Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Looking Deeper Into the Mail-It-In Race

For those of us who like to try and scope out pick 4 and 5 tickets, we all know the mail-it-in race. It's a race where nothing particularly catches our eye, and the logicals look, well, logical. In our mind we convince ourselves we can get by with the 2, 3 and 5 and we're done with it. We have bigger fish to fry in the other legs where we have strong opinions. 

Sometimes these races can bite us, because we did just that - the same thing everyone else is doing. 

Recently, I loved a sequence at Gulfstream, where two horses looked like strong keys. When I reached the 5th leg of the pick 5, I saw the quintessential mail it in race. It was one of those Gulfstream maiden claimers, with three first time starters, two from a well known barn with nice works, one from a mom and pop barn who looked okay, but meh,, and one horse who looked to have decent figs, with the rest of the field dreadful. 

Looking for other ideas I decided to check the track cappers. But they were mailing it in too, with comments like, "this barn doesn't fire with firsters, but these two firsters worked well" and they picked them one-two. 

Maybe I needed to mail-it-in, too. But, thinking about it, I thought I should do a little more work and look deeper for opportunity to zag while everyone zigs. I decided to look at the mom and pop firster. This barn had one first time starter earlier in the meet who was 30-1 and didn't hit the board. Yawn. However, it was probably worth watching a replay, and what I saw was definitely interesting. The colt showed strong speed from the inside rail post, made the lead, and carried it right into the lane, at times looking like a winner. Then the horse just stopped, coming 6th or 7th. Interestingly, he was not back in two months later, so one could assume something may have happened to him to make him stop. 

Their current FTS's works were fine, spaced well and the horse looked fit. 

In a mail-it-in race, is this not a strong A horse at 15-1 morning line?

Typing this you can assume what happened - the horse engaged all the way around the track, was asked at the top of the lane and won by a widening 5. He was the sixth choice in the pick 5 and other serial bets. 

He was a perfect horse, in a perfect race. The modelers and teams couldn't be on the horse, and everyone was mailing it in. 

Mail-it-in races are sometimes exactly that - a race to get by with three or four logicals. But when we have to convince ourselves the logicals are the winners, after we see hole after hole in them, they aren't so logical at all. This type of race can often present us with an ideal chance to dig deeper and strike. 

Have a nice Tuesday everyone.  

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Congrats! There ya go! Insight includes putting in deeper analysis than most players want to put into a race. Watching previous races carefully is a methodology that goes along with what you wrote about in the previous post. And it works the other way around, too. If the maiden claimer or even straight maiden race Captain Obvious/current chalk got the clearest of trips last race to just miss, it probably won't happen again.

IMO if there's any situation where you don't want to mail it in, it's a maiden race, the graveyard of pick-X tickets. Yeah, it takes more time and you come up with the obvious chalk more times than not. But most serious players wouldn't take the easy 'capping route for claimers or allowance races.

So there's your edge over many otherwise good players.

Al the K

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