Flatter: Ah, the tradition of late odds changes at Keeneland

It is a tradition unlike any other. Keeneland.

Maybe the eve of closing day is a little late to wax nostalgic about the limestone walls and autumn colors. Better late than never, right?

It says here that Keeneland is to horse racing what Augusta National is to golf. I will see you Amen Corner and the pimento and cheese sandwiches and raise you The Hill, the big sycamore and a bread pudding. Where are the voice of Jim Nantz and the piano of Dave Loggins when we really need them?

New lawsuit says conspiracy favors computer players.

At this point I must interrupt all this saccharin and drag the phonograph needle across the record. Or maybe something that is more than jolting and less from the 20th century.

Unfortunately, Keeneland has another tradition unlike any other. That would be the storied changing of the odds, usually about 100-150 yards up the track after the horses have left the gate and betting has been locked.

Just as Augusta National has been slow to embrace a membership that steps outside the lines of rich, white men, Keeneland has been slow to embrace the poor horseplayer.

It was eight years ago when Keeneland raised takeout on win, place and show bets by 1.5% and most exotics by 3%. Bettors revolted, and all-sources handle plunged 8% that fall. It remains a flashpoint that put a scar in the Lexington, Ky., landscape that no lightning strike ever could match.

Then came the current fall meet on the heels of high-profile messages from other track operators to at least make it look like computer-assisted wagerers were not going to flex their influence over betting pools without running into some curbs.

In 2019 the New York Racing Association was the first to put an early time limit on CAWs, cutting them out of win bets once the minutes-to-post clock struck 3. Del Mar did the same thing this summer with a self-imposed two-minute cutoff. Santa Anita put the same policy into effect this fall.

So how about Keeneland? Nope. Senior officials there say lawyers have been working behind the scenes to find a compromise to discourage CAWs from big-footing their mutuels. They also downplayed the idea of a two-minute red flag for the win pool, because that would be more cosmetic than effective, especially since the feeling there is that batch-betting teams are less interested in Keeneland’s win bets than they are in other pools.

The problem with that theory is the numbers do not support it.

“The odds in that last cycle after race has gone off are changing more dramatically at Keeneland than they’ve been changing at Del Mar, Santa Anita and NYRA,” said Marshall Gramm, an economics professor at Rhodes College in Tennessee who also is a horse owner and a serious bettor who has found success in high-level handicapping contests. “By having the two-minute cutoff, that’s effectively stabilized the win pool at those tracks. For Del Mar, for example, before they made the change, the typical payout difference for any horse that ran in the race would change by 11% in the last cycle. It was down to 2% as a result (of the cutoff). At Keeneland that number sort of remains around 13%.”

Gramm, who is a Horse Racing Nation investor, said on my podcast this week that the Keeneland problem is nothing new, but it is more glaring under the brightened spotlight of horseplayers who are taking particular notice.

“It doesn’t appear that Keeneland cares or will make any changes this meet,” said a recent X post from Chris Larmey, a former chair of the National Horseplayers Championship players committee.

Time and again this fall Larmey has posted screen shots of the odds changes before and after the start of races at Keeneland. Other bettors have followed his lead with their complaints. You might have heard of one of them.

“We love betting on horses,” Dave Portnoy wrote Saturday on X. “It’s my favorite sport to bet on. I can’t do it anymore. It’s actually criminal that tracks are allowed to have their own CAWs. The laws will eventually change just like all other sports where owners can’t bet on their own teams or companies. But until then the tracks are basically stealing from their customers in my opinion. It’s ruined betting on horses.”

For the uninitiated, Portnoy is an internet lightning rod who has nearly 3.8 million X followers. He created Barstool Sports, which was worth a half-billion dollars when he sold it to Penn Entertainment two years ago. Months later he bought it back for just a buck. Yeah. For the uninitiated. The question should be Ron who?

Portnoy owns horses now and raced his first winner Monday, a filly by the name of Wondergirl Carly who made her debut score at Parx. If only all of us who are frustrated with odds plunges could go out and buy a winning racehorse.

“There are people that might read Portnoy’s Tweet and say I’ll think about this, and now I may do something else,” Gramm said. “It’s the fact that there are a lot of longtime bettors, five- and six-figure bettors, who are being driven from the game because of these price movements.”

To me there is one simple solution that Nevada has been doing forever. There is a law there that says a price may not be offered privately by any bookmaker to a single bettor. For instance, let’s say I had a tip that this horse named Justify was going to be a monster, I rolled into Las Vegas with a sack full of C notes, and I asked a bookmaker to post a price in the 2018 Kentucky Derby futures. Those odds have to be up long enough and publicly enough for anyone to take a crack at them.

Oh, wait. That actually happened. Not to me, but that very move cost one bookmaker hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it was fair play.

The last time I checked, if the odds change for a race after it starts, then those prices are not available to anyone. The excuse that the software was late posting those odds would not hold water with the Nevada Gaming Control Board.

Even simpler than my solution? Just call the damn two-minute time-out, Keeneland. And everyone else who is taking pari-mutuel action. That means you, Breeders’ Cup. We still have a week until your self-proclaimed world championships.

It is not too late.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below and at RonFlatterRacingPod@gmail.com are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.