Op/Ed: It was a Great Kentucky Derby Day, but Not Without a Sour Note as CAW Players Feasted on Regular Joes

There were plenty of people who liked the chances of Japanese shipper T O Elvis (Volatile) in Saturday’s GI Churchill Downs Stakes. He had won four straight races, was on the improve, and the word out of Japan was that this horse might be as good as any sprinter in the world. That he was 30-1 on the morning line made the idea of placing a large wager on the 4-year-old even more enticing.

He was never going to be 30-1. The linemaker whiffed badly on that one. But as the field left the gate, T O Elvis was 12.82-1, a price that would have led to a $27.64 payoff had he won. For a horse who was competitive on paper, but was surely facing the toughest assignment of his career, the price seemed right.

T O Elvis came through, thrashing 10 quality horses to win by 3 1/4 lengths. It should have been a time for his backers to celebrate, but there was likely more resentment than satisfaction among winning horseplayers when the win price was posted. T O Elvis went off at 5.87-1 and paid $13.74.

The ones who were really celebrating were the CAW players, who, without a doubt, were behind the massive odds drop and likely won about $1.6 million on their win wager.

And that’s just in the win pool. The winning exacta combining T O Elvis and Disruptor (Gun Runner) dropped from $122.77 to $54.22 in the very last betting cycle.

It appears that CAW players also crushed the daily double, combining T O Elvis and GI Turf Classic Stakes winner Rhetorical (Not This Time). In the next-to-last betting cycle that double combination was paying $63.82. It wound up paying $26.08 for a $1 wager.

That information is courtesy of economics professor and horseplayer Marshall Gramm, who charted the changes in the pools and the prices and posted them on X.

“In the third-to-last click, T O Elvis was 12.82-1, representing 5.97% of the win pool,” Gramm wrote in an email. “In the next click, the total win pool increased from $3.69 million to $4.39 million. If we assume the ‘regular’ money remained constant at 5.97%, then of the roughly $311,000 wagered on T O Elvis in that cycle, about $269,000 likely came from the team. (I’m using the singular since it appears to be one group).

“They also heavily bet into the other pools, definitely the exacta and double and likely others as well, all during this second-to-last click. The final click was relatively small. T O Elvis’s odds actually drifted slightly from 5.81-1 to 5.87-1. That last click appears to be when they finalized their exotic positions.”

So, here we go again. Horse racing is the only gambling game where you can win a bet and be made to feel like a chump. As expected, there were a number of players who voiced their outrage on X.

NYRA linemaker David Aragona posted this: “T O Elvis was dazzling, and anyone who watched his last race can’t be surprised he just did that. But hopefully this race serves as a needed inflection point around the lack of regulation of CAW wagering, because that was as egregious as you’ll see.”

“T O Elvis listed at 12-1. Wins easy at 5-1,” Mike Mutnansky tweeted. “You thought you were getting a $26 winner. You got a $12 winner. What a terrible look for racing. Happy this happened on national TV. What a [expletive] joke they’ve let the CAWs become.”

It’s not that this was anything particularly new. We’ve seen thousands of these large odds drops over the last several years and it happens at every track in the country. But what made this different was that it was on the Derby Day card. Some people believed and said that the pools are so big on the day that the action from the CAW players couldn’t possibly put more than a small dent in the prices.

Obviously, that’s not the case. Between the win pool, the exacta pool, the double pool and whatever other bets they used T O Elvis in, the CAW players easily bet more than $500,000 on the horse. The race went to show the money these teams have, the power they have and their willingness to wager huge amounts when they think they have found inefficiencies in the wagering pools.

They could have lost. But they didn’t. And their windfall cost the regular player hundreds of thousands of dollars they would have collected had the CAW players not been involved.

Here’s what Del Mar Dennis had to say on X. “The CAWs most certainly did. What gives. There’s “funny business” and then there’s funny business when the winner, T.O. Elvis, drops down seven clicks as the gates open. Why? Better question, why am I and fellow fans like you still betting?”

A lot aren’t. Especially when you factor in inflation, pari-mutuel handle is plummeting in this country and the most obvious reason why is that a lot of horseplayers have simply given up, knowing that they can’t compete with the CAW players.

Unfortunately, nothing is going to change. The tracks are not going to turn down the billions in handle that comes from the CAW teams. And there are tracks, Churchill among them, that own betting outlets set up to take bets from CAW players.

But there is a cost. On the sport’s most important and visible day, the T O Elvis payoffs were a terrible look and added to the growing anger among those who just want to have a fair chance when it comes to playing the horses. T O Elvis won, but the sport lost as his win no doubt led to more customers deciding that they are done with this game.