I hereby pronounce the death of one of the serious handicapper's regular useful tools: the tote board. 

A couple of months ago, while playing tracks via simulcast at Horsemen's Park, I saw the odds of the horse I bet drop about in half during the running of the race. More recently, I saw a legitimate longshot drop from 30-1 to 10-1 while his race was being run. You've undoubtedly also noticed this phenomenon, and it's been going on a lot longer than just the past couple of months. For me it has become a genuine annoyance at best and a detriment affecting my wagering--and probably that of many other players--at worst 

Think I'm whining? In a front-page article in the Daily Racing Form on Monday, December 4, 2000, Andy Beyer wrote an article titled From 12-1 to 5-5 in one flash of tote. In the article, Andy tells the story of Holly Hill, a horse in the seventh race at Laurel the preceding Friday, who went into the gate at 12-1 and finished the race as the 6-5 favorite. Andy researched the details behind this huge drop and learned that the $20,000 someone had bet on the 3-year-old had been bet in Birmingham, AL, via Racing and Gaming Services (RGS), a company on the island of St. Kitts. Birmingham Race Course takes its signal from RGS. 

The same bettor also bet $7,500 on Incased in Gold in the same race. The odds went crazy. Silver Advantage, the favorite, went from 9-5 to 4-1 in the last flash, and wound up winning the race. The tracks that can absorb hits like this without much effect on the betting pools can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Laurel isn't one of them. 

I asked a couple of people about the last flash on the tote board, which usually seems to hit when the horses are half to three-quarters of the way through most sprint races. 

The first was the head mutuel clerk at Horsemen's, a veteran mutuel clerk who knows her stuff from years of experience. She explained that Omaha's off-track wagering facility is like many others around the country. The money wagered is not sent directly into each track's pool, but to a hub, a facility which receives the money bet (electronically, of course) from HPO and a number of other similar locations, and then passes it on to the track for which the wager is intended. Presumably, this method provides an easy, smooth, and perhaps faster way of many tracks to send their bets to the tracks for which they are intended. 

But there doesn't seem to be a set point at which that hub money is sent to the track, where it is added to the pools. Dick Mitchell told me that it can take up to a minute for the totals to go from a hub to a track. So in a 6-furlong sprint, maybe 11 or 12 seconds before the end of the race, you'll find out if the 3-1 horse you bet will pay $8 or if enough was bet on him across the country to send him down to 8-5 and become a bet that you would not have made, if you had any indication that the odds would be driven down that far. 

Is it legal? Sure. Is it fair? While there may be several answers to that question, depending on your point of view, fairness is not the issue here. The issue is the use of the tote board as a tool for handicapping. There's no sense anymore in waiting to bet in the last minute or as close to the last flash before the race as possible, because you just don't know how much will be dumped into the pools while the horses are running. 

Why bother to track the odds from opening to just before the race anymore? The very few well-researched methods incorporating the tote board as a factor are for the most part now null and void. 

The only possible way to rectify this situation, from a handicapper's point of view, would be to have a continuous feeding of money very quickly after it is bet into a track's pool which a player could track as if he were playing on-track in pre-simulcast days.

Of course, you'd have to have a channel (or picture-within-picture option) for each track at each simulcast location for players to be able to view this information. Sure, you'd still have the possibility of the last-minute plunger betting $20,000 on a Holly Hill. But that's been with us since Day One of the tote board. This way at least you'd be able to incorporate the tote board into your wagering as many did before simulcasting became the dominant reality it is today in racing. 

Technically, probably within the next 5 years, my scenario could be a reality. But it likely never will be. Racetrack management is the reason why it won't be. With few exceptions, the attitude that fans are a necessary evil, that horses make the races go instead of bettors, will make the investment of time and money it would take to accomplish the right way to handle this tote situation laughable in the eyes of most track managers. "Accommodating the player" is a concept whose time may never come for most race tracks in the U.S. 

What's the answer for now and the forseeable future? Simple: picks your plays, project your selections' final odds a point or two, and plan your wagers accordingly. More avid fans might want to track the last-flash-before-the-race odds versus the actual closing odds with the hub money added and see if there's a regular pattern that applies to their tracks.