Posted:
#1
So I've always followed horse racing casually, the big races, Triple Crown, Breeders, etc...a few months ago I went to Woodbine live and caught the bug to start handicapping more in depth. I've always loved looking over numbers, stats, results, trends, and now even breeding trying to find good plays. I'm still relatively new at taking this seriously so would love to get some insight from the more experienced among us here.
Earlier tonight I was playing a few races at Santa Anita...had a couple plays that I'd done my homework on and was playing. Race 7 I had a big bet on a horse named Amada Rafaela, trained by Baffert, that had an extremely dominant debut winning by 8 lengths. He was priced at 3/5 which I know you're probably thinking what a square I am, but like I said I'd done my homework and bet him earlier in the day, a little over $800 to win $500.
By post time he was down to 1/5 odds online, and even heard 1/9 live odds at the track. I had the option to cashout before the race for close to $200 profit and obviously hindsight 20/20 this is what I should have done. As I'm sure you can assume by now, the horse didn't win...but it wasn't that he ran the race and didn't win, he was pulled up at about the halfway point and retired from the race.
So I guess my question to the experienced horse bettors is does this happen fairly often, or was this just an extremely unlucky coincidence? You know it just seems a little too convenient. There were 5 other horses in the race with the 2nd fave paying 15/2 and the others obviously at longer odds. With the overwhelming favourite out of the equation, equal bets on the other 5 horses would have been extremely profitable. They announced just before post there was about $230k worth of money just at the track riding on the favourite. Just seems too easy that they pull the horse mid-race and poof goes all the money.
Thoughts?
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