Fairmount,
Just wanted to make sure I acknowledged your question.
I am no good at estimating where odds will go off so I don\'t even try to do it anymore
I think we have to wait to see how they all look come Derby week so see who the real buzz horses are.
I will be on the Churchill backstretch on Saturday and Sunday morning to watch Falling Sky and Swift Warrior train before heading up to Lexinton to be there for River Rocks\' run in the Lexington so I will definitely try to see if I can get a good look at some of the Derby horses this weekend to give us a baseline for how they look coming into the race.
As an aside to that, I think having some kind of baseline on these horses is pretty critical. It\'s very hard to look at a horse for the first time during Derby week and be able to conclude \"that horse is doing great\". If you haven\'t seen them before, you can\'t tell if they are better or worse than before their last race.
For example, Verazzano is an absolutely georgeous physical specimen. In the paddock of the Tampa Bay Derby, he looked as good as a horse can look. He\'s so good looking at his best that it\'s totally possible that we get to Derby week and people think he looks \"really good\" but in reality, he isn\'t doing as well as he was when he\'s in top form (not saying this is the case by the way, just a hypothetical)
Another example of the importance of having a baseline was how Bodemeister looked/moved on the track heading into last year\'s Derby. As you might recall, very knowledgable guys like Welsh were very bearish on how he was moving on the track during Derby week. However, that was just how the horse always moved. He was an unsound horse who had a tremendous amount of talent. he wasn\'t moving any differently during Derby week than he was before the Ark Derby when he ran a huge figure.
So, main point we can only put so much weight on \"how they look\" during derby week without having some baseline
