Derby – Fluke?

No, I hadn’t picked Giacomo to win, nor did I pick the other horse to come in second. a 50-1 and a 72-1 coming in 1-2 just doesn’t happen in ways you can predict, as the $9,800 exacta showed. To my knowledge and 15+ years of going to the track that’s the largest exacta payoff I’ve ever seen.

The $2 Superfecta paid $1.7 million and supposedly 12 or 13 people had that. I’d guess they were playing birthdays, and wheels. The kind of people who play every possible combination. There were 116, 280 possible Superfecta bets in the 2005 Derby (mathematically shown as 20!/16!) – making the wager still theoretically possible but I can’t imagine going to the window to make that bet.

Will Giacomo show again? Not likely. It’ll obviously run in the Preakness, but there’s no way it’ll do this again. Even though Bellamy Road’s been pulled from the Preakness, I still think Afleet Alex has got to show. However the full Preakness card hasn’t been delivered; there’s a lotta horses out there, a lot of numbers and pacing to crunch.