WagerMate’s picks…
2016 Breeders’ Cup Results
I made 22 win bets. I miscounted in the last blog entry — the figures show that 21 horses had an ROI over 25% — and Masochistic turned into the 22nd bet because of a scratch in the sixth race yesterday. The winning bets were on Champagne Room, Finest City, and Tourist. That’s $115.40 back on the $44 worth of win bets.
Only two of the exacta bets paid off, returning $57.60 on the 13 bets of $6 each (total of $78 spent).
For the weekend, that’s a profit of $51.00 on $122 bet.
Three points:
- This would have been a lot worse without $69.20 from Champagne Room, so you could say we had some good luck.
- Champagne Room was the 11th most popular horse out of 12 in the race, so WagerMate deserves some credit for making it a contender.
- This was done without a shred of manual handicapping. I still think you should add your own work to WagerMate’s ideas.
2016 Breeders’ Cup
WagerMate likes a mix of favorites and long shots for the Breeders’ Cup races this year. I’ll place $2 win bets on every horse that WagerMate says has an ROI over 25% — that’s 7 horses on Friday, and 12 horses on Saturday.
I’ll also place $1 exacta box bets on the top 3 picks in each race.
Here are the Friday picks…
2016 Belmont Results
13-2-10-1 — with Creator paying $34.80 to win, and Destin paying $9.40 to place.
Didn’t see that coming…
2016 Belmont Stakes
2016 Preakness Results
5-1-3-11 — so, no tickets to cash.
2016 Preakness
Build 340
Version 3.5 of WagerMate has been released. It has one major new feature: it uses a new track-to-track variant.
That one improvement gets us more than a 1% point increase in both the Win Rate and the ROI. Here are the back testing results on my 2009-2013 data, with the default filter:
This indicates that if you blindly followed WagerMate’s picks you’d lose 7%. If you only followed the picks for turf races, you’d win 1%.
By now, you should know that’s not how I really think you should use the WagerMate results — I want you to combine the WagerMate results with your own handicapping work. If you use the WagerMate results, instead of starting with an ROI of -20% (due to the takeout), you’re starting at -7%, and that’s a big difference.
Good luck!
2016 Kentucky Derby Results
The two favorites, Nyquist and Exaggerator, came in first & second: 13-11-5-14, so we missed on the win bet, but made a little profit on the exacta.
The $24 exacta ticket paid $30.60.
2016 Kentucky Derby
Breeder’s Cup Recap
Won $107.50 on bets of $108.00 for an ROI of… 0%. Didn’t have a great weekend except for the $95.70 exacta in Race 9. A couple of WagerMate’s recommended bets were canceled due to scratches.
Here’s the positive spin: by blindly following WagerMate, I broke even (lets not quibble about the 50 cents) — imagine how well you can do if you do some actual study & handicapping.
2015 Breeder’s Cup
WagerMate likes a lot of long shots for the Breeder’s Cup races again. I’ll place $2 win bets on every horse that WagerMate says has an ROI over 25% — that’s 7 horses on Friday, and 15 horses on Saturday.
I’ll also place $1 exacta box bets on the top 3 picks in each race.
Here are the Friday picks…
Build 338
The latest version of WagerMate, build 338, has a couple of minor improvements in it:
- WagerMate knows that Del Mar is switching back to dirt tomorrow.
- A bug related to saving user-scratch information is fixed.
I’m working on improving the track-to-track variant. It may take a couple of months to do all of the calculations, and insert the new work into WagerMate.
2015 Belmont Results
5-6-7-1
So the $9.00 superfecta bet paid $28.50.
Not bad, but, betting the exacta may have worked out better — I was hoping for long shots in the third and fourth spots.
2015 Belmont: The Battle for Place
2015 Preakness Results
WagerMate was right about American Pharoah (but, so was everyone else).
WagerMate and I were wrong about Firing Line. On to Belmont….
2015 Preakness
WagerMate likes the same three horses it liked in the Kentucky Derby, in the same order:
I feel obliged to bet them in the trifecta this time.
I don’t like American Pharoah as much as WagerMate does; I still like Firing Line, so I’ll bet it to win.
I’ll also bet a superfecta 1/2/8 over 1/2/8 over 1/2/8 over All.
2015 Kentucky Derby Results
18-10-8-15
So a $1 exacta bet paid $36.30; not bad.
Did I recommend betting WagerMate’s top 3 picks in the trifecta??? No? 50 cents woulda turned into $50.50. Happy to have to the top 3 picks in order, but really, these were not long shots, so I can’t claim this was magical.
2015 Kentucky Derby
2014 Breeder’s Cup
WagerMate likes a lot of long shots for the Breeder’s Cup races. I’ll place $2 win bets on every horse that WagerMate says has an ROI over 100% — that’s 6 horses on Friday, and 19 horses on Saturday.
I’ll also place $1 exacta box bets on the top 3 picks in each race.
Here are the Friday picks…