A couple of comments about some of the inane comments that have been posted. It is true that professional handicappers give picks the day before and that is how they are judged. But anybody who listens to professional handicappers is an idiot. Why do any of you bother buying the sheets if you are concerned about what a professional handicapper thinks? The point is that the sheets are tool to do well at the track. Regardless of what anyone posted in the handicapping contest, the sheets were invaluable that day.
The handicapping contest only allowed the betting of $1,000. Obviously, DP keyed Perfect Drift in the contest because he did not want to blow half his money on the Belmont. But if you believe that an even money favorite is going to run out of the money, but have no strong opinion on the other horses, then you should be willing to spend a lot of money to make a lot of money. On the sheets, Sarava had a good pattern, but was a little to slow to be competive. Any sheet player who says he was the most likely winner in the race is probably lying. But I considered him to be the only horse in the race with a positve pattern, and I often bet horses who are not the most likely winner if the odds deserve it. Sarava at 70-1 definitely deserved it, as did MDO for that matter. I thought Perfect Drift was the most likely winner, but at 5 to 1, there were better bets in the race. That is why pre-race handicapping contests are stupid and certainly not a test of the quality of the respective sheets (Even though I did post a contest entry because everyone else did, I was on record as saying these contests are stupid before the race. This day confirmed that).
As both DP and I have said on different occassions on this board well before this contest ever arose, the ability to throw out horses is at least as valuable as the ability to pick winners, and often more so. JB\'s comment about ROI is pretty lame. A $15,000 tri and a $145,000 super (eminently hittable if you were willing to spend the money) will make any ROI look good.
I love how people always say that a horse \"would have won\" if he only had a good start. Touch Gold would have won the Preakness a few years ago, but for his bad start. He ran a huge race despite his almost fall, which was worse than WE\'s, and almost won. Touch Gold then came back to win the Belmont. WE stumbled and then ran like the bounce candidate he was, and I will be surprised if see him running again anytime soon. So, he only would have lost by 10 lengths if he had not stumbled. Big deal. Only Secretariat has ever run a good Belmont off of a pattern similar to WE\'s pattern (actually, I should say similar to Secretariat\'s Derby and Preakness, Secretariat had a much stronger pre-derby pattern than WE), and as we now know, WE is no Secretariat.
Look, just about everyone did pretty badly in the handicapping contest. There were many important scratches and one race was taken off of the turf, wich rendered any contest results suspect to begin with. Maybe some of you spent the time to handiap each race for scratches and surface changes, but I doubt most spent the time. Further, declaring victory because you lost less money than the other guy is kind of lame. If any of you took the results of this handicapping contest as evidence of what sheets to buy, then you deserve whatever choice you make.
If you don\'t want to believe DP, fine. If you think it is tacky to post about hits at the track when you made picks ahead of time, fine. But if any of you think the Ragozin Sheets were not effective on Belmont day, then you guys are even more myopic than I thought. Personally, I can\'t tell you whether the TG sheets were also effective, as I have not seen them and the handicapping contest certainly told me nothing. I will be interested in comparing them when JB posts them.
