With the Santa Anita fall meet coming to a close, Saturday and Sunday are the final days to play the coast-to-coast Pick 5 wager until late December. Sunday’s wager is a mandatory payout. 

We’ve written in the past how the Coast-to-Coast payoffs greatly exceed expectations, so I wanted to revisit those payoffs as we’re nearing the end of the Santa Anita meet.

And we continue to see that the $1 coast-to-coast Pick 5 is one of the best Pick 5 values available. Below, we see how well the coast-to-coast payoffs compare to other tracks in 2024. 

Why are the payoffs consistently good?  

We believe there are several reasons. One of the biggest reasons is that we have seen that any Pick 3, Pick 4 or Pick 5 wagers that feature multiple tracks or non-consecutive races tend to pay better. This is often because these wagers are of less interest to computer wagering teams. 

Through analysis, we have also seen the cross country Pick 5, golden hour Pick 4 and special high minimum Pick 3s pay well and hope to have more about those in the future. 

Obviously, the low 15 percent takeout helps the payoff, and the $1 base wager also helps create value. 

Here are the 2024 Pick 5 payoffs by track through October 24 including the median pool, base wager, median $1 payoff, median $1 parlay, the average number of combinations in the Pick 5 and the payoff vs. parlay comparison.

As with any Pick 5, we would recommend jumping in when you have some opinions to leverage. This weekend’s coast-to-coast features two great opportunities: an all-turf sequence on Saturday and a mandatory payout on Sunday.