Bob the Brain was looking for one more winner. The final race of the Hawthorne handicapping contest was five minutes away. The horses were already on the track, and the scoreboard told him he was $3 behind the leader. The winner would take home five grand.
“Of all the people to be in this tournament, Steven Walker has to come qualify!” Bob had shouted from his table in the track’s handicapping center when he heard. “My luck that Steven Walker has to come qualify!”
“For me to win the tournament,” said Bob, describing how he picked his last horse of the contest, “I would have to come up with a horse other than the horse the person ahead of me picked. Since he’s a good handicapper, I assume he took the best horse, Ft. Mann. I couldn’t take Ft. Mann. That would be a terrible situation if we both took the same horse–the positions wouldn’t change.”
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“In a decent year I was able to make 30 to 60 thousand,” he says. “I’ve never had a steady job. Back in the 90s I had a good streak of three or four years without having to do any outside work. But playing the horses is harder work than any work I know. It’s a 70-hour-a-week job.”
On the first day of the contest, a Friday, everyone had been searching for a long shot to lift himself out of the pack, but favorites won the first five races. The highest payoff was 9-5. The next race was looking equally worthless: Luga, a 4-5 shot, fought for the lead in the stretch. But then Quick to Fight, a 25-1 shot, ran past him.
Quick to Fight was worth more than the first five winners combined. Cautious players who’d picked favorites all day had $33. Players who’d chased after long shots and caught Quick to Fight had $55. Quick to Fight paid $53.00 to win and $13.40 to place on the tote board, but the rules of the contest limited the winnings per race to $42 to prevent anyone from triumphing with a single lucky long shot.
