A ‘trump ticket’ could bring riches – or not

If after Election Day you believe we are living in the time of the long shot, buy a “trump ticket.”
 
It’s a stab at winning a quick $3 million at Aqueduct Racetrack on Friday, and it’s a wager in which the odds could theoretically be in your favor.
 
Gamblers and mathematicians alike refer to buying every possible combination in a wagering pool as a “trump ticket,” and have done so long before the president-elect came on the scene.
 
Here’s what’s going down:
 
For four days in a row, no one won the Pick Six at Aqueduct, a bet in which you must pick the winners of six races in a row to pull down a big prize. That means a big carryover jackpot of $837,570 for Friday’s contest on races 3 through 8, which will attract millions of dollars more to the pool before the third race’s post time of 1:21 p.m. Eastern.
 
Experts guessed the total pool will be as much as $3 million as bettors from all over the world take a shot.
 
The bettors will likely have a mathematical advantage over the New York Racing Association because the carryover of the kitty will be larger than the cut taken out of Friday’s freshly wagered money.
 
On Thursday at Aqueduct, it looked like there were going to be lots of winning tickets to share the $837,570 jackpot, as popular horses won the first four races of the wager. Then Riff Raff won the next-to-last race at odds of 70-1, and Playthatfunnymusic triumphed in the last race at odds of 19-1 -- and there was not a single ticket with all six winners.
 
Thanks to the fairly small winter fields at Aqueduct on Friday, there were only 68,040 possible betting $2 combinations in the Pick Six, meaning a gambler could buy a guaranteed winning ticket for just $136,080 by creating a ticket that included every horse in every race.
   
The option of buying every possible wagering combination in a contest, particularly when referring to exotic horse bets and lotteries, is called a “trump ticket.” And there is an endless debate about when it is a good investment. Usually it is not, because even though you’re guaranteed to look like a winner, it’s still very easy to lose money because you have to split the pot with other winners.
 
On Friday at Aqueduct, bettors could buy a ticket with one horse in each race for a flat $2, and it would look like a lottery ticket, reading something like “1-1-1-1-1-1-.” For $128 they could pick two horses in each race, for $1,458 they could get three in each, and for $8,192 they could get four picks in each race.
 
That trump ticket would cost $136,080, and if long shots came in all day, the ticket would bring the gambler who bought it millions in profit. But if obvious favorites win out Friday, thousands of bettors could hit six out of six races, and a winning ticket might only pay a few thousand bucks to each, resulting in a huge loss for any player who thought a trump ticket was a guarantee of a fine future.