hallandale beach, fla.
A bettor playing Gulfstream Park’s races last month cashed a ticket that was almost unprecedented in U. S. parimutuel wagering. He collected $221,677 for a winning combination that cost 10 cents.
The wager, dubbed the Rainbow Six, represents an innovation sweeping the sport: the microbet. Whereas the $2 bet once was the industry’s standard, and most exotic wagers have been sold in $1 units, many tracks have begun to offer smaller bets. Customers at Gulfstream can play 10-cent superfectas, 50-cent Pick Fours and a 50-cent Pick Five as well as the 10-cent Rainbow Six.
This wagering concept was developed in Australia under the name Flexi-betting. An industry executive, Paul Cross, discussed the innovation at a U. S. horse-racing conference in 2006 and inspired a greyhound track to introduce wagers costing less than a dollar. Now most thoroughbred tracks offer microbets in some form.
The main rationale for microbets is to help smaller bettors play exotic wagers that typically require a multitude of combinations. Picking the first four finishers in a race is a formidable task; if a bettor wants to play a superfecta using all possible combinations of five contenders, a five-horse box with a $1 wagering unit would cost $120 and would exceed the budget of many players. The advent of the dime super means that a bettor can make the play for $12 and get in the game with the big boys.
Some people would say that this is not necessarily a good thing for less sophisticated bettors. Maury Wolff, gambler and economist, observed, “We’re pushing people into more complicated bets that are much more difficult to put together intelligently. It’s hard to screw up an exacta, but it’s easy to screw up a superfecta play.”
Though the microbets surely have some drawbacks, they offer one benefit that trumps any negative features. They shelter players from tax withholding by Internal Revenue Service. When a bettor wins $5,000 or more on an exotic wager paying odds of 300 to 1 or higher, the government extracts 25 percent of his payoff. (If a superfecta returns $5000, the player walks away from the window with $3750 and a tax form.)
For many players — those who don’t itemize their tax returns and thus can’t claim losses to offset their reported wins — this is money they will never see again. Taking so much cash out of circulation reduces players’ betting capital and thus hurts the economy of the entire parimutuel industry. Because the payoffs on 10-cent supers, 50-cent trifectas, etc. are much less likely to exceed the $5,000 threshold, players keep more money and continue betting with it.
Some forms of microbets are more attractive than others, and I believe the worst of them is Gulfstream’s Rainbow Six. Though it has proved popular since it was introduced here this winter, it is, in my view, a sucker bet.
In the Rainbow Six, bettors try to hit six winners as in a conventional $2 Pick Six, but the entire pool is paid out only when a single ticket has all six winners. If more than one perfect ticket is sold, the winners collect 60 percent of the money bet that day (less the track’s takeout) and the remaining 40 percent goes into a jackpot that carries over to the next day.
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