The most amazing part of the lone winning ticket (worth $969,345) sold on the Belmont Day Pick-6 was not that it only cost $96 but that the 12 horses used on it were the six winners -- and six horses who finished off the board.
According to the NYRA, this was the winning 1x2x2x2x3x2 ticket, purchased by a YouBet customer:
Leg 1: Fabulous Strike (1st)
Leg 2: Diamondrella (1st), Raw Silk (6th)
Leg 3: Munnings (1st), Hull (4th)
Leg 4: Gabby's Golden Gal (1st), Livin Lovin (4th)
Leg 5: Gio Ponti (1st), Cosmonaut (5th), Wesley (7th)
Leg 6: Summer Bird (1st), Charitable Man (4th)
What we don't know is whether this was the winning bettor's entire play or part of a larger one. Maybe he singled Forever Together on his main ticket and this was the backup ticket for the Just a Game, using Diamondrella and Raw Silk?
In any case, there's nothing fishy about the ticket. NYRA said in a press release that it "utilizes progressive scan technology, which generates a report after each leg of any multi-race wager so that all dollars can be tracked throughout the wager, ensuring no one has tampered with any ticket after the first leg of the wager" and that "the winning Pick 6 wager was placed via Youbet at 1:56 p.m. on Saturday, and the pool closed at 2:34 p.m."
--Here are the winning Beyer Speed Figures for each of the Triple Crown races since the figs were first published (in The Racing Times) in 1991:
As discussed in the last post, judging the quality of a Triple Crown class in June is a dicey proposition, especially in an era when horses are so lightly raced and may still have plenty of upside if they're allowed to stay in training and race. But just for fun, let's see how the Triple Crowns since 1991 stack up when ranked by the combined winning BSF's for each race:
