New pick seven figures to challenge bettors

AUBURN, Wash. – Among the myriad betting opportunities offered by Emerald Downs, which opens its 2016 meeting Saturday, horseplayers surely will be attracted to the newest one: a pick seven with a minimum 20-cent wager and a relatively low takeout of 16.1 percent.

The pick seven will be offered on the final seven races each day. If there are no tickets with seven winners, 80 percent of the pool will carry over to the next card. The remaining 20 percent will go into a consolation pool and be paid to ticket holders with the most winners.

Joe Withee, the longtime director of publicity at Emerald Downs, lobbied his bosses to add the pick seven during the offseason. Withee reasoned that the wager might stir excitement on days with a big carryover, and given the logistics of picking seven successive winners, carryovers should be frequent.

The average field size at Emerald Downs in 2015 was roughly seven horses per race. A pick-seven sequence composed of seven seven-horse fields would lend itself to 823,543 possible winning combinations.

Withee was so persuasive that his fellow Emerald Downs employees have informally dubbed the pick seven “the Withee Wager.” All things considered, the pick seven compares favorably to the daily pick fours and pick five at Emerald Downs, both of which require a 50-cent minimum bet and have a more burdensome 22.1 percent takeout.

“When we race on Friday night, the pick seven will be the whole card,” Withee said. “We’ll have some carryovers, undoubtedly. It’s not going to be easy to win. I think it will be of interest and we’ll get people talking about it a little bit.”

The takeout of 16.1 percent is likely to be a key selling point, Withee said. In California, the closest comparable wager is a 50-cent pick five with a 14 percent takeout. Last Saturday at Santa Anita, bettors poured $522,208 into the pick five, covering the first five races on the card, and wagered $143,039 on the early pick four, which covered races 2-5 and had a 23.68 percent takeout.

“California has the Players’ Pick Five, with really good response – it grows all the time,” Withee said. “We found out that we didn’t have to go with the higher exotic takeout level in Washington state, that we could introduce a bet at the lowest takeout offered. So, that’s what we did. It will build up gradually. Like I said, it’s not going to be easy to pick seven winners.”