TAB MEDIA RELEASE : Minimum TAB Place payout

RELEASED BY: Phumelela Gaming and Leisure Limited

The minimum Place dividend of R1 was not paid on Call Up, winner of Race 4 at Vaal yesterday, because of the deadheat for third place between Farah and Spanish Armada.
The delay in declaring the official payouts for the race resulted in TAB checking with USA-based tote system company Amtote, which manufactured and maintains the computerised tote betting system, that the system had calculated the payouts correctly in terms of the rules.
Amtote confirmed that the system had calculated the payouts correctly in terms of TAB rules and that the minimum payout rule did not apply to any of the placed runners.

TAB apologises for the delay.

Strange logic...You back a horse that easily gets a place and you are penalised cos 2 other horses deadheat BEHIND you...surely logic says that the deadheaters should share the deficit.

I agree, Rob. Perhaps it's a co-mingling issue.

As I understand it, we use a different method of calculating payouts.

The way I thought it worked is that, in South Africa, the nett pool is divided into 3 equal shares. Each share is divided by the number of tickets on the placed horses, resulting in the payout. As you say, the deadheating horses shouldn't affect the payout of the other horses.

In the US, the calculation is different. The total of winning bets on the 3 placed horses is subtracted from the nett pool. That figure, the 'profit', is divided by 3 and then by the number of tickets on each placed horse to get the payout. With this method, the payouts depend on the odds of all 3 placed horses.

On the other hand, maybe it has nothing to do with our method or with the pari-mutuel method and is the result of something else entirely.