Arlington Million day ideas

[Bill Lyster]

For a lot of us the multiple marathon races at Arlington are fun to watch, but hard to handicap, largely due to many foreign entries without any way to easily compare their form to the American entrants.

There will be five graded races ranging from 9 furlongs to 13.5 furlongs on the turf and even though I can use the marathon method for US horses, there is no easy way to rate the Euros.

However, I have tracked the Breeders Cup turf races and found a method that helps eliminate some of the confusion. If you have the New Pace module in RDSS you can look at the races this way.

This is last years BC Filly and Mare Turf race @ 10 furlongs on turf. The first screen shot is the Adjust SR screen and you can see that at least 5 foreign horses have no adjusted rating because they have not run in the U.S. However, when you choose the Trackmaster SR option all the Euros get ratings.

The top 4 Late horses were the 13-3-11-8. the top 4 finishers were the 11-8-4-3 with the 8 being the only US based runner. The winner was the #33 Euro Queens Trust (#11).






This is last years BC Turf; Several of the horses were European based, but had either run in previous BC races or the Arlington Million day races. In this case the only Euro without a U. S. race was the 7, but the 3-4-6-10 and 12 had one or more races in the U. S. and thus had Adjusted SR numbers.

But again, look at the Trackmaster info. the #1 Early Horse was Highland Reel by 9 pts! - won wire to wire; the top Late horses were the 4-10-8-6. The horses actually ran 12-4-10-7.





What's the point you might ask. Using the Trackmaster info, in the last 9 BC Filly and Mare Turf races the winners have been in the top 3 US horses 7 times and in the top 3 Euros 4 times. Obviously some of the Euros had enough US races to be top 3 in their US races also.

In the BC Turf's last 9 races 5 winners were top 3 Euros, 2 winners were top 3 U.S., 2 winners were top 4 Euros (in one of these races there were only 2 U.S. horses entered.) Only in 2014 was the winner not in this group.

At least it should help winnow out a few of the non contenders.

Good luck watching and wagering this weekend.