Not to dwell on Sunday's good fortune, but since several of you asked how the A-B-C play in the last post translated to 10 tickets and a $1,026 investment, perhaps my shorthand's been a little too short. Here's how it worked out -- you can scroll down to the previous post if you want to see the A-B-C breakdown for each race.
The A-B-C method requires that you get home one of the following three configurations:
--6 A's (ticket #1 above); or
--5 A's and 1 B or C (tickets #2-7); or
--4 A's and 2 B's (tickets #8-10.)
In the array above, I've boldfaced the "deviations" from the main ticket, and highlighted in yellow the winning tickets.
In practice, you can usually cut down on the number of tickets you put in by combining some of them. This play is not a particularly good example of that, but even here you could (and I did) combine tickets 1&2 by going "1,4,5,8" in the first leg, followed by the five A's, for a $216 ticket that combined the separate $54 ticket #1 and $162 ticket #2.
Consos still confuse people and I usually have to write out the tickets in this fashion to figure out how many I had -- 11 in this case, Here's how it works: On ticket #2, I got three consos, for the first five winners plus losing #'s 9,10 and 13 in the last leg; on ticket #7, I got one conso, for loser #1 in the first leg followed by five winners; and on the winning 6/6 #9 ticket, I got seven more consos, one for each losing horse on the ticket (#'s 5 and 8 in leg 1, #'s 1 and 2 in leg 2, #'s 3 and 7 in leg 5, and #5 in leg 6.)
Hope that clears things up. There's also, ahem, a book about all of this.
--That $21, 741 carryover from Saturday night in the Meadowlands pick-4 drew a robust $91,816 pool on the Monday afternoon card. (The previous Monday, the pool was only $35,200.) So even after 15 percent takeout of $13,722, they paid out $99,835 on Monday betting of $91,816.
I didn't play it particularly well, leaning too heavily on third-leg favorite Stevil, but managed to get 6-5 on my money when it paid $703.10 for each $1. Without the carryover money, it would have paid $550.
I had half an hour to kill when the sequence was over and the only thing NYRA Rewards was still taking at that point was Portland Meadows, so in a moment of pure degeneracy I downloaded the PM pp's and made my first-ever parimutuel wager on Oregon racing. There were some familiar names from my summer Emerald Downs pick-4 playing, but there were also horses coming out of races at tracks with three-letter abbreviations I'd never seen before -- Brn? Prv? Til?
I put together a little 2x4x6 caveman pick-3 play. Bingo -- but alas it came back only $33.90 for each $48 invested.
