GP Friday-- 2:15 First Post, Carryover at $2.6 Milion

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 49^th 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).