Sorry about this business of your last 60 comments on the "BC Saturday Live" post not showing up yet. I've read and approved and posted them, but for whatever reason, Typepad isn't displaying them. I'm going to try changing it from "show oldest first" to "show newest first" and maybe at least that way we can get #'s 63-112 to show up, replacing #'s 1-50. Those of you in the 51-52 zone may be forever obscured. And I'll just start posting a little more often, even if I have nothing particularly scintillating to say, until it's straightened out. If my reversing the order doesn't work, please feel free to resubmit any lost comments to this post.
---I'm still slicing and dicing the BC numbers, which as expected have made for unwieldy comparisons with previous years. The quick version:
1. The two-day Friday-Saturday handle was up slightly from 2007, in the neighborhood of 5 percent. That's a good thing, but a larger increase was expected, despite the economic downturn, given the addition of three new BC races.
2. The filly races moved from Saturday to Friday did not handle as much as they did when run on Saturday .
3. The Saturday handle was down $10 million from a year ago, despite a change from a dismal sloppy day to a sunny and sparkling one. BC Saturday handle was down an alarming $34 million from $136 million on a 10-race card in 2006 to $102 million on an 11-race card.
---Thanks for your many kind (and largely unpublished) comments about Saturday's good fortune. The pick-6 haul was $66,003.60 (one 6/6 at $55,920.80 plus 13 5/6 consos at $775.60 apiece for another $10.082.80), before IRS withholding of $13,980.20 for a net payout of just over $52k. How did I end up with 13 consos? In addition to the six other horses I was alive to in the Classic (Henrythenavigator, Tiago, Curlin, Go Between, Duke of Marmalade, Student Council), there were seven earlier horses who could have won and kept the same tickets alive (Kip DeVille, Bushranger, Westphalia, Bittel Road, Fabulous Strike, Eagle Mountain, Soldier of Fortune.)
If anyone ever saw the pick-6 willpays, please send them along, just for curiosity's sake. I ended up partially hedging by making $1000 in win bets on the three longshots ($400 on 23-1 Champs Elysees, $300 on 40-1 Fairbanks an 49-1 Smooth Air) among the five horses I was uncovered with, and decided to let 9-1 Casino Drive and 10-1 Colonel John just beat me.
Capitol OTB purchased the identical eight-ticket $5,000 play as the one I put in, and announced today that 40 qualifying patrons are getting $1200 each.
---The decline in BC Saturday pick-six handle, from $4.7 million in 2006 to $3.2 million last year and a below-the-guarantee $2.88 million this year could be attributed to the economy, though I think the inclusion of the BC Juvenile Turf might have had something to do with it as well. I just took the two Euros and who I thought was the best American and hoped for the best, but I can understand others deciding to skip the bet entirely with a new and largely formless event in the sequence. Obviously the payoff would have been a lot less with Zenyatta at $3.00 rather than Donativum at $13.60 in the mix, but I think the handle would have been at least what it was in the slop last year had the lineup of races been the same.
My dream schedule:
Specialist Friday: Marathon, Turf Sprint Juvenile Fillies Turf, Juvenile Turf, Dirt Mile, Mile.
Championship Saturday: Juvenile Fillies, Juvenile, F&M Sprint, Sprint, F&M Turf, Turf, Distaff, Classic.
