These are WagerMate’s picks…
I’m going to bet an exacta with 5, 9, 11, 16 over 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 14, 16.
…which uses the WagerMate picks on top, and adds a couple of favorites to place.
I managed to lose all 14 Win bets, for a grand total of $28.
I did win two of the exactas for $67.80 and $17.00. So the $78 spent on exacta tickets returned $84.80.
Hope you had as much fun as I did!
Just like last year, WagerMate likes a mix of favorites and long shots for the Breeders’ Cup races. I’ll place $2 win bets on every horse that WagerMate says has an ROI over 25% — that’s 4 horses on Friday, and 14 horses on Saturday.
I’ll also place $1 exacta box bets on the top 3 picks in each race.
Here are the Friday picks…
And these are WagerMate’s contenders for the Saturday races…
Tapwrit won — none of the other WagerMate picks was even close.
Soooo, let’s average the Derby & Preakness & Belmont results and talk about that number….
…$168.10 returned for a $36 investment.
Ummmm. Well Cloud Computing messed up my exacta. Let’s average the Derby & Preakness results and talk about that number….
The finish order of 5-1-11-14 means the $12 exacta I played turned into $168.10.
I was impressed that Lookin At Lee could do so well from post position 1.
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:
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…
13-2-10-1 — with Creator paying $34.80 to win, and Destin paying $9.40 to place.
Didn’t see that coming…
5-1-3-11 — so, no tickets to cash.
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!
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.
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.
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…