Earlier this week, officials at Gulfstream Park West (aka Calder) announced that there will be three additions to their betting menu when their meet starts Oct. 7. One is a welcome addition, one is a goofy but fascinating experiment, and one is simply a terrible idea. The happy no-brainer is the addition of a pick five on the first five races to go along with the existing one on the last five each day. The pick five is usually offered at a low takeout and with just a 50-cent minimum, and horseplayers have made it the fastest-growing wager in the sport. It provides pick-six-style action at a vastly reduced cost and frequently pays off with exceptional value. Last Sunday at Belmont Park, winners who paid just $6.30, $5.80, $6, $6.40, and $6.60 combined for a pick-five payoff of $2,498 for $2 (or $624.50 for 50 cents), more than quadruple the $578 parlay. The intriguing experiment is the addition of super high five wagering to all races. On one hand, this is nothing to be applauded. The super high five, which requires picking the first five finishers in a race in precise order, is racing’s least-popular super-exotic bet for a pretty good reason: Handicapping which horses can or cannot finish as low as fifth is largely a fool’s errand, and the wager has never caught on. Taking an unsuccessful once-a-day bet and offering it 10 times a day sounds counterintuitive, but there’s a unique twist to what Gulfstream will be doing: If no one hits the super high five in race 1, the entire payout pool carries over to race 2, and so on throughout the card. If no one hits it on the last race of the day, the pool carries over to the next card. At a $1 minimum, the bet may turn out to be too expensive and random to attract sustained interest. It is, however, an interesting and perhaps ingenious attempt to transform traditional day-to-day carryovers into race-to-race carryovers within a card. It’s conceivable that excitement could build through the course of a day if the bet goes unhit race after race. It also should provide multiple positive-expectation gambling situations, where more will be returned to bettors on an individual race than is wagered on that race. One drawback to the new setup is that bettors who come close will get no cigar, instead of a payout for nailing the first three or four finishers in races where no one tabs all five. On Wednesday night at Mountaineer, which offers a 50-cent super high five only on its last race, no one could do better than picking the first three finishers, who went off at 11-1, 30-1, and 24-1. There was a single winner who scooped up the pool with a 3-7-6-all-all ticket that paid $3,892.80 for 50 cents. Under the Gulfstream plan, that bettor would have gotten nothing, and the $3,892.80 would have carried over to the first race on Thursday’s card. If the bet catches on and draws decent pools, operators might want to consider paying out 25 percent of the net pool in consolations for those who pick the most winners without nailing them all, and carrying over the rest. Consolations are good for churn and customer morale. Maybe it works, maybe it crashes and burns, but it’s worth a try. Gulfstream’s plan is to offer the bet for two months while evaluating whether to continue it during the winter meet, which starts Dec. 5. The idea that should have never made it off the drawing board is the addition of a quinella with a $5 minimum on the last race of the day. It sounds like an April Fool’s joke: Take an anachronistic, wasteful bet and offer it at an exorbitant minimum. Quinellas, where you pick the first two finishers in either order rather than exact order, are a relic of a bygone era of $2 exacta minimums and patrons who could not afford to invest $12 in a race on a three-horse exacta box. The day that exacta minimums dropped to a dollar, the bet became superfluous. Now Gulfstream will be offering a quinella that is more expensive than an exacta. It gets worse. The quinella is a dopey bet because it effectively forces a horseplayer to make both-way exactas in equal strength and get the same reduced payout whether the 3-5 shot beats the 10-1 or the 10-1 shot beats the odds-on favorite. In the exacta, depending on whether you think the favorite is a cinch or can be beaten, you can emphasize your opinion by making a larger exacta one way or the other. Horseplayers understand this, and that’s why the quinella is all but obsolete in Thoroughbred racing. So, now Gulfstream will be resurrecting the dumbest bet in racing at the highest minimum in the game? That’s quite a quinella right there.