Thistledown: Irregular betting prompts investigation into Monday's fifth race
 

I love thinking and reading about arbitraging strategies .... I wonder which one they used here. It could have been in conjunction with betting on Betfair, that would be straightforward if the liquidity was big enough.

"Ohio racing officials have launched an investigation into a flurry of last-second bets on the fifth race at Thistledown on Monday, the officials confirmed on Tuesday morning."

http://www.drf.com/news/thistledown-...ays-fifth-race

arbing

They could have gotten down 30k in win bets with bookmakers. They win 192 minus the bet minus the pool manip. Not sure about the bets to show though

Everyone is forgetting the most important thing though. Would they get paid? Very unlikely IMO. Rule numbers 1-10 with off shore books is NO POOL MANIPULATION!

Agree but prob not offshore...plus offshore has tiny limits for that track. Could also be bot error. I was just speculating. Cant figure it out

Thistledown was not offered on Betfair on Monday.

Gotcha, but i still doesn't change the getting paid part.

100%

One other thing to toss out there is....the accounts where the 5000 bets came from could have been hacked or fraudulant. Lets see where investigation leads

This type of thing is not new, it was done long before there was such a thing as ADW's, OTB, or computers. Way back in the 1930's a famous betting coup was pulled off at the old Agua Caliente track that many turf historians are familiar with, the so called Linden Tree incident, owned by Baron Long, part owner of the track. The horse was a standout, and right at post time a group of men hired by Long hit the windows and bet every other horse in the race. Because of the small pools they were easy to manipulate. In the meantime Long and his cronies heavily bet Linden Tree with bookies all around the country. The horse won easily at an inflated price and created quite a stink. The track stewards conducted an investigation, and supposedly barred Long and kicked him out of his own racetrack. All this back in the era of paper mutuel tickets and friendly bookmakers on almost every corner.

Hayson-Fletcher coup revisited
 

This smacks of a betting coup involving a greyhound race in Australia a few years ago - bet all the other horses/dogs in the race through the mutuel pool at the last possible moment and bet the heavy favorite through bookmakers who don't bet back (or suspect a need to bet back or lay off the bet). The bookmakers lost about 1 million AUD that way.

I wonder if this was a case where a bookmaker thought worst case would be a loss of about $6k or so and took the action.

More: http://www.drf.com/news/thistledown-...-still-mystery

This is the thing that bothers me the most. Robotic wagering accounts for 10%
of the wagering in the US! Why is any computer allowed to automaticly tie into the tote system? Do they get a last look at the odds?

"Crawford acknowledged that the odd amounts of the win and show bets on Eye Look the Part pointed to the use of a computerized robotic wagering program. The programs, which account for at least 10 percent of the handle on U.S. horse races, analyze pool totals searching for inefficiencies, and they typically place bets in odd amounts because of the program’s ability to calculate the impact of the bets on the odds."

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Stop the robots!

the general manager of Tampa Bay Downs, Peter Berube, thinks that is what is going on and he never gave contracts to offshore rebate shops, Elite and RGS. there may be other places with those capabilities that i don't know about too.
since i am not set up with those capabilities, i don't bet the races that can be handicapped with an odds model because i know i am going to be an automatic loser. the races that i bet, the prices tend to go up on the horses that i bet.