Canterbury to offer pick six with 10 percent takeout

Canterbury Park in Shakopee, Minn., will reduce its pick 6 takeout to 10 percent and abandon the bet’s jackpot-style format when the track opens for live racing on May 18, Canterbury announced on Thursday.

The pick 6 will share space on the wagering menu with a pick 5 that will also have a 10 percent takeout. Both wagers will have a $1 minimum and will pay out the full pools to players with tickets having all the winners of the sequences. If no tickets have all the winners in the sequence, 25 percent of the pool will be paid out in consolations and 75 percent of the pool will be carried over to the next day.

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Canterbury Park adopted a jackpot-style payout scheme for its pick 5 wager in 2017, and last year, the track offered a jackpot-style pick 6 with a 20-cent minimum. Under those systems, the full pools were only paid out if a single ticket had all of the winners in the sequences.

But Canterbury abandoned that scheme for the pick 5 last year while lowering the takeout to 10 percent, and its pick 5 pools jumped from an average of $8,366 per pool under the jackpot format to $79,500 without it. Conversely, the pick 6 jackpot pools “did not perform very well,” said the track’s media relation’s manager, Jeff Maday.

Still, Canterbury’s average per-race handle jumped 114 percent last year, in part because the track shifted its schedule to leverage its position in the simulcast marketplace during a year in which the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on racing schedules throughout the country.

“There is no doubt that the low takeout in the pick 5 was a factor in attracting new players to our racing product,” Brian Arrigoni, the track’s analyst, said in a release. “Those new players liked what they saw with our weeknight mix of turf and dirt races and solid field size and not only bet into that low-takeout pool but also found appealing wagering opportunities across other pools as well.”

On Thursday, the New York Racing Association said that it would also abandon its jackpot-style pick 6, returning to a traditional bet with a 15 percent takeout and a $1 minimum. Some horseplayers have been critical of the sport’s widespread embrace of the jackpot-style bets, which can tie up betting dollars for weeks on end and which are often targeted by highly efficient robotic computerized wagering programs.

With attendance limited last year to 750 patrons each night, Canterbury raced on a Monday through Thursday schedule. This year, it will race on a Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday schedule, a shift from its 2019 schedule of Thursday through Monday. Post times on Sundays will be 1 p.m. Central, while post times on weeknights will be 5 p.m.

Canterbury is planning for a 2,000-person limit on attendance this year, but Maday said that the track’s management “continues to work with government and health officials” on relaxing those restrictions in the future.

Prior to the pandemic, Canterbury would draw more than 10,000 people a night for its Thursday cards, a staggering total for a mid-tier racetrack on a weeknight.