Monday's Super Spectacular Blog Vol 5 - Jackpots Dropping Like Flies, Crazy Cousin Ronnie, Sledge Hammers, ADW's Pay Plenty to Purses, Pod and Link Round-Up, Marcus the Greek Returns

Welcome to the Super Spectacular Blog Vol 5.  Thanks for reading and sharing this disorganized barrage of thoughts and links each week. 

Timeform CJ will be happy to know I've been busier than usual and didn't have enough time to jot down War and Peace quite as much this week. Taxes need to be done and (big news!) I'm in negotiations with CNN to take over Don Lemon's spot for a harness racing wagering show. I have not even gotten to a couple of your pods yet. Lucky I don't Derby handicap until two minutes to post. 

Anyhow, off we go!  

Let's start this off with the coolest thing I saw this week. Way to go and congrats Fernando.  

So the other day the ⁦@nmrhof⁩ gave ⁦@JayHovdey⁩ and I the honor of informing Fernando Toro that he had been voted into the Hall of Fame.
Jay H. told Toro he needed some photos autographed. On the photos it said Toro was in the class of 2023.
Sorry, it’s dusty in here pic.twitter.com/maKolCURrK

— Jay Privman (@jayprivman) April 25, 2023

This week's Bet with the Best pod guest was Jon Stettin. I'll get to the whole thing after I get done my taxes but the feedback so far looks good. Jonathan plays pick sixes, which I rarely play, so I am hoping to get a tip or two, or hopefully three! 

Fortunately I follow smart people on twitter that I can steal things from, and I thought Keith Bush synopsized this pod (and the others nicely). 

• "In my view the two salient themes emerging from Chris's long-form pods - bet with purpose and bet to kill."

I think that's right. I've said it before on this blog, but I think it'll hold: 

Remember your last score. Was it because you nibbled, backed it up with B horse chalk, lucked into it, added two horses you heard someone talk about on TVG? Or was it because you had an opinion, built tickets around that opinion that made sense, and fired?

This week's Going in Circles pod with Chuck and Barry (holy cow, I just realized this is almost Chuck Berry) is here. They were on go. 

Jason Beem had WaPo's Neil Greenberg on. Beem has had myriad guests over the years, and a lot are from non-traditional "racing".  Good get with Neil JB. 

Last up in pod-land, Aragona had Steve Kornacki on his pod. How cool is that? This - a numbers guy (or gal) - is horse racing handicapping, in my opinion. 

FanDuel is marketing the Derby alongside sports betting this year. It'll be interesting to see what kind of volume they do. In other news CDI introduced a rolling super high five. Just what my bankroll needs. 

Surcharges of (in this case 3.5%) for betting late might sound good on paper to "control" big bettors. But when a horse who has about a 22% chance to win a race and is 13-1, I believe he's probably going to end up 9-2 no matter what. 

I often wonder what Patch's final odds would be if he raced this year. CRW volume is making up a higher percentage of the win pool, but there are twenty Derby horses, and there's probably not enough money in half of Kentucky to recalibrate the odds board. 

You know what they say, never underestimate the power of a one-eyed horse.  

For this week's edition of Tilt, I go back many years. 

Back as a kid in the northern tundra I worked at a gold mine in the summers. One day I showed up for my shift and my boss told me to, "Go see Laurel and Hardy in the Dry (locker room). They have a job. They're our best guys and they can fix anything. You'll learn something." 

I show up and immediately see why everyone calls them Laurel and Hardy. Hardy is a short round guy who can barely speak a word of English, and Laurel is a tall thin guy who can not speak a word of French. They're a maintenance man comedy team. 

Laurel

Anyhow, a few lockers at the end of a row are seized and we have to fix them. Hardy is up front, Laurel to the back and they spend several minutes banging the lockers, puzzled at what to do, all the while speaking to each other in broken English and French. At this point they're really agitated and growing more so. 

Then Hardy says to me, "hammer", pointing to his tool box, so I hand him one. He shakes his head and says "big hammer", so I put back the small one, and grab him the 10 lb sledge that was sitting beside it. 

Over the next 30 seconds he proceeded to swing that hammer like a crazed banshee. I've never seen anything like it. He beat the living hell out of those lockers. 

There was about five seconds of stunned silence, then Laurel looked at me and said, "they needed to be replaced anyway"

When I lose four photos in a row and feel a little tilt coming on, strangely enough I think of this from time to time. 

If we beat out our frustrations with a hammer in our ADW, the only thing we're beating up is our bankroll. And it will "need to be replaced."

Sage advice, in my and Laurel's opinion: Walk away, bake a cake, turn on the TV (even if the Bachelor is on loop), but never ever ever grab the big sledge. 

In the end I guess I did learn something, but probably not what my boss intended me to.

A Derby super box costs over $100 grand. I'm not even sure "Elite 14" has enough in the Xpressbet account. 

It's an Irad thing? 

Sports betting the new opiod crisis? I have no idea, but even if true, it's tough to shake the cash, especially for governments. 

“I’ve had colleagues come up to me with concerns about gambling,” Addabbo said, “and then I tell them about the $900 million in revenue for education, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is great!’ ”

If you ever want to know the projected off odds on some stakes races, you can follow bitplayer on the twitter as he/she does the work for you. 

We hear that ADW's are not paying enough for purses in North America. In reality, in Canada and the U.S., ADW's (and betting in general) pay one of the highest rates in the world to purses. We love high juice, and we're conditioned to think lower juice means less money. It's why places like Kentucky Downs wanted to raise it. 

Over in Australia, about 3.9% is returned to purses (much less than in North America), but they opened up their markets in 2008, resulting in much lower takeout. Blog readers from way back then would know that when this change was made, the industry warned of very bad things. 

They even took the changes to the High Court, where the head of Racing Australia pretty much said the industry would fail to exist if bookies, low takeout exchanges and other mediums were allowed.

"All 50,000 participants will lose!" he told anyone within shouting distance. 

Ummmm ........ 

Can purses grow while increasing reach with expanded markets while taking less per bet? You betcha. 

Another set of jackpot bets bite the dust. Hastings has replaced their pick 6 and Super High Five jackpots with regular wagers. For those wanting to fire, Tommy says he'll be doing twitter spaces for the western Canadian oval. 

I'm sure I've met Cousin Ronnie at the OTB. Spoiler alert, Ronnie is down 5 large. 

I am proclaiming the Derby Wise Guy Horse is Skinner. Although then again I am not a wise guy and I think he has a shot. Maybe he's not a wise guy horse. 

This is the week we hear the word "Thurby". First, there is no such word. Second, there's no Derby this week other than on Saturday, and when there's no Derby on a Thursday we call it Thursday. We also don't call Derby Saturday "Saturby". I'm just here standing up to the Corporate Man (CDI is the man) and their fancy branding word marketing people and now I feel better. 

Marcus the Greek is on a heater and Chris and Scott landed him for the first Sport of Kings Derby pod. If you're doing some Derby research there's a good place to start. I listened last night and I thought it was quite good. 

As most SSB readers know, the venerable Ray Coloto - Rosecroft announcer and world famous movie director - promised me a signed program if I mentioned his pod on the blog. I'm happy to report an update. This blog comes with amazing perks. 

Here's your Derby Wagering menu. 

Lots of talk about money laundering in Canada lately with $372M off the books in Ontario alone at casinos that they know of, and they just nabbed one dude pumping $4M through a few casinos. This has to be happening in racing you'd think?

No respect, no respect at all - Betting partner asked who I liked in a race on Monday, and it turns out I liked a horse he hated. The horse closed from last and got third by about a length, raced okay, but nothing special at a pretty fair 3-1. He thought it was the worst pick in history. 

A couple hours later I decide to share what I think is a great longshot for my second selection of the night. 

$26 winner, which seemed to make him even more cranky. 

So, this week's Ryan Willis Cranky Update is 9.75 out of 10. 

PTP Update - Surged in the shadow of the wire to be a better handicapper than a rock. 

Man goes into gambling debt, kidnaps his 4 year old granddaughter and demands $75,000 ransom from his daughter. And he doesn't try and conceal his identity. This Hitchcockian-type plan surprisingly didn't work. Note - the man was not from Florida. 

That is some kinda confidence for a horse a week and a half out from the Derby. 

I spoke about the V75, Sweden' version of a national pick 7 before. It's hard to believe it's been 12 years since they released this ad for it. I've always felt it was one of the sharpest looking ads for horse racing I've ever seen.  Let's make it this week's Super Spectacular Blog sponsor. I take Krona.

---- ITP Joyce Buddy Movie Finale ----

I received this last scene in full last week and popped it up under a private server to keep the bots from accessing it. The writers allowed me to use this link for only a few days before it has to come down. 

Please enjoy the finale - Will ITP save his sister Ashley? Who is the ring-leader behind Elite? Will Mike and ITP become best friends forever? It's all here. 

Thanks for reading Volume 5 of the Super Spectacular Blog. It's Derby Week, so bet responsibly. Or get drunk on cheap hooch and blow the bankroll. But if you choose the latter, make sure you cash some tickets because there's nothing worse than a $0.01 ADW bankroll and a hangover on Sunday morning.  

Have a great week everyone!