Wagering Securely
Bettors, don’t worry about past-posting or outdated tote system technology: Late odds changes, like those that had Any Given Saturday dropping from 2-1 to 9-5 and Xchanger rising from 29-1 to 32-1 as the Haskell field headed into the clubhouse turn, are your fault:
Without being so foolhardy as to say past-posting never could occur, the true culprit for large odds changes is an ever-larger proportion of the parimutuel pools being wagered within the final two or three minutes to the start of the race. Ironically, fear of late odds changes probably is expanding this practice by bettors, who can take advantage of various account-wagering vehicles or even shorter lines at the mutuel windows to “get down” late.
That’s TRA vice president Chris Scherf, in a letter to the editor written in response to a Steven Crist column about bettors’ wagering security concerns. Scherf assures us that TRPB is monitoring wagering patterns and on the lookout for anything nefarious. I don’t doubt that, and trust the system is secure. But that doesn’t make the late odds changes any more acceptable (especially when they’re bigger than $0.20 of a projected payoff) and the TRPB’s monitoring system doesn’t address issues of control or transparency, which are also vital to system integrity.
The industry has actually come up with a great system that would fix many of the problems associated with the current tote system. The Wagering Transmission Protocol (PDF), in development for nearly four years, would put host racetracks in control of validating and accepting wagers; allow off-track wagers to mingle directly into pools instead of waiting until the final cycle; assign unique identifiers to all wagers, allowing for instant and easy tracing; and generally make the system more secure and transparent. But implementation lags: WPT will be tested for 30 days at one racetrack sometime in 2007, then rolled out across the industry over the next couple of years. We just have to wait, and trust, until then.
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