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In the modern day, there is no way to past-post (meaning making a bet after the pools have been closed) unless there has been a technical failure of some sort. The only way for a bet to be placed after the race starts (but before the pool closes) is if the person in charge of locking the pools delays doing so or outright just forgets to. In normal operations, those failures are caught before the race goes official, and in most cases the guest site is thrown out, or the entire race is refunded.
Additionally, the TRPB now has a tote security monitoring system that gets an audit feed from everyone, and any widespread instance of this would have been caught a long time ago.
The close-cancel delay (which Dave described) has been eliminated from nearly everywhere. Seem to recall at the last 2020 Meeting someone mentioning there was only one outlet left that still had it, but don't remember who. Keep in mind, that delay wouldn't allow you to wager, just to cancel a wager already placed. When I was a teller, it had to be the last ticket you punched.
Closing the pools early won't change the late money swings people are discussing here. A large portion of the pool is still going to come at the last flash, and the odds are still going to move the same way. The only thing that would change is you would be able to see the final odds before the gate opened (but still not before you made your bet).
I don't know how to do it from a operational standpoint, but to fix the problem being discussed here, you would have to shut the computer players out of the game completely, or shut them out at 1-2 MTP and leave the wagering open for everyone else. Of course the large teams would eventually figure out a way around that and you'd be back to square one again.
The "real-time" video feed being described certainly doesn't exist now. Even if it did at some point in the past, it offers no advantage now other than to a live human who is trying to make a bet at the last possible moment hoping to see one more odds flash. The pools don't lock based on a video feed. The pools lock when a human being watching the race live locks them at the host track, so a faster video feed is not going to allow you to see the break when others can't and bet accordingly. Jay68802, your experiment would fail.
If you were doing in-race betting, then yes being able to see something before someone else does would matter. Anyone doing that would be best served to be on-track watching live.
I recently had one of our better players tell me that he thought the pools were becoming much more efficient at the bigger tracks, and as a result he was finding fewer overlays and his ROI was declining. That tells me there are more computer players in the pools and that they are likely hitting on the same horses even if they get there by different methodologies. I do know from looking at the Hong Kong pools that they are very efficient, and there is a ton of computer play there, so his suspicions make sense.
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