Should be a great card. The Florida Derby should prove to be a major steppingstone to Louisville, although right now everything appears to be so wide open that it is difficult to guess from where the KY Derby winner will come. The undercard looks great also, with half a dozen stakes races and no maiden claimers or straight claimers in the condition book. Hope that they all fill.
There are a lot of things going on at Gulfstream on Saturday. A lot of buzz will involve the mandatory payout of the Rainbow Pick 6, the carryover of which has reached around $4.4 million. If the past is any indicator, the total Rainbow Pick 6 pool on Saturday could reach $18 million or more if it is not hit before then. Many wagering syndicates are undoubtedly forming to attack it. What makes this event very different from past mandatory payout days is that the previous ones have featured races for low level claimers or maiden claimers with overflowing fields, as the Racing Secretary was attempting to have the largest possible fields to maximize the amount in the pool. You had to go 4 or 5 deep in every race to have a prayer of success, and that made the tickets very expensive. With graded stakes races, the fields might be smaller and the races could be more formful. It will be interesting to see the actual race order and learn which races have been placed in the Rainbow Pick 6 sequence.
I've been competing in a contest called Stable Battles, which runs every Saturday for 10 weeks and uses the last 8 races on the Gulfstream card. We are near the halfway point. Missed the first week, so it has been an uphill battle, and some handicapping mistakes on my part haven't helped. A quirky aspect is that you are scored based on the total purse money won by your picks, so the potential winning totals vary dramatically from week to week. Depending upon which races are in the last 8 on the card, the total of the purses this week could be many times that of any of the preceding weeks or any to follow, with the stakes races offering something like $2.5 million. That makes this week the most important one of the entire contest for anyone seeking an overall award. First prize is an actual ownership interest in a yet unraced 2 year old, a different sort of prize for a handicapping contest.
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03-26-2018, 02:11 PM
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