Days 13 & 14 - Saratoga Sojurn

For a bunch of years, now, I've been intrigued by horse racing--and the folks that go to see horses race. There's an old school feel to the whole affair: racecourses that date from the late 1800s, even if some of their accouterments are updated to a more modern, and less grand, 1950s sensibility; a mix of the haughty with the hardscrabble, the horsemen with the hawkers, racers with bettors, each trying to make a buck with their own tools and in their respective ways; standing in line, shoulder to shoulder, for decidedly human transactions--verbal bets with their own jargon and process of race number, bet type, amount and horse number. And then, well, there's the whole medieval feel of horses chasing one another. I sometimes wonder if the jockeys shouldn't be draped in chain mail and suited in armor.

Before this summer, I had only ever bet--as most novices do--on big stakes races: the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes. And I had only over been to Belmont's track and only for Belmont Stake Days--the third leg in the Triple Crown each June. But this past July, I went there for the first time not on a Stakes day. It's a beautiful place in its own right. For a mere dollar (one-third of Saratoga's usurious $3 entry fee) it's not a bad place to spend a balmy afternoon. And with a couple of thousand fellow racing fans instead of the 100,000 plus on Stakes day, it was positively relaxing. I bet on a few races and, as always, won nothing.

So when Carl suggested we head up to Saratoga for a few days to see the ponies--and do a little camping in between--I jumped at the chance to see another and much more historic track. I budgeted $100 to lose over a couple of days on fantasical bets of infinitesimal odds with obscene payoffs. It's not unlike playing the lottery.

We arrived in Saratoga on Wednesday, rushed to the track, and picked ourselves up a copy of the Post Parade which contained the day's racing program. Carl gave me a few tips on how to read the past performance records of the horses and then we plunked down a bunch of bets. We won nothing, but left the track amused and looking forward to a night in the woods at a nearby state park in the intervening evening, followed by what would surely be a winning day at the track on Thursday.

We checked in, bought a bushel of firewood, found our way to the tentsite and unpacked the car. It was a great site--flat and level with a minimum of pebbles in the soil. There were no tents nearby, so we looked forward to a quiet night without the yahoos I'm used to bunking down next to at campgrounds. We positioned the tarp and unloaded the firewood. All we needed was the tent.

Well, that and the tent poles to hold the tent up. Which, of course, I left at home, 2oo miles away.

I couldn't have felt more dejected. My job was to bring the tent. And the tentpoles. And now we couldn't camp. I pondered this for a moment and decided to crack open my fifth of bourbon to help me contemplate it a little better. Finally, with the sun setting we realized we'd either need to sleep outside without a tent or get a hotel room nearby.

NEWS FLASH: During racing season in Saratoga there are NO HOTEL ROOMS NEARBY. So we got on our phones and Blackberries and managed to find a room for $160 (upfuckingstate!) for the night about 30 miles away near Lake George. Suddenly, our day's losses were seeming steeper than when we left the track. All the more reason, we determined for ourselves, that we absolutely had to win big on Day 2 at the track. I had some more bourbon.

The next day I modified my approach, remembering a snippet from a book I thumbed through a few years back on racing and betting: real bettors focus on winning horses with marginal payoffs instead of long-shots that pay out thousands. Repeated over time, it's a winning strategy--the Warren Buffet approach to betting. So over the course of the second day--nine races--I bet a series of favored horses and managed to win back enough money in several races to cover my day's bets and the losses at the track from the day before. Not enough for our beds the night before, but enough to leave the track happy.