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Can you imagine if you won the lottery prize of £2m by selecting the six winning numbers, and Camelot gave you your £400k prize and said, "if you want the other £1.6m, you will need to correctly select next week’s first number drawn"?
That is effectively what the Tote do with the Scoop 6. Then they use the biggest lottery race on the day as the bonus race, to make it nigh on impossible to get the money. How is that right?
If today’s bonus contender had selected Hoof It, i’d have called her a mug. But it won, on 10st, in the most competitive sprint of the year. Is the Scoop 6 a rigged game, where you lose even if you win? Also what happens to today’s £612k bonus? Does it miraculously disappear into the Tote’s coffers? Next week’s bonus is a miserly 28k.The rules about the bonus are available to anyone buying a Scoop 6 ticket, it’s not as though they’re kept as a nasty surprise to upset winning punters.
And today’s big bonus went to the person who selected Hoof It in the Stewards’ Cup. Simple enough to understand, isn’t it?
RD
There were three contenders for the bonus, just that two of them wished to remain anonymous. One of thsoe two selected Hoof It and hence won the bouns.
Seems to me if there are no more than a handful going for the bonus prize it makes sense to go for the favourite since the odds make no difference. Rather than being ‘a mug’ for selecting the favourite, in this instance it seems the sensible thing to do.
I think the Scoop6 is a c*** bet, but then so is the Lottery and millions do their money on that every week.
Rob
RD
There were three contenders for the bonus, just that two of them wished to remain anonymous. One of thsoe two selected Hoof It and hence won the bouns.
Seems to me if there are no more than a handful going for the bonus prize it makes sense to go for the favourite since the odds make no difference. Rather than being ‘a mug’ for selecting the favourite, in this instance it seems the sensible thing to do.
I think the Scoop6 is a c*** bet, but then so is the Lottery and millions do their money on that every week.
Rob
Oh, I didn’t know there was a winner. But the question still stands as to where does the money go
if
nobody wins it and why it shouldn’t be distributed when you actually win it rather than putting another barrier up. You picked the six winners, near on impossible normally, then they expect you to pick the winner of the Stewards Cup as well? For a large % of the pot?
Surely everyone betting on the Scoop6 has made a decision to do so, and if they don’t like it they don ‘t have to bet. It’s not as if the terms of the bet aren’t known beforehand, and anyone who does the bet on a regular basis surely knows that the pick the toughest race for the bonus.
If the bonus isn’t won it’s carried over to the next bonus pool as Per Tote Scoop 6 rules
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v.
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If there are no registered qualifiers for the Bonus Fund or no registered qualifier selects the winner of the Bonus Race, the Bonus Fund will be rolled over to future Tote Scoop6 Bonus Fund(s) as decided by the Tote.
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We could go round telling people what they shouldn’t do 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but in the end it would make little impact. People have a choice what to do with their money, and if they wish to p*** down the drain on bad value bets then it ain’t likely to change.
Rob
It is all rather complicated, though, with the win, place and special bonus. So is the super7 which hardly anyone does.
Surely it would all be a lot more straightforward if they made the Saturday jackpot the scoop 6. Or they could adopt Ap’s suggestion that the jackpot is course specific and rolls onto the next meeting at that course. Then the scoop 6 would be a special jackpot of televised races.
I could easily do without it as it has made Saturday viewing virtually one handicap after another – bookmakers no doubt love it and I guess it isn’t going to go away.
Got the impression it was designed as a big pot for the small punter but that idea has rather backfired given the number of times Findlay has been in the frame.
It is all rather complicated, though, with the win, place and special bonus. So is the super7 which hardly anyone does.
Surely it would all be a lot more straightforward if they made the Saturday jackpot the scoop 6. Or they could adopt Ap’s suggestion that the jackpot is course specific and rolls onto the next meeting at that course. Then the scoop 6 would be a special jackpot of televised races.
Yes, the ITV 5,6,7 was fine for me. A seven horse acca, with running total after each race. I think there was a 10% bonus for getting all seven winners. As I remember, five or six winners and you picked up too.
Yes, i’ve noticed a definite glut of handicap dross on Saturdays too. York is the worst, it’s like playing ‘spot the conditions race’ within a card full of 15 runner hcaps.She was gonna back hoof it at 3.00 but talked herself out of it because of the weight despite francome telling her to go with the gut feeling.
Unlike a woman to over analysise but its cost her six hundred grand
I always feel sorry for the ones whose lost in the final leg after having five winners. I hope they covered there bets with proper bookmaker bets cos you’d be feeling pretty sick otherwise
It is a very poor bet for that reason.
I devised the original concept for scoop6 when I was marketing manager for Tote Direct; that concept was altered by the ‘top brass’ and the addition of a bonus race was the suggestion of CH4’s Andrew Franklin who believed it would add drama (and bigger viewing figures)
(I note that Mr Franklin said in a recent RP article that his proudest achievement was ‘devising the scoop6’: Tote chairman Peter Jones also claimed the same ‘proudest moment’ in an RP interview a couple of years back: I still have the original flip chart presentation I drew up but it proves the old saying "Success has many fathers – failure is a b@stard")
My original three-part concept was to concentrate on the Placepot aspect of it with the majority of the pool going to those with 6 places: the Placepot market at that time was far and away the most popular of all Tote ‘Exotic’ bets with pools at the Cheltenham Festival regularly reaching £500k.
I did not believe too many people would fancy their chances of picking 6 winners of tough races each Saturday but believed that a hell of a lot would have a crack at getting 6 placed.
My recommendation was that 65% of the pool should go to the placepot side – 25% to the win part and 10% towards building a rollover which would go to whoever won it on their own (a single punter picking all 6 winners in a week where nobody else did), with a guarantee of a minimum £100,000 bonus to that winner.
I remain convinced that this structure would have earned the Tote an awful lot more money than the current one has, and still produced a few headline winners while deterring the syndicates who have so seriously diluted the bet’s popularity with their frequent raids on rollovers.
I devised the original concept for scoop6 when I was marketing manager for Tote Direct; that concept was altered by the ‘top brass’ and the addition of a bonus race was the suggestion of CH4’s Andrew Franklin who believed it would add drama (and bigger viewing figures)
(I note that Mr Franklin said in a recent RP article that his proudest achievement was ‘devising the scoop6’: Tote chairman Peter Jones also claimed the same ‘proudest moment’ in an RP interview a couple of years back: I still have the original flip chart presentation I drew up but it proves the old saying "Success has many fathers – failure is a b@stard")
My original three-part concept was to concentrate on the Placepot aspect of it with the majority of the pool going to those with 6 places: the Placepot market at that time was far and away the most popular of all Tote ‘Exotic’ bets with pools at the Cheltenham Festival regularly reaching £500k.
I did not believe too many people would fancy their chances of picking 6 winners of tough races each Saturday but believed that a hell of a lot would have a crack at getting 6 placed.
My recommendation was that 65% of the pool should go to the placepot side – 25% to the win part and 10% towards building a rollover which would go to whoever won it on their own (a single punter picking all 6 winners in a week where nobody else did), with a guarantee of a minimum £100,000 bonus to that winner.
I remain convinced that this structure would have earned the Tote an awful lot more money than the current one has, and still produced a few headline winners while deterring the syndicates who have so seriously diluted the bet’s popularity with their frequent raids on rollovers.
Whose idea was it to make it £2 a line, I mean even channel 4 example would cost you £128 for 2 horses per race, while just one more selection in each race would be £1,458 and then the’s no guarantee of getting anything back. At least the jackpot can be done for 10p units and placepot for 5p which when having hundreds of lines makes a huge difference. I think this is why so many syndicates win the scoop 6.
RedRum77, I believed the bet, as originally devised could not only stand a £2 stake (you were getting three chances of winning for that) but that it would act as another deterrent to syndicates.
In the original format – placepot-based – I think this would have held good.
They key for me is that in making it effectively a win bet with a fairly paltry place consolation, at a £2 stake, 75% or more of the potential market was wiped out. That’s the % of punters I estimate who would simply discount the risk-reward ratio at £2 in trying to pick 6 winners.
A long way of saying I agree with you, but believe £2 was realistic in my original structure.
I have no problems with a ‘Saturday special’ bet steeplechasing, and your plan sounded like one that would have given everyone a sporting chance of a pickup, with the added chance of a large win.
It seems to cover both parts of the equation. The small time punter who is chuffed to bits winning £100, and the big players who want the big payday with a ‘saver’ attached to recoup your stake.
What really grates with me with the current format is that it is all or nothing. Six winners (hardly probable in a lifetime) for the pot, five winners and a second and you get a pittance. Rough justice?
On top of that, even IF you luck out and get all six winners most of the pot is tied up on picking the winner of an impossible handicap the following week.
The lottery allows you to get 4 or 5 numbers up and get a nice win, and it’s all good. Not that skill plays a part but you should be compensated with a return for gettingthat
close.
The syndicates issue is valid too. The little guy puts all the money in the pot and the big players then come along and sweep it all up in the usual systematic way. For an outlay of £31k, a 10 man syndicate can have the first five in the betting in all races and have a very good chance of multiplying their investment by 1000 thru 5000% for no effort at all apart from being wealthy enough to lay out £3000 on a bet when the bonus has collected up. Not fair.
It makes more sense, as an ordinary punter, to simply pick six horses and play the 4 and 5 timers, plus a six timer, for 20p’s for a meagre outlay of £4.40, the price of two scoop 6 bets that in reality you have zero chance of picking up a penny from.What really grates with me with the current format is that it is all or nothing. Six winners (hardly probable in a lifetime) for the pot, five winners and a second and you don’t win a penny.
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You would get the place part of the bet for that, RD.Small consolation, but still something.
What really grates with me with the current format is that it is all or nothing. Six winners (hardly probable in a lifetime) for the pot, five winners and a second and you don’t win a penny.
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You would get the place part of the bet for that, RD.Small consolation, but still something.
That was quick lol
You posted while I was editing. Yeah, I corrected that. I actually didn’t know about that until reading steeplechasing’s reply to RR.
The initial observation is still valid though, if you were to pick 5 winners and a 4th in the usual 15 runner handicap of the day. It would be kind of hard to swallow that.Actually, RD, you were right if the second place in question was in a two three or four runner race
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