By Jim Freer and Barry Unterbrink
The Rainbow 6 was hit on just one ticket at Gulfstream Park on Friday — and the holder of that ticket took down a jackpot of $2,211,783 on the 20-cent per combination only bet.
It was the only ticket that had Resident Liberal (5), the winner of the ninth and final race, along with the winners of the other five Rainbow 6 races.
The program numbers of the six winners were 5-1-3-9-6-5.
The winning ticket collected the entire coming in carryover of $1,965,547 plus 80 percent of the day’s new Rainbow 6 bet of $307,901.
As of 9:00 p.m. Friday, Gulfstream had not disclosed the identity of the winning bettor or information about the size of the wining waging ticket.
The winning ticket for a single bettor will severely dampen what Gulfstream management had hoped would be a huge betting day in the Rainbow 6 on Sunday. On that day, Gulfstream will have a mandatory payoff of the entire carryover — no matter the number of winning tickets.
If the carryover had continued into Sunday we expect that it would have been about $2.2 million–and that it would have attracted $5 million or more in new Rainbow 6 bets. Now, we anticipate that about $1 million in Rainbow 6 betting is likely on Sunday.
The carryover had grown because Gulfstream had gone 46 straight race days without the jackpot/carryover payoff requirement of just one ticket with the winners of all six Rainbow 6 races.
On non-mandatory payoff days when there are multiple winning tickets, Gulfstream takes out 20 percent of the day’s Rainbow 6 bets. Of those bets, it then divides 56 percent among tickets with the most winners (usually 6) and adds 24 percent to the carryover.
This Saturday is a non-mandatory payoff day for the Rainbow 6.
Gulfstream will have 14 races with first post at 12:00 p.m. The Rainbow 6 will be on races nine to 14 with the sequence scheduled to start at 3:55 p.m. Last post is listed at 6:36 p.m., a $10,000 claiming race.
On Sunday, the last day of the 2019 summer meet, Gulfstream will have eleven races with first post of 1:15 p.m.
The Rainbow 6 will be on races six to eleven with the sequence scheduled to start at 4:00 p.m.
The Gulfstream Park West meet, held at Calder, will open next Wednesday October 2. Gulfstream did not make a special request with Florida gaming regulators to extend any carryovers into that meet.