Royal Delta 2.0

[Rupert Pupkin]

Going back to the debate about gearing horses down, as I said before, it does not happen particularly often that a horse is geared down to the point that the horse would have won by a much bigger margin. I see maybe a handful of these cases in an entire year. But when I do see the rare occurrence of a horse winning by 3-5 lengths less than they could have if they were asked, I will put the horse on my watch list because you can occasionally get an overlay in these cases the next time the horse runs. People do pay attention to speed figures. The difference between a horse getting a 78 Beyer compared to an 88 Beyer can make a big difference in a horse's price the next time they run.

I will give you a good example of this. Watch Amberjack's race at Belmont on May 11, 2013 (the 8th race). He could have won by 5-6 lengths. Rosario totally geared him down and he ended up winning by less than a length. It was an allowance race. In his next start, he came back in a stakes race and went off at 12-1 and won again. For anyone who was handicapping that stakes race and looking at Amberjack's PPs, his previous race did not look especially impressive on paper. It looked like he barely won in a mediocre time. That was a case where you got a much bigger price because people misjudged his win. If Rosario did not gear him down in the allowance race, he probably wins the allowance race by 5-6 lengths. And he probably goes off at 5-1 in the stakes race instead of 12-1. This type of thing does not happen often, but when it does, it is an angle that you can sometimes take advantage of.

The problem for most people is that they are not good judges as to what extent a horse was geared down. I see plenty of cases where horses are geared down 70 yards from the wire and the gearing down is practically meaningless because it was not extreme and it happened so close to the wire. In many of these cases, the gearing down did not even cost the horse a half a length.