Del Mar offers another Pick 6 weekend with mandatory payout

As it did two weekends ago, Del Mar will offer a Pick 6 weekend Saturday and Sunday, when the track will have 10-race cards with 5 p.m. EDT first posts on both afternoons.

Saturday’s program will have a $1 million guarantee offer, meaning anyone correctly selecting the six horses as a single-ticket winner would get the day’s prize (say possibly $400,000), then receive an additional check from Del Mar to raise their earnings to $1 million. If there is no single ticket winner that day, all carryover monies go forward to Sunday.

Then Sunday’s mandatory day will be offer an assured payout on the bet to those with the most winners that afternoon, be it six, five or whatever, where the final pot is divided by the total number of winners. There will be no carryovers on that card.

Going into Thursday’s card at Del Mar, the Pick 6 carryover amounts to $225,350. Eight races are scheduled that afternoon and another eight on Friday prior to Pick 6 weekend. If the bet is not hit over the upcoming three afternoons, a potential final pool in the $3 million range is quite possible. When Del Mar presented a similar scenario two weekends back, the final Pick 6 pool rose to $3,057,176.

The Pick Six may be wagered on for as little as 20 cents. Normally, it pays out 70 percent of its total pool to those with the most winners with the remaining 30 percent being carried forward to the following day’s race program.

The largest win prize in the history of the bet at Del Mar took place on August 1, 2004 when one bettor collected a reward of $2,100,017.