Horse racing: World Pool debut boosts Ellerslie’s star-studded Karaka Millions

Crocetti in action. Photo / Natasha Wood

Ellerslie is set to save the hottest for last on Karaka Millions night with the new Group 1 addition to the glamour race meeting which will bring viewers from around the world with it.

Saturday’s enormous twilight meeting has been bolstered by the addition of the $700,000 Sistema Railway, usually held on New Year’s Day but moved to this Saturday and set to be star-studded.

Exceptional 3-year-old fillies Alabama Lass and Captured By Love will take on the older sprinters in our most elite sprint, which will be the last of the six races staged on Saturday.

It will be one of the three races covered by World Pool, the international betting product, which will be conducted on a New Zealand race meeting for the first time,

For a meeting to be eligible for World Pool status it must have at least one Group 1 race carded, that box ticked by the transfer of the Railway.

World Pool is powered by the racing behemoth which is the Hong Kong Jockey Club and give punters in at least 25 countries the opportunity to bet into the same tote pool.

That can create enormous pools for win, place, quinella, trifecta and even double trebles, the latter two something of forgotten bet types in New Zealand because of smaller pool size.

World Pool races also mean increased exposure in overseas markets and its New Zealand debut will be on the Karaka Million Two-Year-Old, Three-Year-Old and the Railway, the last three races at Saturday’s twilight meeting.

World Pool’s greatest advantage is for bigger win or place punters or those who likes exotic bets but are put off my smaller pools sometimes not providing true value for a trifecta or a treble, whereas in World Pool races those returns will more truly reflect of the market.

World Pool races can also provide punters will value as horses with international jockeys, like Blake Shinn and Craig Williams who both ride at Ellerslie this Saturday, can be over bet and therefore under-priced, pushing out other dividends.

Put simply: A Hong Kong-based punter having a bet on Saturday is more likely to back a Blake Shinn ridden horse trained by Te Akau then a horse trained in a New Zealand stable he has never heard and ridden by a lesser known jockey. Ipso facto, Saturday’s longshot’s prices could get a lot longer.

“It is a wonderful acknowledgement of New Zealand racing,” says Entain NZ boss Cameron Rodger.

“It shows the worth and merit of moving the Railway to make this possible and is a real tick of approval for the standard of this meeting and how New Zealand racing is viewed.

“It is going to mean a lot more eyeballs on the meeting and same again on Champions Day [March 8] and that can only be good for the industry.”

New Zealand punters betting into World Pool don’t have to do anything different except it only applies to tote bets, not the increasingly-popular fixed odds betting.

For all the class and razzle dazzle of the Karaka Millions races on Saturday the Railway could be the highlight of the night with Alabama Lass and Captured By Love up against Crocetti, Babylon Berlin, Waitak, Sacred Satono.

Another 3-year-old Poetic Champion still has the option of either the Railway or the $250,000 Cambridge Stud Alamanzor Trophy, for 3-year-olds but also over 1200m, as his target on Saturday.

Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s racing editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.