Quote:
Originally Posted by thaskalos
There was a guy at my local OTB who often sat at the table next to mine. We would nod to one-another...but we seldom spoke even a single word to each other for many months. And then one day when the place was crowded, we both ended up at the same table...and a race was run that ended up with a 2-4-3 result. The trifecta paid a couple of hundred dollars...and he turned to me as if he wanted to say something. After a little hesitation, he said to me..."don't you hate it when you spend considerable time handicapping a race, and you miss out on a nice payoff by the slimmest of margins?" And he showed me a ticket where he had boxed 5 horses in a trifecta...but none of the top 3 finishers were anywhere on his ticket. I committed the cardinal sin of laughing at his funny remark...and that was the beginning of the end for me.
From that day on he would show me not only every single losing ticket that he ever played...but he would also tell me about every supposedly winning bet that he thought of making, but never did. I guess my laughter at his joke meant that we were now best friends, or something. It got so bad that I was ready to bitch him out after a few days...which is something totally out of character for me. And then the day came when he shyly confessed to me that he had gone broke...and didn't have money to bet an already handicapped pick-4 at some harness track. Would I be nice enough to advance him $32...which he would return to me the very next day, if he lost? I slipped him a $50...and he went away. And I haven't seen him again in almost 10 years. A mutual acquaintance told me that he now frequents an OTB some 20 miles away.
I consider it one of the best investments that I've ever made.
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This is a true story too, from my days in the Cheyenne OTB. A co-worker of my wife's in the Air Guard was a total degenerate but a nice enough guy. Tee who posts here some might remember Adam. He was a pretty big bettor too, like he wasn't betting $10 a pop. We'd watch him walk in the OTB, quickly see what race was next, and bet $50 across on a race (could be harness too) with no handicapping whatsoever.
He figured out I kind of knew what I was doing most of the time and would badger me for picks. I would give him my three best of the day, all SoCal. I probably made him some money in the long run, though no doubt he blew it on other races. But one morning he calls me lamenting the rough day "we" had at Hollywood Park the previous day. He was giving me crap for the picks. He said none of the three horses had even hit the board.
I was dumbfounded as I knew all three had actually won. I was actually expecting a big thank you when I answered his call, while at work no less. And they weren't chalk types either, in the 4 to 6 to 1 range. When he finally stopped talking, I asked him why he thought they lost and if he wrote the wrong numbers down. He informed me he had called the OTB and asked for the results and the numbers they gave him weren't on the list. This was around 2000, not like today. I informed him that the horses had all in fact won and he should bring his tickets and cash them.
Now is the good part, he had already thrown them in his trash bin and it was trash day. He went out to retrieve them, and apparently the trash truck had already come. He went out trying to track down the truck, apparently did after a bunch of calls and driving around. He told his tale of woe to the drivers, and I guess they let him search the truck.
This is a really feelgood story. He did find the tickets and cashed them. He showed them too me, and I can verify that they had definitely been in a lot trash. But that isn't the feelgood part. The feelgood part is I told him we were done after that. I didn't forget that he was an ass to me on the phone and I used it as my get out of jail free card.
