Day 66 – Friday, October 21, 2011

Posted on October 21, 2011 by andyscoggin

Here is the first Place Pick 6 ticket posted on the new AndyScoggin in NJ website.  This Friday card has 8 races, so the PP6 runs from races three through eight.  Post time for race 3 is around 1:50pm ET.  Here is today’s $ 24 ticket:  3,5 with 3,4,5 with 2,6 with 2,6 with 7 with 6,8.

UPDATE – 4:45pm – Five out of six in today’s PP6 and that included three exactas. In the last leg we had a third place finish to get knocked out of the PP6.  Three exactas in the PP6 sequence meant we would have had EIGHT winning tickets.

If you haven’t had a chance to read the previous post Playing the Place Pick 6, I hope you take the time to do so.

Posted in Monmouth Park, Place Pick 6 | Leave a comment

Playing the Place Pick 6

Posted on October 20, 2011 by andyscoggin

This is an article I wrote about how to play the Place Pick 6.  It is a lot of fun if you haven’t given it a try.

In recent years Monmouth Park has been willing to try new wagers.  For the Breeders Cup in 2007, the low take-out 50¢ minimum Pick 5 was unveiled for the first time.  That Pick 5 wager has swept across the country and has caused most tracks to change their minimum bets on the Pick 4 to 50¢.

In 2011, the new bet is the 50¢ low take out Place Pick 6.  A winning ticket requires you to just pick a horse to finish first or second in six consecutive races.  At Monmouth those are races 4 through 9.  If nobody successfully picks six place horses then there is a carryover and there is never a consolation pay out for five out of six.

In this first year the handle has averaged around $10,000, which is similar to the amount wagered on the Pick 5 when it first appeared.  The largest pools occurred when amazingly there were carryovers. This has happened twice producing a pool of over $25,000.

In the first 52 days of the Monmouth meeting the payouts have ranged from $7.25 to $6,404.70 on the base 50¢ wager.  Most interesting is that very high prices are just as common as the very low ones.  There have been eight Place Pick 6 results of over $1,000 and eight that paid less than $50. There have been successful cashes of 50¢ tickets for $4,846, $3,390, and $3,065. When I began playing the wager in May I would never have expected such large payouts. In addition there have been five more winners in the $500 to $1,000 range and 18 between $100 and $500.  The last 13 fell in the range of $50 and $100.

Since the Place Pick 6 payouts have such a wide range it is extremely important to cash as often as you can and for as much money as possible. The most desirable result should include cashing more than once on any individual winning ticket.  This can happen when you have both the first and second place finishers in any given leg, or basically having the exacta in that race. Obviously bigger payouts will happen when your place horse shares the finish with a long shot, thus diminishing the number of people that will share the pool.

I have established a standard 50¢ Place Pick 6 play that costs $36.  The ticket has combinations of: 1 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 3 x 3 for 72 total combinations at 50¢ each.  Choosing three horses in any leg works like an exacta box increasing the chance of hitting both place positions and thus producing multiple winning tickets.  Also, at Monmouth, there are usually large fields that are really tough to handicap and having 3 horses in those wide-open races increases the chance of staying alive. With this type of ticket there are 5 races where you can hit exactas and this makes the wager even more fun. On a few occasions I have hit two exactas and thus have ended up with four winning combinations.  This strategy seems to be working as I have hit the Place Pick 6 twelve times for a positive ROI in the 48 days that I have posted a wager.

I always smile when I play the Place Pick 6 because it makes me think of one of my favorite movies the 1973 classic, The Sting.  You remember the climactic scene when Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) and Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) complete the sting on banker/gangster Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw).

Doyle Lonnegan: I put it all on Lucky Dan, half a million dollars to win.

Kid Twist: To win? I said place!  Place it on Lucky Dan! That horse is gonna run second today.

Since Hooker and Gondroff made money on a place bet, then why shouldn’t the rest of us?

I like to gamble and I like action like most horseplayers, but I don’t have a big bankroll.  Sometimes it’s big enough to make a solid play at the Pick 5 or the Pick 4, but it is never adequate to attack the two dollar minimum standard Pick 6.  However, for $36 the Place Pick 6 provides a great chance at a really good payout.  There is plenty of time left to get involved with this new wager as the Monmouth meeting runs until November 6.

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Cigar’s Classic 1995 Breeders’ Cup

Posted on October 19, 2011 by andyscoggin

Cigar entered the 1995 Breeders Cup Classic riding an eleven race winning streak that spanned back to his last two races of 1994.  It was a streak in which Cigar had not run a Beyer Speed Figure less than a 104 and had earned figures above 110 in all but two of his races. He had won 8 grade one stakes at 6 different tracks on both the west and east coasts.

Cigar’s dominating performances and the consecutive victories had gained the attention of sports fans and not just in the racing world.  Cigar found his way into mainstream magazines like People, Esquire, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated.

Cigar was a homebred of Allen Paulson and was foaled in Maryland.  His pedigree was what put him on the grass for the 11 of his first 13 races. He was a son of Palace Music out of a Seattle Slew mare. Cigar’s name came from the world of aviation tycoon Paulson.  Most aviation checkpoints are five letter words and Cigar was one such location in the Gulf of Mexico.

Bill Mott took over the training of Cigar in the summer of 1994.  Cigar had been a stakes placed turf specialist in California and Mott continued to run him on the grass. In October of 1994, Mott entered Cigar in a N2X allowance race on the main dirt track at Aqueduct.  That race was to mark the beginning of Cigar’s winning streak.  He beat that field by eight lengths and he earned his first triple digit speed figure. A month later he became a grade one stakes winner of the NYRA mile with a 115 BSF.  Of course that is the race that is now known as the Cigar Mile.

Cigar’s win streak saw him defeat the best horses around the country.  Holy Bull’s racing career ended in the 1995 Donn Handicap that Cigar won. In the Pimlico Special he beat Concern and Devil His Due. Tinner’s Way and Best Pal fell to him in the Hollywood Gold Cup.  Wins in the Woodward and Jockey Club Gold Cup led him to the Breeders Cup Classic, which was to be held at his home track of Belmont Park.

The 1995 Breeders’ Cup was all about Cigar and his consecutive wins, but the track at Belmont came up muddy and he had had only one other unsuccessful try on a wet track.  Also the inside paths had been the place to be all day and Cigar was breaking from the 10 post.  No horse had gone undefeated for an entire year and won the Horse of the Year title since Spectacular Bid in 1980.

Nothing was going to stop Cigar in the Classic. One of Tom Durkin’s most memorable calls captures the excitement of the race.

Cigar was full of run from the moment he left the gate, “Cigar is keyed up today…Cigar wants to go for the lead but Jerry Bailey says NO, not yet.”

Approaching Belmont’s sweeping final turn Durkin exclaimed, ”CIGAR, CIGAR makes his move and sweeps to the lead with a dramatic rush with three furlongs to go.  Jerry Bailey turns him loose.”

Durkin knew the importance of today’s race and Cigar’s place in history. “A quarter of a mile remains between Cigar and a perfect season.”

As he stretched his lead to two lengths Durkin helped build the legend of Cigar, “Here he is, the unconquerable, the invincible, the unbeatable, Cigar.”  To this day when I watch the race and hear Durkin’s call I feel the excitement and emotion of that day. It was a classic Breeders’ Cup Classic in 1995.

Posted in Bill Mott, Breeders Cup, Horse Racing Nation, Jerry Bailey, Tom Durkin | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Breeders’ Cup Sprint Top 10 races

Posted on October 17, 2011 by andyscoggin

This a reprint of a feature article from HorseRacingNation.com. On HRN.com you will find video of all ten of the races.  There is a link at the bottom to see the full piece.

The Sprint provides the most excitement per second in the Breeders’ Cup combining pure speed on the front end with the chance for a dramatic closing finish. All of this in less then a minute and ten seconds.  In the 27 years of the Sprint only five favorites have won producing an average win payoff of $20.53.  This top 10 list features great frontrunners and amazing victories from the back of the pack.  From ten down to one, these races document the exciting history of the Breeders’ Cup Sprint.

10) 1984 – Eillo – Play It in Reverse – No better place to start the countdown then with the very first Breeders’ Cup Sprint.  Monmouth Park based Eillo was trained by veteran Budd Lepman for Crown Stable.  The name Eillo came from reversing the name of his owner Ollie Cohen.  Jockey Craig Perret guided Eillo to a wire to wire victory over Commemorate at Hollywood Park.  Eillo’s win price of $4.60 is the shortest payout in Sprint history.  Tragically Eillo died four weeks after the Breeders’ Cup due to complications from colic surgery.

9) 1988 – Gulch – Persistance Pays Off – Persistence certainly paid off for the connections of Gulch who won a Breeders’ Cup in his third try after running 5th in the 1986 Juvenile and 9th in the 1987 Classic.  Gulch had graded stakes wins at distances from 6F to 1 1/8 for owner Peter Brant and trainer D. Wayne Lukas.  Gulch was 6th after a half mile and was guided between horses by Angel Cordero, Jr.  Fast early fractions of :21 and :44-1 setup the closing run on the sloppy Churchill Downs track.

8)  2002 – Orientate – Streaking to the Crown – Orientate entered the Sprint at Belmont Park having won 5 stakes races in a row including the Vanderbilt and Forego Handicaps.  The D. Wayne Lukas trainee went off as the betting favorite.  Jockey Jerry Bailey had Orientate sitting just behind and to the outside of the speedy early fractions of :21-2 and :43-4.  He just got up in the final strides to defeat long shot Thunderello.  The win was Bailey’s 13th in the Breeders Cup and second consecutive victory in the Sprint.  Orientate clinched the sprint championship for owners Bob and Beverly Lewis.

7) 1987 – Very Subtle – Nothing Subtle About This Win – Very Subtle crushed this field by 5 beating the previous year’s contenders Groovy and Pine Tree Lane.  Ridden by Jockey Pat Valenzuela Very Subtle got to the lead shortly after the start. Valenzuela said, “She won really easily. She ran a really great race.” The Mel Stute trainee handed Groovy, the heavy favorite at .80-1, his first loss in seven starts in 1987.  Owner Ben Rochelle bought Very Subtle for $1.2 million in a dispersal auction.

6) 1990 – Safely Kept – Shadow Dancing – Safely Kept was the 1989 Eclipse Award winning Sprinter even though he lost the Breeders Cup Sprint to Dancing Spree.  In 1990, Safely Kept had 7 wins in 9 starts yet went off at 12-1.  Trained by Alan Goldberg for Jayeff B Stable she battled head to head from the turn with the favorite, Sheikh Maktom’s British Horse of the Year and three year-old champion, Dayjur.  Approaching the wire Dayjur took the lead by a neck, but jumped a shadow on the Belmont stretch, allowing Safely Kept to go by and win by a neck at the wire.  Yet this year she finished second in the Eclipse Award to Housebuster who did not contest the Sprint.

5) 1997 – Elmhurst –  “Storming Down the Outside” – There is nothing more exciting than watching a horse rally from dead last to victory in a six furlong sprint.  Elmhurst, who was bred in Kentucky by Calumet Farm is a personal favorite of mine.  His victory triggered one of my best Breeders’ Cup betting scores.  His 16-1 odds produced a $395 exacta, $3,203 trifecta, and $20,127 superfecta. Elmhurst was last after 3/8th of a mile and then commenced a ground saving run up the rail.  The first quarter of 21-2 and half in 43-4 set the race up for a come from behind victory.  At the top of the Hollywood Park stretch Cory Nakatani swung him to the outside.  He was so far behind that Tom Durkin did not pick up the closing move until he was already in fourth place and then, “Here comes Elmhurst storming down the outside … Elmhurst gets there in the final strides.” Elmhurst’s victory gave the trainer/jockey combination of Janine Sahadi and Nakatani consecutive BC Sprint titles.

4) 2000 – Kona Gold – Three, Two, One – Betting favorite Kona Gold finally found the Breeders’ Cup winner’s circle after he finished third in the Sprint in 1998, and second in 1999.  This running of the Sprint highlighted blazing speed. After a “wild first quarter of :20-4” and the front runner going “full throttle”, Kona Gold took the lead in mid-stretch and held on for the victory.  The 1:07.60 time set a Breeders’ Cup and a Churchill Downs record for six furlongs.  Jockey Alex Soils and trainer Bruce Headley recorded their first Breeders’ Cup wins.

3) 2009 – Dancing in Silks – Closest Finish of All – Dancing in Silks was supplemented for $180,000 into the $2,000,000 Sprint.  He got a perfect trip under Jockey Joel Rosario while sitting in fourth place just outside of the early speed. Long shots Cost of Freedom and Crown of Thorns, a fast closing Gayego, and Dancing in Silks hit the wire within a head of each other. The official margins between the four horses were a nose, a head, and a nose. The victory gave trainer Carla Gaines and Rosario their first Breeders’ Cup wins. The California-bred paid $52.60, the second highest in Sprint history, for his victory over the synthetic surface of Santa Anita.

2) 2008 – Midnight Lute – Back to Back – Midnight Lute became the first multiple winner in the Breeders’ Cup with his consecutive Sprint victories.  Recovering from a hock injury he had only one start in 2008, before the Sprint, when he finished well beaten in the Pat O’Brien in August. In that race he suffered a severe quarter crack. Bob Baffert had to train him up to the race. Midnight Lute ran a stirring last to first race at Santa Anita going by the leaders with ease in a Breeders’ Cup record of 1:07.08. Baffert was spouting superlatives after the race, “He showed today what a great horse he is. He’s a beast. A massive, beautiful, horse. The perfect Thoroughbred. He’s the best I’ve ever trained.”

To see my number one BC Sprint race click here HorseRacingNation.com.

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The new AndyScoggin in NJ is under construction.

Posted on September 21, 2011 by andyscoggin

The old site for AndyScoggin in NJ is still up and running.

http://andyscoggin.blogspot.com/

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