If you're not starting to see hidden genius in the guy who invented the money-losing "Horse Wizard" slot machine, couldn't come up with a relatively puny down payment for a Maryland slots license and ran Pimlico Race Course into the ground, here's evidence.

Canadian tycoon Frank Stronach, the guy with that string of failures, will continue to run Pimlico and Laurel Park after the tracks emerge from the bankruptcy he created. Nobody emerged to outbid him in last week's planned auction, despite months of speculation and hope.

Bankruptcy let him dump Maryland racing scion Joseph De Francis as a partner in potential slots profits for a fraction of what De Francis might have expected.

And Stronach might even - I never thought I would write this - get slots. His long-shot attempt to outlaw slots next to Arundel Mills mall is still alive and could set the stage for Laurel Park slots if it works.

At least six outfits were said to have expressed interest in Laurel and Pimlico, which have lost business for years to slots-rich, out-of-state tracks despite Pimlico's status as the home of the Preakness Stakes. Several potential bidders went public with their interest, including the De Francis family and Arundel Mills slots developer David Cordish.

But last week - the second attempt to sell the tracks - nobody put money down for a "stalking horse" bid to launch the auction, said people close to the process. That forced creditors to deal with Stronach and sell him back the tracks for basically $100 million and change.

"We had at least six or seven people who were credible parties who were very interested," said Michael Wildish, managing director at Miller Buckfire, the New York banking company that was holding the auction. "We actually came close to signing a stalking-horse agreement with two or three guys."

In the end, however, Laurel Park's doubtful status as a future slots venue kept the stalking horses stuck at the gate, according to Wildish.

"When there is such material uncertainty that could impact value, it is always difficult to get a deal done," he said.

Maybe that really was the reason. Maybe it was the lousy economy and the credit drought. Maybe Cordish and other potential bidders thought auctioneer Miller Buckfire, hired by Stronach's company, Magna Entertainment, would cook the process.

Or maybe nobody wanted to pay $100 million for two aging, unprofitable tracks except a Canadian horse groupie with a history of dumb bets on racing.

Dennis Mills, boss of the Stronach company buying the tracks, talks about developing them like they're in Manhattan at Park Avenue and 85th Street. "Some of the best real estate in America," he told The Baltimore Sun last week.

Don't stay too long waiting for the bulldozers. What Stronach probably really wants, as Mills put it to The Sun, is to "eventually have a gaming experience at one of the racetracks." In other words: slots. Perhaps that would allow the tracks to have a rare profit experience, especially now that De Francis and his partners had to settle for a few million instead of getting roughly half of any slots proceeds for two decades, as their previous deal allowed.

But if Stronach shoved Pimlico and Laurel into bankruptcy to get rid of De Francis, maybe he wasn't so brilliant after all. The bankruptcy cost him enormous sums, maybe more than he would have had to pay the De Francis partners if they all had gained a slots franchise. Stronach failed to keep creditors from claiming the $100 million he's paying for Pimlico and Laurel. And he's still trying to score a slots permit that basically had his name engraved on it when the General Assembly set the conditions for the parlors.

The battle lines just became clearer.

Cordish, whose Laurel-Pimlico interest was seen as Plan B if slots failed at Arundel Mills, will push doubly hard to quash a proposed November referendum on the mall project.

He was "ready, willing and able to bid" on Pimlico and Laurel, he said by e-mail. But he didn't state why he didn't get the process started by becoming the stalking horse. Maybe he's confident he'll prevail with the slots project he already has.

Stronach, for his part, gains even more incentive to keep bankrolling opponents of Arundel Mills slots. If that project fails, the logical place for the Anne Arundel County slots license is Laurel Park. (That's where everybody expected it to go, but Stronach botched the application.) If, by some bizarre spin of the fruit reels, Stronach does get slots, the value of the tracks he just bought back doubles.

But that could chew up years more in legislation, lawsuits and bickering.

If he really is a business genius, Stronach would have figured out how to breathe life into Pimlico and Laurel without slots. If he really does love racing, he would have sold the tracks to Cordish or somebody else instead of continuing to string them along, keeping the lights on and angling for a big jackpot that always seems only a spin away.