The Calcutta Explained – Fun Form

CHRISTINE Smith has organised the official Horse Festival Calcutta for more than 20 years and was happy to explain how the Calcutta is conducted to encourage new people to come along, enjoy the atmosphere and get the inside word from racing enthusiasts on their predictions for the Scone Cup.

Ticket sales begin at 5pm and close at 8pm. The race call and auction beings at 8:30pm. The restaurant opens at 6pm and Happy Hour is 6:60pm-7:30pm at the Scone Sporties, Aberdeen Street, Scone.

ADVICE TO PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T BEEN BEFORE

It’s the atmosphere and it’s building up the atmosphere to Cup day, there are quite few people there that are genuine punters who look at what the horses are going for and they compare them to what the bookies are saying, whether they are 5 to 1 or 100 to 1.

Jonathon Darcey from Inglis sets the order in which we sell the horses and he gets the information from one of the leading bookmakers.

Jonathon is one of the directors of Inglis and Sons, he and his boys do the auction; it’s all very professional.

Jonathon gets the bookmaker to list the horses how that bookmaker is going to rate them.

We sell tickets so it’s a bit like a raffle, we sell tickets for $2 each, from 5.30pm till 8.00pm then we have a barrel with all the tickets in it and we have another container with all the horses in the Scone Cup.

We sell the emergencies first and then the one that the bookmaker thinks is 100 to 1 is next off, whatever the bookmaker thinks is the favourite is the last one to sell.

A horse is drawn and a ticket is drawn until all the horses are drawn.

Those people that draw a horse, when it comes to the auction they have the option to either buy it back or sell it.

If they choose to buy it back they only pay a half the purchase price, if they choose to sell it, half the purchase price goes into the pool for the Calcutta and half goes to the person that draws the horse.

If they happen to draw one of the least favourites it might sell for $100 dollars.

If they draw a horse that some of those in the know think has a great chance of winning the cup it might go for $2,000 or $3,000.

If you are fortunate enough to draw a horse, you had a win anyway.

If you choose to sell it you have gained half the purchase price, if you choose to purchase it yourself you only pay half of the purchase price.

The Calcutta pool starts with the sales of the tickets.

Say we sell four thousand tickets there’s eight thousand dollars to start off the pool then you sell the horses.

The bidding gets quite heated and rapid, particularly on the ones that are the more fancied horses.

Sometimes you might be lucky and put $10 dollars in so you get five tickets in a barrel of four thousand and you draw a horse.

There are other people that buy $200 worth of tickets and don’t draw a horse, it’s the luck of the draw.

If it’s one of the least fancied they might choose to buy it, if it sells for $100 dollars they only pay $50 dollars, they’ve got a chance, there might be an upset and they come, say third, they might get two and a half thousand for their fifty dollar outlay.

The next day when the Scone Cup is run, the Calcutta prize pool is distributed, 60 percent of the pool goes to the person that buys the winning horse, 20 percent to the second place getter, 10 percent to the third place getter and 10 percent usually goes to charity, but because we run it as the Horse Festival which is not-for-profit, the Horse Festival committee gets the 10 percent to go towards next years Festival.

RABS CALLS THE RACE

Warren “Rabs” Turner does the phantom call, his call is basically like a race call but he stops just before the  finish line and you don’t actually know who wins it or he will give the name of one of the favourites as the winner.

He has been doing the phantom call for me for quite a number of years, the arrangement we have is that he will continue to do the phantom call until he picks the winner, and he hasn’t.

He has been doing the phantom call for 12 or 15 years.

His mum dobbed him in, Rhonda said one year that ‘Warren doesn’t mind doing that sort of thing, I’ll line him up for you’.

So she put him into it and his comment was that I am there anyway.

The first year I did it his syndicate came second and it took me a couple of days to work out where they were until somebody said to me, don’t worry they will come and find you, they’ll be racing.