Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Tuesday Notes

Good morning racing fans!

Barry Irwin is stoked with the O'Neill thing and Bill Finley wrote a good piece saying what a lot of folks want to say. Bill is up for Barry's Award.

Tweet of the Day:
The decision on Kentucky Downs-Churchill Downs September dates might be today. Bettors want KD, some horsemen want CD. I scratched my head a little about the Churchill Downs stabling question. It's not like folks who stable at Churchill Downs with dirt horses have nowhere to race. When Turfway was on, the non-poly horses had nowhere to go, and for most of 2014, Indiana Downs has gotten them.

Santa Anita's daily double obsession is not really an obsession with fans. They did not meet that "guarantee" yesterday, and the cross country thingy is no great shakes. Both bets have a 20% takeout, which is higher than last meets 18% (and higher than NYRA's 18.5% in the cross country case). Seriously, that's odd folks. Do you ever see a company increase prices, then spend money marketing the item? "Hey, we upped our Big Mac to $4 instead of $3, come in and we'll guarantee you get special sauce on it". 

Balmoral Park's 15% juice pick 4 had a carryover (that we mentioned) on Sunday. With some good promo, over $100,000 in new money was spent, and the payoff was a whopper - a pool shot for over $120k. Some person from Brooklyn cashed.

There are very few tracks left without gimmicks or large carryovers where we can make a score. Did you notice that? Keeneland used to be, because you could get a fairly logical superfecta that paid $20k, or a good deep pick 4 sequence that paid good, and it would happen almost once a day. NYRA at times has that, but not really much anymore. Really all I see is Woodbine. This past week the handle is up 11.3% year over year, field size has been good, and if you handicap, you can usually find something to take a shot on. They're another track talking about going back to dirt. If they're smart, I don't think they will. Handle is up over 25% the last several years and with 'all-weather' they can keep field size up. Spring and fall in TO can bring a lot of poor weather at times.

Have a nice Tuesday everyone.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Here is another barometer. After two weeks Hawthorne's percentage of winning favorites is 31%, a very bettor friendly number. The move to drop Sundays and go with a four day racing week is about to pay dividends with the larger fields getting bigger play.
In the spring, Keeneland had the lowest percentage of winning favorites in the country at only 26% on the polytrack. That number in the fall on the new dirt surface has risen to an unthinkable 40%. That's an increase of 14 points. Not good.
Based on their solid start and Indiana closing in two weeks I have a feeling that the Hawthorne handle and field sizes will be soaring.

Michael A

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