Last Friday I went to Saratoga New York to watch my first ever horse race.  I always assumed that horse racing was basically glorified scratch tickets – only slightly better because people of all income levels lose their money instead of just poor people.  I’d never seen a horse race because I have qualms about animal exploitation for the furtherance of societal decay, but I briefly suspended my misgivings for a chance to "bet the ponies" at what one guy I know told me is "the greatest meet in the world", which sounded a little far fetched. 

When you go to Saratoga there are a few things you notice – the first of which is the crowd.  The crowd is a mix of wealthy operators and people who want to appear to be wealthy operators but who merely have large auto lease payments (these two groups are indistinguishable), scantily clad women both rich and poor, men who appear to be homeless, or nearly homeless, and in the grandstand, about 4,000 men donning pressed khakis and blue blazers in an uncomfortable "this is the first time I've ever worn this" way that makes it look like their mothers just dressed them for church.  By looking at this last group it is impossible to tell whether they own a southern plantation or work at Verizon kiosk in the Aviation Mall in Glenns Falls.

My wife grew up near the track and spent several summers working nearby.  As such, she became an expert on betting, owing to the fact that she once won $1,200 at OTB while sitting on her couch. Before we got to the track she handed me a racing form, which contained a lot of numbers and very small font, some of which contained fractions, and words such as "sloppy".  The form contained a key which also contained extremely small font and which would have been helpful if I’d had three hours to figure out what it meant, so I simply followed my wife’s strategy, which involved me asking where we could see how the horse finished in the past, her telling me she wasn’t sure and eventually disappearing to the betting window and returning with a handful of race tickets that indicated that we had bet on 70% of the horses in the race in some fashion.  My wife explained that these bets were called “exacta boxes” which I don’t entirely understand, but which I think has something to do with losing $12 while only getting the potential upside of a $2 bet which my wife carefully calculated to be “like $3,000, probably”.

One thing I didn’t know about horse racing that I learned on Friday is that all the races are not the same length, and that they are measured in furlongs which is just a unit of length, even though it seems like it should denote something funnier.  This may or may not have an impact on what horses you should be betting, but when your strategy involved picking a horse because it had a name that sounded like a character from Elie Weisel’s, Night, a few extra furlongs really aren’t that important.

The actual race was less exciting than I expected, mostly because I had no idea what was going on or who I was rooting for because we’d bet on so many horses, but also because I couldn’t see anything, and because the races were over in about a minute and because I kept looking for the horses on the dirt and they would run by on the grass or vice versa.  Amazingly, despite our optimization betting strategy we netted zero winners or even partial winners in 8 races, which I believe to be some kind of record.

During one race I stood near the winner’s circle, which is actually a rectangle so that I could watch the post-race ceremony.  The race was won by a horse named Letsshootpool, which was about the doucheiest name of all of the horses in the entire meet.   I was surprised that given its stupid name it would have chosen to make its owner any money, but was less surprised to see that its owner wore snake skin boots, or that he didn’t even give his horse a kiss on the nose or feed it an apple after it won him his lease payments on his Maserati.

Despite losing money very quickly, without ever knowing exactly how much I stood to gain, and not being able to see the horses, and generally not knowing what was going on, I had a surprisingly enjoyable time.  We can’t be too down on ourselves about our betting record, there are no successful gamblers, and when you think about it, $80 was a small price to pay to see a guy who wore snake skin boots on purpose. 

If I can manage to get the time off from Verizon I’ve already agreed it’ll be a yearly tradition - next time, however, I’m going to sit in the grandstand, I’ve already picked out my blazer.