Saturday May 29, 2010
Resulting Free Plays:
Saturday’s Free Play; Hollywood’s – Race #5… Bad Boy –a WINNER — but like many overwhelming form horses they are underwhelming in the win-price. This was as advertised a decent single in Pick-3 to Pick-6 plays.
Sunday’s Free Play; Hiho Geronimo romped home a nice $9.40 winner.
Thursday’s Free Play; Cayambe was a beautiful OVERLAY winner at 9/1, paying $21.60, fight thehard fight to find value!
Friday’s Free Play; Costa Marta ran great but only managed 2nd. Anima (te protected one) dropped down to win at 4/5…
Today’s Free Play:
Hollywood’s – Race #8… Returning 3 years olds (for their 1st race after their 2 year old season) can be a tough judgement decisions that handicapper’s confront from January thru June. Ones that come back early in the calander year are more likely to race very well than ones that return later on; the extra time off must be an indicator that something went wrong in or after their last start as a 2 year old. No hard and fast rule exist on this, as with each trainer, you have a different set of circumstances to make your judgement. My typical inclination is to bet against a returning 2 year old after-April and we are now clearly past April. Yet in today’s example, I am going against this largely because of the workout pattern and the excellent record ofthe trainer and the type of race-horse we are looking at — A speed-type colt. Handicapping is certainly as much art as anything else.
Our Key horse today is Twirling Candy, trained by John Sadler. Even though Sadler’s record with comebackers is mediocre, he still is a top rated trainer who wins better than 20%, that tells me he understands horses and their particular special needs. And has the ability to do what is necessary in individual cases, because if handicapping is an art, so is training the horse. While Sadler isn’t overly inclined to race a horse real hard in the comeback race, I am guessing this horse will be fully ready to run big and fast. When trainers have horses that are naturally very-fast-early or as I like to call the REAL- HOT, the trainer’s need to have this type of horse fully fit, otherwise the horse could really hurt themselves because they go so hard right out of the gate. Their fitnes needs to match the high speeds they attain in the early part of the race. Twirling Candy is an excellent horse and while he has raced only once lifetime, he is potentially very valuable, and because he run hard early, I suspect Sadler will have him ready to stand the rigors of racing straight-away. To that end we see two 6 furlong workouts which suggests this is the right judgement….I’ll take the 2/1 and play exactas over Thoms Baines and Willconker with only small reverses…Twirling Candy should be a sinlge in Pick3 3 going from 7 to 9 and 8 to 10. In the 9th race we will use the FREE bingo square of the doubleton of Tuscan Evening and Forever Together…Good luck…