Okay, I broke down: I DID get into the $5 milion closing-day pick-six pool at Del Mar, though for a mere $81.60: I bought a 20 percent interest in a friend's $408 investment, and I have to say I got my money's worth.
Or maybe it just seemed that way because I got my $81.60 worth of action in one exciting 12-minute window instead of living through three hours of racing with an uhnhappy ending. I had plans for the evening that did not include being next to a TVG tv. So instead of following along race by race, I came home and watched the online replays of the six races in rapid succession.
My friend's ticket was a classic A-B-C play with either one or two B's, or one C, allowed to win. In the first leg, he used just one A and two B's, but one of the B's was Westerly Magic($28.20). Nice start. Leg 2 broke badly in that the $5.80 winner was only one of five B's in his deepest spread race, but with a B-B start we at least were alive, with all A's, 3x2x1x1. We got through the 3 at $7.60, and the 2 at $4.20, so now it was one cold late double for all the marbles.
If I had put four hours of handicapping and two hours of rooting into the thing by now, I might have been discouraged. But having invested all of about eight minutes, it was all pretty exhilirating. If Drill Down at 2-1 and Patch of Blue at 3-1 had won, we'd have probably gotten around a $20k payoff, roughly 50-1 on the $408 investment (and $4k for me, on my $81.60) on a legitimate 12-1 late double. Okay, so they both lost, but it was a good bet. And I lived and died it in about 12 minutes.
The closing-day pool was $5.063 million on top of the $992k carryover. Everyone tries to get out on closing day. Those who picked six got $55,964, with 5-of-6 consos paying $385.20.
