The California Horse Racing Board on Thursday approved a request by Santa Anita Park to offer a new bet type that will allow players to select the top three finishers in three consecutive races. The wager, which will be called the "Three by Three," will debut at Santa Anita within the next several weeks, according to Scott Daruty, president of Monarch Content Management, an arm of Santa Anita’s parent company. The aim of the new bet is to “introduce a new concept” to the wagering menu, Daruty said at the meeting.  “We’d like to give it a try and see if it’s successful,” Daruty said. The wager will allow players to select horses to finish in the top three positions in each of three consecutive races, with payouts based on how many horses a player correctly selects in the three-race series. Under the bet rules, the vast majority of the pool will pay out to those players who correctly make all nine selections, but there are payouts available to tickets with as few as three correct selections, spread out over the three-race series. “The best way to think about it is a three-by-three grid, and at the end of the sequence, you look to see how many of your boxes got filled in,” Daruty said in an interview after the hearing. The bet will have a $1 minimum and a 22 percent takeout. The bet will not be made available to computerized account-wagering teams, Daruty said. The bet’s availability also will be initially limited to wagering sites that are customers of AmTote, the bet-processing company owned by 1/ST Racing, Santa Anita’s parent, due to programming changes that need to be made to enable calculations of the bet’s payoffs. AmTote’s customers include XpressBet, which is the account-wagering company owned by 1/ST. :: Get the Inside Track with the FREE DRF Morning Line Email Newsletter. Subscribe now.  “We’re not really tied up in this being an instant success, so we’re hoping that if it is a success, the other tote companies will put in the time and work,” Daruty said in the interview. The vast majority of the pool, 92.7 percent, will be distributed to players who correctly select all nine horses in the proper position, according to documents 1/ST provided to the board. Approximately 5.6 percent will go to tickets with eight correct selections, all the way down to 0.06 percent for those with either three or four correct selections. A winner of any share of the pool also will be eligible for the payouts from smaller shares. For example, if a player’s ticket has eight of nine correct, the player also will get pay outs from the minor shares for seven correct, six correct, five correct, and three or four correct. The shares will carry over to the next day if no one has a ticket eligible for the payout, including all nine correct. “We’ve tried to come up with a wager where there’s a lot more opportunities to win,” Daruty said. The request was approved unanimously by the board. Oscar Gonzales, vice chairman of the board, said that he supported Santa Anita’s attempt to try out a new wager as well as the company’s decision to limit the bet to so-called “retail players,” a term that is being used in racing to describe those players who are not associated with computerized-assisted wagering teams. CHRB funding formula being discussed Also at the meeting, stakeholders in California racing who are responsible for providing the funding for the CHRB’s annual budget told the board that they have begun meeting to iron out different proposals that may shift some of the funding responsibilities. Bill Nader, president of the Thoroughbred Owners of California, told the board that a committee set up to discuss the proposals met for the first time Tuesday. The proposals are based on whether to give more weight to the total number of race dates for each racetrack or the amount of handle generated by each race date when determining the percentages the tracks pay to cover the CHRB’s “direct costs.” Currently, according to officials, the formula for direct costs gives more weight to handle, which means that Santa Anita and Del Mar pay higher shares than Los Alamitos, Golden Gate, and the Northern California fairs, relative to race dates. Santa Anita and Del Mar are favoring a new formula that would give more weight to race dates. The discussions are taking place at a time when Northern California interests are attempting to put together a new circuit in the wake of the anticipated closure of Golden Gate Fields this summer. Golden Gate Fields is owned by 1/ST Racing, which announced the closure late last year but then agreed to race six more months in 2024. Northern California interests contend that an agreement to use a new formula based more on race dates for the coming fiscal year would put “an unnecessary burden” on the plan to rework a Northern California circuit around the fairs, according to Larry Swartzlander, executive director of the California Association of Racing Fairs. “I want to work together on this and make it right, but the timing’s not good,” Swartzlander said. Scott Chaney, executive director of the CHRB, introduced the topic to the board so that the board’s members would be apprised of the ongoing negotiations on any new proposal, which would have to go in front of the board for approval. “This is a tough situation,” Chaney said. “Part of the reason this is coming up is because money is tight all around.” :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.