While listening to Post Time With Mike & Mike recently, the conversation switched to creating a lottery bet which everyone could participate in and have a fair chance of hitting. The talk about a lottery bet stemmed from a discussion with Jason Settlemoir of The Meadowlands about the current Survivor wager, which has leveled off at a pool size of $18,000-$20,000.  The wager requires you to select at least one horse in the first 10 races on the card and pick a winner in each of the races. If at any point during the 10 races a person is the only one to have that winning horse, they collect the entire pool. The pool can also be paid out to multiple winners if no one has the winner of a race or if more than one person makes it through all 10 legs. The problem as I see it with the wager is the amount of money necessary to take a stab and the amount of time the money is in limbo during the night. If you commit $64 to $96, a reasonable amount to have an opportunity to hit, that money is tied up until race 10. That means anyone with a modest budget of $100 to $200 is priced out of taking a shot. The wager eliminates a big part of the potential pool of bettors. My “fix” for the wager would be to make it a Survivor 7 (I’d even consider a Survivor 6). The first key is that betting churn is increased because there will be more winners on most nights and the wager will pay off after just 6 or 7 races instead of 10. Secondly, the wager is now affordable for any player. A 3x3x3x3x2x2x1 ticket is just $64.80 for strong coverage. Find two “singles” in the sequence and you cut it in half to $32.40. Some will say that this will make the bet into a normal Pick 6 or Pick 7, but it differs in a couple of ways. 1) If you fail to select the winner in a race, you are out. In a pick 6, if you miss a race you can still get a consolation payout. So, there is a bit more strategy in the Survivor wager. 2) The wager pays out the entire pool every night with no carryover whereas a Pick 6 may only pay out 25% of the pool if nobody selects all six winners. Of course the likelihood that one person will take down the entire pool on any given night will be greatly reduced, but the upside is that more people will win, which should be the goal, because winners keep betting and losers go home. While switching to a Survivor 7 is something I think could drive more life into the Survivor 10 bet, the wager really has no lottery appeal, because the chances of playing one ticket and hitting are extremely remote and the payoff of $15,000 to $17,000 doesn’t quite equate to the millions you could get with $2 in the Mega Millions or Powerball. Perhaps more importantly if you want to appeal to a mass audience, you need a more random outcome that can’t easily be calculated by a sharp handicapper. In other words, every ball in the lottery games is random whereas the outcome of every horse race is far from random. My idea is a $5 Pick 4 wager where the winning combination for each race is determined by the total of the first three or four finishers. For example if the order of finish in the first leg is 4-7-2, the winning number for that leg is 13. Assuming a field size of 10 in each leg of the “Random 4”, the winning numbers for each race will range between 6 and 27. The number of potential combinations makes it foolish for anyone to attempt to use all of the possible winning numbers. There is enough handicapping involved that a sharp player could try to focus on a certain range but enough potential variance that one small mistake could destroy their chances. The “Random 4” only pays off if someone correctly selects all four winning numbers. If there are no winners it carries over to the next racing card. The idea here is to provide a wager where you don’t need to “know” anything about racing to play and is cheap enough that anyone that walks in the track would be willing to take a shot to potentially win a huge sum of money. I believe it could also appeal to all ADW players regardless of their favorite breed since no handicapping is necessary to win and the cost is cheap. I’ll admit that the number of races may need to be adjusted depending on how difficult the wager becomes to hit, but whether it is a Random 4 or Random 5 is irrelevant. As long as I’m throwing out ideas, I have another Pick 4 possibility. Each ticket costs $20 and you are only permitted to play one combination if you are using any trackable wagering account. If you are familiar with Daily Fantasy Sports, think of it as a “Single Entry” game. This would eliminate a “whale” from placing a hundred or thousand bets and limit them to one for every ADW account they use. The other interesting part of the wager is that if you show up at a track or Off Track Wagering location and don’t use a rewards card, you can play as many tickets as you want. The only stipulation is that multiple combinations can’t be played on one ticket, so you’ll have to work a bit to place a bunch of wagers. The wager will pay out to the people with the most winning numbers. I see two very appealing aspects of this wager. First, you are providing a true benefit to anyone that comes to the track. If you spend your money to pay for gas, tolls, food, etc. to show up, you deserve a perk. 2) By limiting the number of combinations that can be played, any person who walks in off the street could potentially pick four numbers and take down the entire pool. With 325 million people living in the United States and over 7 billion in the world, how hard could it be to find 5,000 people a night to put up $20 to create a $100,000 pool? Even if the takeout was 15%, wouldn’t you take a shot for $20 to win $85,000? Of course, someone could show up at The Meadowlands and play a 50 cent Pick 4 into a similar $100,000 pool and win, but since the number of outstanding combinations will be much greater, you’ll be getting substantially less money back. I don’t have a crystal ball to see whether any of the above ideas will work. I do know that you can’t create something successful if you don’t innovate.