Turfway: Jackpot 8 debuts with tweaked payout structure

From its name to how it pays out, Churchill Downs Inc.'s new jackpot wager is a work in progress.

Turfway Park will get an extra day to work out the kinks after the wager was cancelled Thursday night when race 5 scratched down to seven horses. The Jackpot 8 must have 10 runners to be offered.

For its inaugural offering Wednesday, the Jackpot 8 handled $5,342, with about 80% of the handle occurring before the previous race was official. The bet has 22% takeout with 75% going to the jackpot and a multi-tiered consolation format with 25% of the net pool available if multiple people hit the octafecta and a 10% "minor" consolation to those who have the most correct when no one has all eight.

So it went on Wednesday, as the bet paid $410.74 to the one player who had the top four finishers. This was in stark contrast to the superfecta on the race, which paid $6,293.30 for a dollar, which is the base unit of the Jackpot 8.

The splits work out to 58.5% going to the jackpot if there are multiple winners or 70.2% if nobody has all eight. The carryover is $3,696.73 when the bet is next offered. A single winner of the jackpot would get the carryover plus 78% of that day's pool.

Overall, the novelty of the wager might have driven interest to the race, which handled $271,427 in wagers exclusive to that race (i.e. no multi-race wagers considered). That total ranked second among the eight race 9s this year on Wednesday and easily was best among the six days with 11 or fewer starters.

Equibase lists the wager in its database as the octafecta, but Churchill has mostly called it the Jackpot 8, including in TwinSpires promotional materials that tout a guaranteed prize of $250,000 if the winning jackpot wager, a single ticket matching the top eight finishers, is placed via that account-wagering platform.