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.