Before getting into the race details, I need to explain an important point.
Normally, in horse racing, the viewer’s intent is something similar to this:
“I intend to view the photosite represented by the photo sent to me in email associated with the horse that officially wins this race.”
However, for this contest, the horse that pays the highest total price to win and place is the desired best outcome – and this is not always the winner.
If a longshot finishes 2nd while the winner is a short price (low odds), the place payoff of the longshot will sometimes be larger than the combined win and place totals of the winner.
So, I asked viewers to change their intent for this contest only to
“I intend to view the photosite represented by the photo sent to me in email associated with the horse that has the highest total win and place payoff in this race.”
In three of the 14 contest races, the place horse in fact turned out to pay more to place than the combined win.place totals of the winner (though the difference was relatively small in all 3 cases).
In the other 11 races the winning horse paid best.
Now, it still was a good thing to have the winner in the contest even if it paid less than the place horse – since the total prices are close, and both count towards contest points.
But to officially get a an ARV “Hit”, the viewer must view the photosite associated with the horse that had the highest total to win and place.
Unfortunately, some viewers never got the message about changing this intent, and some of those that did never confirmed that they changed it – I had left it as optional in my message to them (probably a mistake).
So the issue of what is a Hit for these viewings is somewhat muddied.
It is a lesson learned to make this clearer in future contests 😉