JC / Railbird

Betting Archive

All That Way

… to get DQ’d. Sounds like Bill Finley’s Italian experience was more frustrating than the takedown of Admiral Bird last Friday, although for my money, the worst disqualification so far this year happened at Keeneland, April 12.

Posted in Betting on July 9, 2008

Slumming

What’s a degenerate gambler to do when he’s off on a Monday but his wife’s working? Why, bet Finger Lakes and Fort Erie, of course!
Anyone reading who has tips for the Monday tracks (a list that also includes Delaware, Philly, Prairie, Colonial, Indiana, and Yavapai) please leave a comment.
Update: And so ends the Monday afternoon betting experiment. I played three pick fours and went 2/12. That’s right, I managed just two winners among a dozen races. There was a race at Finger Lakes I went five deep in a field of seven, and the two horses I didn’t use completed the exacta! Brutal day.

Posted in Betting on June 23, 2008

It’s a Mirage; I’m Tellin’ Y’all it’s Sabotage

After seeing what the pick four paid on Tuesday at Colonial Downs (races four through seven), I’ve decided to focus on the track in the hope of securing a similar overlay using two 9-to-2 horses and two favorites.
After taking care of my husbandly duties at home (e.g., walking/feeding the dog, laundry, starting dinner), I settled in with my Friday Colonial PPs, my Equineline account, and my Pilot G-2 05 blue pen to begin handicapping the twilight pick four.
Much to my dismay, some of the races aren’t coming up on Formulator.
No matter, I’ll just tackle that two-year-old MSW race (the sixth) by looking up some pedigrees and trying to unearth some juvenile and/or turf form. Whoa there, big fella! Nothing doin’ there either. Equineline accepts my orders but cannot retrieve the actual information.
Clearly this is a bipartisan conspiracy (have you ever seen Democrats and Republicans get along as well as they did today at the Congressional hearing?) to keep people from participating in Thoroughbred racing.
Many of us saw/heard firsthand the horseplayer getting ignored during the hearing, and the subcommittee has already put its words into action by keeping us from handicapping our favorite tracks.
At the very least, NYRA heard I started my boycott of its signal over the takeout increase, and it has made all information to other tracks inaccessible to me.
Either way, I’m getting out my tin foil hat.
Seriously, though … check out those charts I linked to (races four through seven) and tell me how that pick four returned $2,900+ for a deuce.

Posted in Betting on June 19, 2008

Increase Takeout, Decrease Wagering

I can only assume that many of the people who populate the Thoroughbred racing corner of the blogosphere also wager on the product, so it was with some surprise that I surveyed the landscape and found that only Steve Crist mentioned (with appropriate outrage) that New York will increase the takeout on its bets to 1%.
As one commenter on the Cristblog noted, some mucky-mucks cited New York’s “relatively low takeout” compared to other states. This holds true in the WPS pools and possibly in the two-horse wager pools (DD and exacta), but the trifecta, superfecta, and pick N pools were never a bargain at 25% and are even less so at 26%.
To me, an increase in takeout is far more grievous than Breeders’ Cup Ltd. moving the female races to Friday or renaming the Distaff the Ladies Classic. I realize that both changes rubbed people the wrong way, but the change is made in the spirit of trying something new in the hopes of increasing interest.
A raise in takeout, however, is nothing but a spit in the face to the game’s customers, the people who largely conduct the economic engine. I just plain don’t understand why anyone would want to support that kind of treatment by funneling their hard-earned dollars into New York’s wagering pools — especially those with the 26% takeout.
The only thing I like more than horse racing is a good old-fashioned boycott, and I am already looking forward to focusing my summer wagering dollars on Arlington, Ellis, and Del Mar. That is, away from Saratoga.

Posted in Betting on June 17, 2008