You gotta love it. Right on cue, if you followed last Monday’s Bettor’s Edge advice, you would have had the winner of the most difficult race on Woodbine’s Thursday card — race 4, a 6 ½-furlong maiden race on the turf. TV analysts kept saying how tough the 12-horse race was to figure out but if one of them had said: “Let’s see if Ivan Bigg’s tip in CanadianThoroughbred.com pans out,” they would have zeroed in on #11 Point to the Stars. This is because the three-year-old had the lowest added-up numbers of four as per the advice in last week’s column.
As stated in that column, the main contenders in maiden races are the horses with the lowest added-up numbers. You simply add up where each horse finished last time and the position of the horse at the first call of his previous race. #11 had finished third last time and had been first at the first call of his previous race. His total number, therefore, was four. The horse with the next-best added-up numbers was #7 Star Scholar with six. Those two horses finished one-two. The $2 exactor paid $54.70. #11 paid $18.80 to win. You may download that race here.
It actually was a very tough race to handicap. I spent about 20 minutes on it because I wasn’t convinced my “rule” horse was going to win the race. But isn’t that the beauty of having a “rule” horse to bet blindly? To my way of thinking, rules trump opinions because our opinions are mostly wrong. I’ve hosted betting groups in which players have sometimes said: “But this time the rule won’t work.” And, of course, you know what usually happens. Mr. Opinion is forced to eat crow.
That happened to be the most important key horse on the card because it had the longest odds. It was because of #11 that the 20-cent pick-5 in races 2 to 6 paid $2,023. Favourites won two of the five legs so, with #11 as another key, it wasn’t difficult to nail. The win prices of the five legs were $5.40 (fav), $12.90, $18.80 (the #11 key), $11.90 and $4.10 (fav).
