Post by Peter Gross on May 12, 2009 5:15:38 GMT -5
Turns out that Mine That Bird’s remarkable win in the Kentucky Derby was not the most surprising upset in May. As far as a tote board explosion is concerned, Stinger Blue Chip rattled the bettors the most, roaring up in late stretch to score by length in the $73,500 final of the Diplomat Pacing Series Saturday night, May 9 at Mohawk, and he did so at eye-popping odds of more than 90-1 for catch driver Jason Brewer. The $193.40 he paid almost makes the $103 payoff from Mine That Bird look like small change. Well, not quite.
I was the benificiary of a most unusual payoff last Sunday. If you allow me, I will rant on for hours about the mathematical advantages of playing the daily double. So there I was Sunday, handicapping the first race at Woodbine and I see that Patrick Husbands is almost 5-1 on Sir Heart Throb. Here's a tip. If you
ever see Patrick Husbands at better than 3-1, go to the window, bet heavily. Husbands is so zoned in, it's insane. He could win on a donkey. Sir Heart Throb had a few decent lines, aside from having the track's best jockey on his back I wheeled him in the double with three win the second, making sure to include Sweet Therapy in the second. Sweet Therapy was ridden by Chantal Sutherland, and though I have already characterized Husbands as the best rider on the grounds, it's amazing how many
Sutherland horses produce their highest Beyer number. Rule of thumb - any horse ridden by Chantal has to be considered.
So Husbands wins the first and the horse pays a happy $11.50 to win and Sweet Therapy goes off at 7-2 and pulls away to win the second. That would be the third favourite hooked up with the second favourite and a couple of the track's most bettable riders. So explain me this: How does the double pay $130.50? That's 64-1.If you apply a little math to the two winners, you get about 18-1. So the double returned about 3 1/2 times the value of the win prices.
I didn’t bet the pick 3, but I wish I had. I did hit the third race exactor. The winner paid $13.90. Again, a $2 parlay on the first three winners would have been worth less than $400, but a $1 pick 3 paid $743.45 or more than three and a half times the value of the win prices on the three horses.
It's all about pari-miutuel wagering. Unfortunately only a tiny percentage of the people who go to the track (and virtually no one who doesn't) has the vaguest idea how pari-mutuels work. I won't bore you with a wordy explanation, but suffice it to say, a person at the track with a grasp on the pari-mutuels will
always do better than anyone playing the lotteries or scratch tickets or slots. The afore-mentioned payoffs were posted in advance, so the alert bettor was able to see that there was tremendous value in one betting pool that was not present in another.