Would you ride one?
by George
If you’re a numbers player AND your lucky number is 3, you probably did alright on the Pick-4 Wednesday night. If not, you can always take another shot at the pool on Friday. It’s usually in the $5,000 range. Just use a different set of lucky numbers. Kidding!
Maybe.
The winning combination of Pick-4 numbers in races four through seven on Wednesday was 3-3-3-3. Nobody really expected the Pick-4 to pay much with short fields, but with the pool in the $20,000 range due to a carryover, it paid a healthy $3,059 for a $2 ticket. Not to be outdone, the Pick-3 stepped up and paid $1.207.70 for a $2 ticket on the combination of 3-3-3. How easy was that? Not.
The odds of the #3 horse winning races four through seven were probably much higher than the actual odds of the winners, which still paid $9.30, $13.10, $10.30 and $22.40 respectively. There were no real surprises on the trainer front in the Pick-4 however, with Shelley Brown winning the fourth, Emile Corbel winning the fifth, Tom Gardipy Jr. taking the sixth and Roger Hansen winning the seventh, but the favourites in those four races finished last, second last, second and second. In other words, there were no winning favourites in the Pick-4.
Winning jockeys in the Pick-4 were Tim Moccasin, Jennifer Reid and Rohan Singh, the latter of whom took both the fifth and seventh races on the card as the only double winner on the night among jockeys. Additional singles went to Trevor Simpson, Clint Magera, Chavion Chow and Gustavo Ortiz.
Jennifer Reid came back down to earth a little with only one victory on the night after back-to-back four-win cards, but the fact is she’s been riding well beyond her years since the beginning of the season. She doesn’t look like your typical apprentice out there and she hasn’t all year.
Singh’s two wins moved him to within one of leading rider Paul Nolan, who was blanked on Wednesday. Nolan has 34 wins to Singh’s 33, followed by Reid (27 wins), Tyrone Nelson (22) and Tim Moccasin (22). If there’s a little bit of a nice surprise in the jockey standings it would be former Jamaican champion Trevor Simpson, who is steadily grinding his way up the standings. Simpson now has a record of 14-10-13 from 94 mounts and currently sits seventh in the standings, but he is capable of winning at any time if he has some horse under him.
Thinking more about how to spot longshots in the Pick-4 — start by giving horses trained by Shelley Brown, Carl Anderson and Roger Hansen extra consideration, especially if their horses are good odds. While Hansen’s horses are always ready to run, Anderson and Brown’s horses have only just started to get rolling in the past few weeks and are scoring at good odds. Brown’s win on Wednesday gave her 22 on the season and kept her in second place, just two behind Blair Miller. Wasn’t it just three weeks ago that Brown had less than five wins?
One the horsey front, the fastest steed on the grounds so far this year, 3-year-old Balooga Bull, will try a route of ground for the first time in the Harry Jeffrey Stakes this Saturday going 1 1/16-miles. If he doesn’t go fast enough to turn your crank, which is doubtful, quarter horse racing starts next week.
Venture down to the rail for a quarter horse race and get an in-your-face picture of what it would be like to be sitting on… er… holding on to, one of these rockets as they crash, bang and blitz each other over what is usually a quarter mile of mayhem. Would you ride one?
A safer bet would probably be to just stay on the ground and enter for a chance to win an invite to this year’s Manitoba Derby Press Conference, which is always a rush of fabulous food, Winnipeg media, movers, shakers and horse people. Learn more in this week’s Insider Newsletter.
You didn’t really want to ride a quarter horse in an actual race anyways, right?
I guess it depends on how your day is going.
Next Post Time for Live Racing: 7 p.m. Friday, July 13, 2012