is something to strive for – not a scattering of $1.80, $2.40 or $2.60 tickets constructing dime superfectas that may only pay out less than $10. There needs to be a bigger picture thinking.

One idea I’ve seen floated through the years that I fully endorse would be two separate pools for each wager. Let’s take a generic Pick-6. You could have a $0.20 option where those wagers go into one pool, and a $1 option where those wagers go into the other pool. That way, those wagering the $1 base don’t have their potential winnings diluted by the $0.20 wagers and everyone is on par relative to their pool.

For The Meadowlands, last night (Saturday) will have been back to square-one with another graciously seeded $50,000 in new money for the PK-8. No matter what happens with that wager as it moves forward, it will have done its part in quick time by proving that the lowest amount wagers aren’t necessarily the best