Belmont Stakes

Thanks to everyone that stopped by the Horsegrader booth this past Saturday at the Belmont.  What a great day and what an exciting day of racing, especially the Belmont Stakes.  So what question do you think that I was asked the most?  Well, it went something like 'Dude, who do you think is going to win the next race?'.  Two guys were adamant that we handicap Race 9 together, so I called up the race in Horsegrader.  We looked at the following Key Factors screen and saw a Lone Speed horse, #7 - Trinniberg, in a Sprint race (7 furlongs for this race):

Click on the screen for a larger image.

I said that could be a good bet, the guys went away and bet and came back with huge smiles and their winning tickets and said 'Who is going to win the 10th race?'. Once again we called up Horsegrader and went to the Key Factors screen:

Well, they saw another Lone Speed horse and off they went to place another bet before I could tell them that it is tougher for a Lone Speed horse, #4 - Desert Blanc, in a Route race (1 1/4 miles for this race).  Well, Desert Blanc came through with the win.

So after their second win they wanted the three of us to handicap the Belmont Stakes.  I took a little different approach since all the Key Factors would be almost all green for every horse since it was a Grade 1 Stakes race.  I brought up the Race Shape screen in Horsegrader:

Looking at the winning percentages and distance (1 1/2 miles) the track bias favored Stalkers (43%).  Looking at the screen we saw two Stalkers - #3 - Union Rags and #9 - Paynter.  If you watched the race you saw that Union Rags won by a neck over Paynter in an exciting stretch run.  The guys didn't return after the race, but I sure hoped that they did a boxed bet with Union Rags and Paynter!

We had a nice little run of wins, and I did tell them that if I could pick the winner of every race then I wouldn't need to be doing this.

We'll dig deeper into the Horsegrader Race Shape screen in a future Blog entry.