With only one winner paying more than $9.00, and that one a Dutrow firster who was probably a much shorter price in the blind, Wednesday's big pick six at Aqueduct might look easy in retrospect, with over 100 winners at $6610 apiece. Not for me. Even though I was technically alive into the penultimate leg, I was virtually eliminated 1:11.32 into the sequence when Dadoway romped by 5 1/4 lengths at 7-2.
Maybe you're not supposed to be stubborn in pools like Wednesday's, where bettors pumped $1.055 million into a $265k carryover, but I'll go to my grave being stubborn about horses like Dadoway. I'm sure he's a lovely and noble animal, but on paper he was an 0-for 9 stopper who had backed up down the stretch in every previous start. He had a couple of races that arguably made him the second fastest horse in the race, but there seemed several more inviting possibilities among more lightly-raced competitors. None of those ran a step and Dadoway cruised.
I wasted about a third of my money after jinxing myself to do so by writing about late scratches and pick sixes in the previous entry. A few minutes before post time, Its a Whopper, one of my "more interesting" A horses, was scratched, transferring all my tickets through him to the awful but must-use favorite, Ferdi's Prince, doubling me up on him. If what a poster wrote about multirace late scratches in Hong Kong is true -- they give you the shortest-priced horse that you don't already have instead of a duplicate through one that you do -- I would have picked up Dadoway. Though until the gate opened, I probably wouldn't have been too thrilled about that either.
Anyway, once Dadoway won as a "C," I was thinned down to a $108 backup ticket that went 3x1x2x1x3 the rest of the way, and crawled through the next three legs on my belly with boring favorites getting the job done. That left me singled to 0.75-to-1 Ghost Dancer in the feature, and had she won I probably would have been looking at three will-pays of $2k or less, but Ghost Dancer spared me the trouble by tiring on the lead in midstretch as second choice What's Your Point nailed her. What's Your Point hadn't even been my second choice, so I have nothing to complain about and entered the afternoon in the ledger as a losing day with a couple of bad opinions. My one conso paid a whopping $74.
Fast Wheels, the $15.60 winner of the finale, was probably more like 3-1 in the pick-six. It's hardly as if he was a killer, running even slower than the dreaded Dadoway, but was a must-use from a trainer who's 26 percent with firsters in an awful field. Even so, he was all out to win by a neck from First of Ten, who had been beaten 52 lengths in his two previous starts.
Congrats to those among you who had it. The payoff was nearly double the parlay, and it was a highly haveable sequence for those less stubborn than I.
