Alright, let’s start with some terminology first.
First, there’s the “Frame”(Thank you very much to Umameshi for having an easier to understand explanation for beginners). Horse numbers are assigned at random and depending on the amount of participants in a race, two or more horses will end up in the same “frame”, which will be indicated in the track by the Jockey’s helmet. This doesn’t mean they’re a team, and it’s just for betting purposes.
As these graphics from JRA-Van illustrate, in bigger races a “frame” can be up to three horses.
Next, there’s 勝馬投票券 (Kachi Uma Touhyouken). This is just the legal name for the betting ticket for a horse. It’s often shortened to 賭け札 (Anafuda) or just “Betting Card”. Currently, in the JRA’s central circuit there are nine types of bets.
There’s 単勝 (Single Wins, who wins a race), 複勝 (Multiple Wins, the pick ends in the top 3), 枠連 (Frame, you decide a frame and if any horse of that frame ends first or second you win), 馬連 (Quinella, picking two that might end at first or second place), ワイド (Wide, you pick two horses and any of them end first to third place), 馬単 (Single Horse, first and second place match exactly), 3連複 (Triplet, you pick three and those three end up in the top three in any order), 3連単 (Trifecta, The same but they end up in the exact places you bet on), and WIN5 (pick the winners of five races that day).
WIN5 is not to be confused with WINS, the JRA’s betting stations across the country. Though the name IS meant to be a pun on how similar it looks to WINS.
There’s also the “Odds”, the less likely the odds of a horse winning (often determined by their record, popularity, and the bets to its name in a race), the bigger the payout. So a 20.8 odds bet means that the horse isn’t a favorite to win, but if you bet on it and it wins, you’ll get 20.8x your bet (with different betting methods paying differently).
Still with me? Don’t blink.
Up next, there’s ころがし or “Rolling”. The “rolling” in this case refers to “rolling over”, ころがし (Korogashi) refers also to the act of buying and selling repeatedly. In horse racing it refers to the act of putting all the earnings of one bet into another one. It’s nothing flashy but just the name given to putting money from one bet to the next in hopes of multiplying the money, often done with safe bets.
Got all that? Now I can get to the actual fun part.
In the second anniversary stream, amongst all the new girls announced, one was called Hishi Miracle. After the stream I started looking up all the new girls to get more familiar with them (which definitely made Jungle Pocket’s appearance at the in-game anniversary story more fun). In the process I found out about the story of “Uncle Miracle” (“ミラクル”おじさん).
In short, Uncle Miracle is a man, by most accounts of witnesses in WINS Shimbashi Just Some Middle Aged Dude, that walked away with 199,186,000 yen, or around 1,718,009 of 2003’s USD.
But the short part doesn’t paint the full picture of what makes this so… fascinating.
Uncle Miracle came to the 2003 Takarazuka Kinen putting a bet of 12.22 million yen on Hishi Miracle. All that was known is that it was a rolled bet.
It’s known that it was rolled over from the Yasuda Kinen, which was won by Agnes Digital (4th most popular with 9.4 odds), and the payout was 12.22 million yen which means the original bet was around 1.3 million yen.
The popular theory says that this was a second rolled over bet from a past race. Said past race is, in this theory, attributed to either the Nihon Derby that Neo Universe won (1st most popular, 2.6 odds, a theoretical bet of 500.000 yen) OR the NHK Mile Cup that Wink Krueger won (9th most popular, 26.0 odds, a theoreitcal bet of 50.000 yen).
Neo Universe is another one announced with Hishi Miracle funnily enough.
Regardless of the path there. On the Saturday before Takarazuka Kinen, Hishi Miracle was the most popular horse for it with odds of around 1.7, even if the attention was set on Neo Universe and Symboli Kris S’ confrontation on it.
Then, at around 11:00 am of that Saturday, a man came to WINS Shimbashi in order to roll his bet from the Yasuda Kinen earlier, where he bet 1.3 million yen and now had 12.22 million that they wanted to put on another bet, a single victory bet while at it. And at that point Hishi Miracle was the most popular one.
As the moment of the race approached, however, the hype for Symboli Kris S and Neo Universe rose and Hishi Miracle went down in popularity to 6th place, putting its odds at… 16.3. These odd were inflated due to the fact that there were less Single Victory bets for it aside from the one guy that decided to put all 12.22 million to its name, which also skewed the way the system calculated the bets.
And so, that fateful day, some random guy that put his bet in early before they shifted, walked out with more money than the actual first place prize money of that Takarazuka Kinen (which was at 132 million).
Oh, and Neo Universe and Symboli Kris S? 4th and 5th place respectively.