RACE 1
LADY SERENA (6) exits a victory against maidens. Although the group she beat that day was rather suspect, anything close to a replication of that performance puts her right there.
TWO TAPS (2) ships in from California for John Shirreffs, and her pedigree would suggest the added distance today should work to her advantage. Victor Espinoza retains the mount.
Friday’s card provides the perfect appetizer for Saturday’s graded stakes buffet at Belmont.
I'm going to key the following horses in multiple-race wagers and will play them to win if they meet my value-line requirement:
Race 1 – Been Here Before (#5 – 6-1 morning line, 5-1 value line)
It’s not going to be easy to make a big score on the early pick four at Belmont Park on Saturday, which encompasses races 2-4
Competitive Edge will be odds-on in race 3, the Grade 2 Woody Stephens, and Untapable will be an equally short price in race 5, the Grade 1 Ogden Phipps.
The idea in this pick 4 is to play it in a fashion that if you hit it you don’t lose money. I will layout my “A” and “B” horses, and then list my ticket strategy at the bottom. I will be able to go to my B horses only once in the sequence. Total ticket cost is $70.
Race 2
My late pick four play at Belmont for Friday focuses on horses from the barn of trainer Chad Brown, who holds the key players in the first leg of the wager, the seventh, as well as the ninth, the New York Handicap, a race in which his top mare, STEPHANIE’S KITTEN, is a single.
Let’s take a look at the wager, beginning with the first leg of the sequence:
Saturday’s all-Grade 1 stakes pick four, which begins in race 8 and concludes with the Belmont Stakes, has a guaranteed pool of $1.5 million. I’ll be playing it (among many other things on Saturday’s highly tempting card), and what follows are my thoughts on each race in this sequence.
Race 8: Just a Game Stakes
Trying to gauge what kind of Beyer Speed Figures the Belmont Stakes horses are likely to get is like trying to make a Beyer figure for the 2015 Preakness – a frustrating exercise with minimal context.
None of these 3-year-olds is going to relish the 1 1/2 miles. The final time and the figure almost certainly will reflect that, so we are off into a great unknown here.
Trainer Leslie Young saddles Meteoroid (#4, ML 15-1) in Thursday’s fifth race at Belmont Park, a 1 3/8-mile optional claimer on the inner turf. Since Jan. 1, 2014, Young is winning at a 27 percent clip in route races, for a return on investment of $3.90.
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Wonder About Lola (#5, ML 4-1) returns in Thursday’s eighth race at Canterbury Park, a six-furlong allowance. It will be her first start since finishing fourth by 2 1/4 lengths on April 9 at Oaklawn Park. The second-, fifth-, and sixth-place finishers from that race came back to win their next starts.
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Still waiting to see as of early Thursday morning whether races are on grass, and strongly suspect Belmont will stay on turf following what should have been a decent drying day and no heavy rain since Monday, though there were persistent light showers most of Tuesday through Tuesday night.
Gambling today will focus on RADIATOR (#13) in race 7, the Intercontinental Stakes, and to a lesser extent am interested in first-timer STRONG INCENTIVE (#7) in race 4.