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Ted, the one absolute I learned from Doc Sartin is "There are no absolutes!" Thus converntional wisdom should be thrown out the window when it comes to wagercapping. This has been an evolutionary process but one of the hardest changes I made (and am still making) in my handicapping is not wagering on the best horse in a field, but wagering on the horse with the best matchup in a field. My latest example of that was keying Dunkirk in the Kentucky Derby instead of Mine That Bird, even though Mine that Bird had the best matchup.
There are a couple of reasons for betting an early horse in either a dirt or turf route:
1) It can go to the lead, relax on the lead, and have energy in reserve for the stretch;
2) It can have good early position, stalk the pace, conserve its energy, and still have energy in reserve for the stretch; or
It can run like Mine that Bird, relax, lag far behind, and show a tremendous burst of acceleration in the far turn and stretch.
Provided it is not a "need to lead" frontrunner that grabs the lead and folds in which case it is a throw out, horses of this nature normally have tremendous acceleration (compared to the rest of the field) and it is just a matter of when it uses that acceleration in a race. An early energy horse does not have to run an early energy race to win!
In the race above take Ball F's race from its third paceline. In that race it showed late energy of -3.0. The next lowest late energy horse was -14.0, which means there is an 11 point energy gap between those two horses. It is my contention (provided its other figures are decent), Ball F had a huge match-up advantage compared to the rest of the field on that race alone. I have seen this pattern consistently in route turf and dirt races and regularly capitalize on such horses at decent odds.
What I do is find energy distribution gaps between one or two horses and the rest of the field! It can be an early energy gap like we see above. Or it can be a late energy gap in which a late horse may be able to pick up the pieces and either win or finish strongly to be a factor in gimmick bets. When a horse has a gap in energy distribution compared to the rest of the field, then it has an advantage when matched up against the rest of the horses with similar energy distribution patterns.
It is my position that a late energy horse may or may not fire when its energy distribution pattern is similar to the majority of the horse in the field. But when you have an energy distribution that is dramatically different (either positively or negatively), then that is a good horse to key both win and gimmick bets!
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