Kentucky Derby Day is annually one of the most anticipated wagering days on a horseplayer's calendar. Full fields with relatively evenly matched horses present the horseplayer with numerous wagering opportunities. Of all the wagers that are offered on Derby Saturday, the pick five may be the best – a wager that concludes with the 142nd running of the Kentucky Derby.
RACE 8 – HUMANA DISTAFF
While the pick four on races 5-8 at Churchill Downs on Saturday includes the Distaff Turf Mile, in which Tepin likely will go off at 1-5 or 2-5, the other three races are competitive enough to make a play possible. And, yes, I will throw in a "B" horse in the Distaff Turf Mile on the odd chance that Tepin doesn’t run her race or encounters a traffic jam.
Here is a $52 play. The ticket is set up to let a "B" horse win in one leg of the sequence. All tickets are in 50-cent increments.
Race 5
Not much we can say about our Pick last week other than he simply didn’t run well. However, a dozen other 3-year-old BreezeFigs maidens did run well enough to win last week: Five at Gulfstream (including a BreezeFigs exacta), two at Los Alamitos, and one each at Belmont, Golden Gate, Penn National, Sunland and Woodbine.
Assessing value in the Kentucky Derby always starts with questioning the favorite. What price will he be? What kind of trip will he get? Is he vulnerable? Nyquist is the 3-1 morning-line favorite for the Derby, and that by definition makes him an underlay in a 20-horse field.
Something remarkable happened in the 2015 Kentucky Derby: The horses who occupied the first three positions after a quarter-mile of the race, Dortmund, Firing Line, and American Pharoah, were the first three horses to cross the finish line.
I had to look back almost 40 years into the Derby charts to find a comparable race shape. In the 1976 Derby, it was Bold Forbes, then Honest Pleasure, then Amano, then Electrocutionist at the Derby’s first call. They finished Bold Forbes, Honest Pleasure, Electrocutionist, Amano.
Any horse can get a bad trip from a good post in the Kentucky Derby. Meanwhile, others get lucky. A good trip from a bad post is entirely possible. After all, there is a fair bit of unpredictability when 20 horses scramble for position.
But the post-position draw for the 2016 Derby was weird because the field is separated by running style. The draw is random, yet most speed horses, notably Danzing Candy, Outwork, and also-eligible first preference Laoban, drew outside in the auxiliary gate.
