Force the Pass, Oscar Performance face solid cast in Poker Stakes

ELMONT, N.Y. – Saturday’s Grade 3, $300,000 Poker Stakes at Belmont Park is an intriguing race featuring the return of multiple Grade 1 winner Oscar Performance, the second step in the return of Grade 1 winner Force the Pass, and an opportunity for the older stakes milers Ballagh Rocks and Fire Away to continue their emergence.

Oscar Performance and Force the Pass have won the Grade 1 Belmont Derby Invitational at 1 1/4 miles but also are graded stakes winners at the Poker’s distance of one mile on turf. Ballagh Rocks is the defending winner of the Poker and most recently finished second behind Heart to Heart in the Grade 1 Maker’s 46 Mile. Fire Away has won three of four starts since trainer Shug McGaughey has shortened him up in distance.

When it comes to the Poker, perhaps it’s best to start with trainer Bill Mott, who has won this race four times, including last year with Ballagh Rocks, and whose Elusive Quality still owns the one-mile stakes and Widener turf-course record of 1:31.63, set in 1998.

Ballagh Rocks ran more than three seconds slower than that when he won the race last year. Since then, he has finished second or third in three of four Grade 1 tries. In the Maker’s 46 Mile, he got an inside trip behind a loose-on-the-lead Heart to Heart.

“We were trying to do some of the dirty work up toward the front end, which probably is not his game,” Mott said Friday. “I don’t think there was much speed in the race.”

Conversely, there appears to be an abundance of speed in this year’s Poker with Black Tide, Voodoo Song, and Oscar Performance. Mott said he is hoping there is “something to come back to him a little bit.”

A lively pace might aid Fire Away, who is coming off back-to-back stakes wins in the Danger’s Hour at Aqueduct and the off-the-turf Grade 3 Dixie at Pimlico.

“He got better last fall when I started shortening him up,” McGaughey said. “I think I was trying to run him too far.”

Oscar Performance typically likes to set the pace but did sit in second when he won last August’s Grade 1 Secretariat going 1 1/4 miles at Arlington Park. He has not run since last year’s Breeders’ Cup Turf at 1 1/2 miles and has not run a mile since winning the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf in 2016 at Santa Anita.

Force the Pass returned from a 20-month layoff to win the Cliff Hanger Stakes by a nose at Monmouth on May 5. Force the Pass had two operations to address a hind-leg condylar fracture.

Trainer Alan Goldberg said Force the Pass has been doing well since the Cliff Hanger.

“He hasn’t missed a beat,” Goldberg said. “It’s a question of competition, that’s all.”

Made You Look made a successful 4-year-old debut and first start for trainer Chad Brown on May 11, coming from off the pace to win a high-class allowance in 1:32.14 for one mile.

Vulcan’s Forge returns to turf for the first time since last summer. Most recently, he was beaten a nose in the Grade 3 Westchester going a mile on dirt.