Luck or Skill, Winning Tickets Are the Stuff of Dreams

BALTIMORE, May 21 -- Tim Dennis plays the horses four or five times a year and, like thousands of sometime fans, often picks his winners based on lucky numbers or catchy names. Bill Maurer heads to the track twice a month, counting on his handicapping acumen rather than blind luck.

The two men, strangers Saturday morning, became fast friends over a plastic cooler filled with cold beer at the 130th Preakness Stakes. For several hours they and their friends shared Budweisers, racing tips, playful insults and something else: a dream that, if lightning struck again, they might join the seven bettors who earlier this month claimed nearly $1 million each at the Kentucky Derby, where the long shots prospered and the exotic bets paid off as never before.

The Derby "just magnified, it just intensified my desire," explained Maurer, a 40-year-old software salesman from Haymarket.

"That's what everybody dreams of," agreed Dennis, a 40-year-old dispatcher from Jessup. "Just thinking about if I would have hit, what I'd do with the money. . . . I would have paid my house off, put my daughter through college. Something good."

It was the language of the lotto, and while some dedicated horse players would scoff at this notion of race-track-as-outdoor-lottery, the past two weeks have carried a distinctly post-jackpot tenor. When 50-1 shot Giacomo won the Derby as the second-biggest underdog in that race's 131-year history -- and when he was followed by 71-1 afterthought Closing Argument, whose second-place payoff was a Derby record -- a trigger of extraordinary numbers filled the sports pages.

Numbers such as $9,814, the winnings for a $2 "exacta" bet, in which players predict the top two finishers in the correct order, a Churchill Downs record. Or $133,134.80, the trifecta payoff and another Churchill Downs record.

Seven winning superfecta tickets were sold. Each of those $1 bets, in which the top four horses were named in the right order, earned a North American record payoff of better than $860,000, more than half the sum Giacomo's owners claimed for actually winning America's most famous race.

The superfecta winners were profiled in newspapers and magazines, invited to network morning shows and asked for their Preakness predictions, earning a level of celebrity nearly equal to that of the unknown and lightly regarded Giacomo. And while that horse may not have the pull-on-the-heartstrings appeal of past Derby winners Smarty Jones and Funny Cide, his shocking win had other ramifications.

"The big payoffs always pique interest," said Darren Rogers, the director of communications at Lone Star Park in suburban Dallas. "If you walk into a casino you see posters of the people who hit the big jackpots at the slot machines. As racetracks, we try to pique interest by showing the big payoffs in something like the superfecta."

Philadelphia Park officials, for example, put out banners and radio advertisements announcing the one superfecta and five trifecta tickets they had sold, according to Rose McElroy, a mutuels manager there.

Wags pointed out that, with 116,280 possible superfecta combinations in a 20-horse race like the Derby, a well-heeled speculator could have cornered the market on all possible combinations and still earned more than a half-million dollars.

The odds for a winning Powerball ticket, in comparison, are more than 1,000 times worse, at 1 in 120,526,770. And yet a similar appeal bubbles beneath the surface of each game.