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Thursday, October 29, 2009

Betting on Jockeys

A couple of weeks ago, I proposed the introduction of a proposition bet; betting which driver wins the most races on a particular race card. Now news comes that the Breeders' Cup will be having a Head2Head Jockey bet over the two day thoroughbred championship. As a spokesman for the Breeders' Cup said:

We think it's important to be able to come up with these types of products to stay competitive. The marketplace is going to allow us to move more in this direction in the future.

As much as many of us love the challenge of picking individual horses as well as playing exotics, we need to recognize that there is a significant part of the gambling population that have no desire to handicap races to the extent many current horseplayers do. Proposition bets are the way to get these people involved in horse racing. We need to start offering these types of bets; once we get people interested in racing, then they may gravitate to the serious wagers most of us currently play.

4 comments:

Degenerate Blogger said...

How is this going to be popular? The horse to horse wager was a bet for amateurs that don't know how to handicap. If the J/J wager is over several races, it may improve the payouts, if not, more of the same. I doubt the H/H wager brought any new fans to the game? More details please PG.

That Blog Guy said...

The bet will cover the fourteen Cup races (seven on Friday, seven on Saturday) and is limited to sixteen betting interests. Specific jockeys will be numbers 1 to 15 with number 16 being all other jockeys. There is only a win pay off on this; the jockey that wins the most races out of the fourteen races wins. In the event of a tie, there would be a dead heat.

I think this bet will be of interest to gamblers who may not be fans of racing; the people who will bet football with the points and over/unders. It will also interest people who bet the individual races; just another way to play the races. More importantly, it will be attractive to those that have no clue or desire to know how to handicap the horses; slot players and those that show up to the track on the big days and play names and numbers; the very people harness racing needs to attract.

It should be interesting to see how the wager is received. If it is well received, I would like to see harness racing try it on days like the North American Cup, Hambletonian Day, Breeders Crown, Little Brown Jug, etc.

ITP said...

This bet has been done before at least a couple of times.

A couple of those national jockey challenges at the TX TB tracks had betting on which jockey would win.

I think at least one other jockey challenge if I recall had wagering on it.

The QH regional championships had wagering on which region would get the most points over the 9 or so races.

All of these were complete busts concerning wagering viability.

DB said...

So PG, if you don't get in before the first race on Friday, your a spectator?

I don't remember a separate pool for the Jockey Challenges, just regular betting pools. It doesn't surprise me that if they did, they were busts. Who wants to tie up a large amount of money over a two day period if the pool is small?

How many of the people new to the races are going to want to come back the next day?

I wish them well.

Thanks for the details PG.