STAN ISAACS
Out of Left Field
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Sudden Death Madness |
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If it worked on basketball,
could it work on racing?
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
BILL
NADER, a New York Racing Association executive, was sitting around
one day thinking about the popularity of what is called March
Madness, the month-long frenetic goings-on of the NCAA basetball
tournament. It gave him a smashing idea.
For all the popularity of college basketball, one of the biggest
boons to the short pants carnival on TV is the betting action
on the tourney. Namely, pools in which people fill out brackets
trying to select the winners of games in each round leading to
the Final Four and the eventual winner. People who don’t
know Brown from UCLA, Hofstra from Coppin State put up a few
bucks and fill out sheets posted in offices, coffee shops, schools
and bars. Even if they don’t win they enjoy the pleasure
of being involved in the month-long action.
Nader wondered how he could adapt the NCAA pools idea to racing.
The NYRA already had instituted one kind of fan involvement.
Patterned after rotisserie baseball competitions that have instilled
new interest in major league baseball, Nader offered people the
chance to put together their own stable made up of jockeys, trainers
and horses at the New York tracks. Points were awarded on the
basis of first, second and third-place finishes by the jockeys,
trainers and horses. This copied the baseball formula in which
competitors buy a complete squad of players from different big
league teams and are awarded points on the basis of home runs,
stolen bases, victories, saves and the like.
The rotisserie format, good as it is, doesn’t have the dynamic
of keeping players constantly involved as the NCAA pools do.
Nader, a determind NCAA pool competitor and rotisserie man (full
disclosure note: he and I are in the same baseball rotisserie
league) put on his most creative thinking cap and came up with,
voila, the Sudden Death competition for the current Saratoga
meeting.
This is how what could now be called Sudden Death Madness works:
the idea is to pick a horse that will finish in the money--first,
second or third--from the entire Saratoga card of races every
day. If the horse you pick finishes in the money, you are alive
in the competition to pick the next day. If the horse you pick
does not finish in the money, you are out. The winner will be
the person who stays alive the longest in the 36-day Saratoga
meeting or, if there is a tie or ties, the winner will emerge
from some tie-breaking rules. The prize is a voucher for $5,000
betting money at New York race tracks.
The competition is free. It is conducted on the internet; a person
must have a computer to compete. Not everybody is computer literate,
yet, of course, but still the availability of the internet allows
people from all over the country to click on and into the competition.
People from Kentucky, Texas and California have already won the
New York fantasy games with winning stables. (The Saratoga races
are available live on various cable racing shows around the country.)
The Sudden Death Madness started with a field of 5,121 internet
players. By Saturday, after 10 days of the Saratoga meeting,
the field was down to 369 players.
Sudden Death has tremendous appeal. It is disarmingly simple.
By rewarding even a third-place finish it appeals to the most
timid horse players who screw up their courage at the track just
to make $2 show bets. Even the least sophisticated horse bettor
thinks he/she can pick a horse that can finish at least third.
On the first day’s action, almost 2,000 of the more than
5,000 players fell by the wayside. The strategy is simple: try
and pick odds-on favorites and the shorter the fields they run
in, the more likely they are to finish in the money. Nevertheless,
1296 fell out the second day when a horse trained by the highly
successful Wayne Lukas finished out of the money. After that
there were these victims on successive days: 325, 165, 638, 162,
106, 102 and 64. Most of the odds-on favorites have been finishing
in the money, but comes a day when a 3-5 shot winds up out of
the money, there will be many bridge jumpers, the term for people
who consider suicide after betting on such so-called “sure
things.”
Nader, whose title is senior vice president of the NYRA, says,
“It’s fun. That’s what racing is. We have taken
what makes this sport so much fun and taken it to cyberspace.
If people have fun and are paying attention, we think we are
accomplishing a lot and are invigorated by the positive energy.
We think because it is easy to comprehend, we could get new racing
fans from this.”
He said, “We hear a good deal of talk around Saratoga about
it. We are particularly pleased because even people who have
been eliminated are talking about it. Some people think the winner
will emerge in only a few more days, others say it won’t
end until about the time of the Travers Stakes toward the end
of the meeting, some even predict that it will take the whole
36 days before all but one player is eliminated.”
Racing is constantly trying to win new fans. The New York tracks
have even had rock bands play at the tracks to attract the young,
but after they put away their dancing shoes, they didn’t
return in any large numbers to the track. The number of cyberspace
players has increased since the NYRA introduced the fantasy stables
in the spring of 2000. Nader said, “We haven’t decided
yet, but we are leaning toward running Sudden Death at the next
Belmont meeting this fall.”
The NYRA website address is www.nyra.com. From the Redwood Forests
to the Gulfstream waters, from California to the New York Island,
this contest was made for you and me.
© 2001 by Stan Isaacs. The graphic is from the official New York Racing Assn. website.
You can comment on this column or contact Stan Isaacs with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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