Just Tattered Flag. We still don't know the names of Nolte's horse, nor Farina/Hoffman's $2M Irish horse with the "plain head".

Oh, and Nolte's horse was sired by Delphi.

So that's three names, and two of them are dead.

Ha - thanks for that. And thanks for your commentary -- it is excellent.

Deadwood is in my top 5 as well (The Wire is #1), absolutely love the show.

You could be right, Luck has several of the ingredients to do it, I just have a hard time seeing it happening based on the cast (which is solid, just doesn't have many incredible actors). Unless the writing for Hoffman's character is Al Swearengen-level great, and Hoffman turns in an A++ performance, it has an uphill battle to be better than shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

opening song - my fav track from last years fifa

ya it for sure won't be easy or assumed.....just was really impressed with the premier and if he can keep up that level of execution and build on it great things are going to happen.

but i'm in the camp of its silly to try and rank great shows against each other....just be happy they exist and you got to see em all.

Can someone clarify for me why the potential payouts for the pick six in the eighth race were so spread out? The four horse pays 48k, while the six pays ~3m. Why is that?

It depends on how many people hold pick 6 tickets that would win on each horse. The whole prize pool was ~2.6 million. If one of the 48k horses had won that means that there would have been 55 winning pick 6 tickets, and the winners would have split the jackpot. With the two long shot horses, that group of degens had the only winning ticket, so they'd get the whole jackpot pool themselves. IIRC there was a couple of 1.3 million horses (2 winning tickets out), a couple of 325k horses (8 winning tickets out), etc.

Awesome. That makes much more sense now.

Longshots...how do they work?

(Sorry, couldn't stop myself.)

BTW, I think my favorite character so far might be Renzo ("I got my disability!"). He might turn into this show's Richardson. The way he walks makes me laugh. The look on his face as the last race started, when the pressure inside his head was building, and he finally had to admit he had no idea what he was watching, and he desperately blurted something like, "Somebody please tell me what's going on!" He went from, "I'm going to watch this race with a studied eye," to chewing his nails nervously, to "Holy crap, I don't know where to begin!" in about two seconds.

ytf,
thanks for the rundown.
the only reason I could follow the show is that I do know the horse game. (relatives owned and trained horses)

I really needed subtitles.

funniest part was escalante so happy that the horse finally took a crap
really enjoyed the racing scenes. there were a couple where right in the middle I was thinking "how the hell did they get that shot"

Man this show is going to be so awesome. I have serious doubts that it will make it to the third season though.

Just have to hope that star power + prestige push HBO to give this show a full run. Not sure how much the budget is for the show but it shouldn't cost too much to shoot like deadwood but the cast probably costs a lot.

I know how longshots work. What didn't make sense to me is how a huuuuge longshot like a pick six could possibly only pay out 48K, but the possibility of so many people having the same pick did not occur to me.

Enjoyed the episode but it was definitely confusing. I have faith that I will be up to speed in a few episodes but it was still a bit frustrating.

Probably answered by YTF but i haven't had time to carefully read through all his posts yet:

What was the point of focusing on horse 8 if it was just going to snap and lose, but the guys still scoop the 2+ mil?

This sounds wrong, can someone confirm/deny?

just saw the pilot last night, loved it.

anyone know what they meant by referring to poker players as 'ricers'? Ive never heard that before/have no idea what that means.

They are talking ab the asian guys in the preview that are playing cards with one of the degens.

Confirm. What part of it sounds wrong to you?

Remember, most P6 players don't bet $2 on it and try to catch lightning in a bottle. Many spend $100s, some spend $1000s when the carryover (progressive) gets this big. Even the "fleas", the always-broke super-degens, spend $20-30 on their P6 tickets. There are usually a lot of live tickets going into the final race--and most of them will include the favorite.

Another thing to point out: The southern California horse racing circuit (Santa Anita, Hollywood Park, and Del Mar) is the major leagues of horse racing. Yes, NY (Saratoga/Aqueduct/Belmont) isn't far behind, and KY and FL have huge circuits as well, but SoCal is the cream of the crop. These top-flight horses are more consistent, and tend to run "truer to form". What this means to this conversation is this: SoCal racing is "chalky". Favorites win there a lot.

For this reason, Pick6 tickets are usually chock-full of favorites (pardon the pun). A 12-to-1 horse like Escalante's will wipe out a huge chunk of the live P6 tickets. A bomb like the one that won the last race, will often wipe out just about everybody.

When you're filling out your P6 slip, you'd love to put ALL the horses on your ticket to make sure you win. But you can't afford to do that, you have throw out almost all of the horses. And it's TOUGH to throw out a favorite. By definition, he's the horse most likely to win. Not only that, but you feel so foolish when you throw out a favorite and it wins. That's why almost all the live tickets going into the final race had the favorite on them, and why the payout on that horse was a mere fraction of winning the whole pool.

There were only two horses that could scoop the P6 for our heroes. One of them was coming down the lane like a champion, ready to fly past everybody. That certainly caught their eye. Even Gary Stevens, who had $0 bet on the race, was excited by (and focused on) this horse's stretch run. To the trained eye, it was clearly her race to win.

After she blew up, they were like, Oh well, where's our other bomb? Oh, moving into the lead? You don't say! It must be our lucky day!

I've never bet a pick 6 and while all this sounds right, why were they worried that the security guard bet the same ticket?

From what I remember they seemed like they didn't know if their payout was going to be cut in half until they asked the guard if he bet it also. So this wouldn't make sense if the payout numbers had already figured that in.

I just assumed it was a combination of the odds of every horse that won, like a trifecta. I never really thought about how the carryover was added on since I never bet those type of tickets.

From what I can piece together from the pilot and the preview, I think a big storyline is going to be the mob trying to get back into the casino business by buying that race track then pushing through legalized table games at all CA race tracks. As this is going on, Dustin Hoffman is going to be playing his own angles to try to get revenge on whatever specific guys were responsible for him having to do 3 years. I think there is going to be a lot more going on than just the horse racing stuff, and I think it's going to have a much wider appeal than John from Cincinnati.

They discussed the security guard after their 4th win. It was still too soon to tell what it would pay, but the existence of an identical ticket would make it impossible to scoop. It would certainly affect their payout in some way, and could conceivably cost them half the pot. DUCY?

Heh, trifectas are not paid based by "the odds of every horse". It's a pool, too.

Found a preview video that I hadn't seen before, titled "Invitation to the Set". I guess those of you who don't want anything spoiled shouldn't open it, even though it doesn't spoil anything. I was glad to see a Deadwood actor for about one second in this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz9bUaxcxBI

YTF,
I was under the impression the total winnings shown on the big board are different for each horse because of the the different odds for each horse. It is possible the tickets will be split, but they wouldn't show that on the big board.