I think this may tie in with why many tracks continue to show a payoff on a $2 ticket even when there are no winning $2 tickets out there. It's even in the charts that way. If they didn't also print the pool totals in the charts, who would know? The only reason I've been able to think of is that it's cheaper (and better "advertising") to mislead the public on those occasions than to spend what it would take to post the correct payoff. Just the other day a friend was raving about a daily double payoff that was in excess of 5K. That's a neat trick with only a little over 3K in the pool. My guess is they could do most anything they wanted to if they were willing to spend the money and that includes correcting the problem of having sometimes more than half of the win pool come in after the race has started. If it ever becomes important to anyone other than the bettors, it might actually get done.
