By Jim Freer and Barry Unterbrink
Gulfstream Park has a nine-race card on Friday, with first post of 2:15 p.m.
The Rainbow 6 carryover has grown to $2,616,516.
It will be on Friday’s fourth to ninth races, with the sequence scheduled to start at 3:52 p.m.
The first race has a Super Hi-5 carryover of $7,420.
On Thursday, there were just two tickets with all six winners in the Rainbow 6, and each was paid $84,316.34 on the 20-cent per combination only bet.
The fact that there were multiple winning tickets extends the Rainbow 6 carryover into a 49th day. HorseRacing FLA’S review of Equibase charts indicates that is Gulfstream’s longest-running Rainbow 6 carryover at least since 2015.
The winning program numbers for Thursday’s Rainbow 6 were 1-8-2-2-7-3.
There were just two winning tickets largely because of wins by longshots Sweet Story, at 19-1, in the eighth race and Toss, at 13-1, in the tenth and final race.
Odds on the other four winning horses were between even money and 5-1.
The carryover coming into Thursday was $2.544,245.
Bettors added $301.165 to the Rainbow 6 pool.
Gulfstream took out 20 percent of the new bets. It then divided 56 percent of those bets among the two winning tickets and added 24 percent to the carryover.
Gulfstream pays out the Rainbow 6 jackpot (full carryover plus 80 percent of new bets) only on days when there is just one ticket with all six winners.
On Thursday, it came very close to the jackpot being “taken down”.
Going into the tenth and last race there were 61 live Rainbow 6 tickets. It turned out that only two of those tickets had Toss, who led at every call in winning the one mile turf claiming race for 3-year-olds and up.
Going into the tenth race, there was just one ticket with a horse singled. That was on Salute and Serve, who never threatened and finished seventh in the 11-horse filed
If Salute and Serve had won, that ticket would have paid just under $2.8 million.
What’s Ahead
The Gulfstream spring meet will end on Sunday June 30,
A Florida law requires pari-mutuels to obtain an exemption from the Florida Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering in order to extend a carryover to a next meet.
To end the carryover during the current meet, Gulfstream will soon announce a “mandatory payout day” on which it will pay out the carryover even if there are multiple tickets with all six winners.
Based on Rainbow 6 history, it is likely that Gulfstream will schedule a mandatory payout for Saturday June 29.
That is Gulfstream’s annual Summit of Speed day with five sprint stakes races.
If the carryover continues until June 29, it could be as much as $3.5 million.
In that case, we expect that between $7 million and $10 million would be bet on the Rainbow 6. And 80 percent of that money plus the entire carryover will be divided among tickets with the most winners (probably six).