Mr. Abbate is a stooper, a racetrack denizen who sees a bounty in the endless quantities of betting slips tossed aside by others. The idea is to sort through enough discarded slips to come away with a few winners mistakenly discarded by distracted or inexperienced horseplayers.

Stoopers have long been part of horse racing subculture, prowling the fringes of the tracks for found money. They once swarmed tracks like Belmont, but with advances in computerized betting and declines in crowds, few remain.

“The golden years are over,” said Mr. Abbate, a computer systems technician from nearby Valley Stream, N.Y. “You still have people who make a living at it. I just do it on the weekends.”

But in special years when a horse is bidding for the Triple Crown, as American Pharaoh was on Saturday, there are so many attendees at the Belmont Stakes that it becomes the Super Bowl of stooping, attracting voucher vultures from all over the country to swoop in on the blizzard of betting slips left behind.

By the eighth race on Friday, Mr. Abbate was scooping tickets outside by the finish line as a roar steadily built among the crowd. Javier Castellano was riding Rock Fall to an impressive victory some 100 yards away on the track, and Mr. Abbate could not have cared less.