When someone gives you a tip at the racetrack, you can decide to go to the windows or keep the money in your pocket.
You see, tips are a dime a dozen, to use that cliché, at the racetrack.
I knew a tout who would take a nine-horse race, go to nine different people and give them each a horse.
The strategy was brilliant because at least one of the tips would prove to be a winner.
Why do I say this? Well, last week I did my second annual PGA Tour predictions with my buddy Andy Bankuti, who spent a lot of time around the racetrack in a variety of roles, so he knows tips.
Last week, he predicted the Canadian players would win a few tournaments this season and sure enough he was right. Mackenzie Hughes (Titleist Pro V1), one of the Canadian contingent, won the Sanderson Farms Championship, beating Seth Straka in a playoff that went three holes.
So if you took a flyer on Hughes because you liked Dandy Andy’s pick, you cashed nicely.
But beyond just giving out a winner, Andy said last week that Keegan Bradley could be a long shot to watch this season. Bradley tied for fifth.
The news was all good for Andy, but terrible for me. Andy set up a fall suicide pool that was extended from the last PGA Tour event to the start of the new season. I was still in it heading into last week with dreams of cashing, except Sahith Theegala failed to make the cut, ending my hopes, along with three other players.
So all I can do now is wait for Andy to start a new suicide pool and hope to cash.
That’s the thing about betting: there’s always one more play, one more chance, one more opportunity to win. Well, unless you are in a suicide pool – NFL, PGA Tour, whatever – and you pick incorrectly and you’re out.
In these days of sports wagering, you can crank it up again immediately after a loss or getting the boot out of a season-long tournament because of parlay wagering. There’s plenty of action to keep glued to the TV screen or whatever you use to watch sports, and hope your horse, so to speak, wins.
But sports betting is tough. As it’s been said since the wagering first began in the epic battle between David vs. Goliath, if it was so easy we’d all be rich. I mean, for those who bet big on Goliath thinking he would easily defeat his diminutive opponent, well, that was the earliest example of the ‘dog winning.
