Pizza, if your fallback position is always going to be there\'s no relevant data, then there is no discussion here, because no one is ever going to commission a study. So, the alternative is to share observations made by people who have invested twenty to fifty years of their lives, on nearly a daily basis. It won\'t get beyond the anecdotal, or the insufficient sample size, but if there is a preponderance of circumstantial evidence, folks are going to be pretty comfortable taking a position. If it doesn\'t meet your level of statistical purity, I doubt it will dissuade those who feel the way they do, because, again, that level of statistical certainty isn\'t going to be found. Absent that, some of us rely on the mixture of common sense with many years of observation, and those doing so generally have highly refined analytical skills, because, at the level they play, the game warrants it, or you will quickly crash and burn. So, yes, the influx of casual players on Derby day likely skews the betting pattern. I can\'t prove, nor can you disprove, that if you were take a sampling of bettors responsible for, let\'s say 90% of the action on every other day of the year, you would see a dramatically different array of betting odds than what winds up on the Churchill board. When Orb goes off at 5-1, I\'m thinking he\'s no more than 7-2 among the \"regulars.\" When Big Brown goes off at 5-2, I\'d say he\'s less than 2-1 with the more serious players. When Giant Finish goes off at 38-1, I can\'t believe he\'d be less than 70 or even 80-1 in a pool of mainstream customers. Twenty years ago, Arcangues won the BC Classic at odds of 133-1 in a 13-horse field. Here you have a contrast between two of the most significant races of the year. There is relatively little \"tourist\" money in the Cup. If there had been, do you seriously think you would have gotten 133-1? It was predominantly serious money, or the absence thereof, that got you those odds. The pool is not diluted by the multitudes who do precisely what Covello said his friends were doing.
So, save the \"this is not statistically verifiable\" response. We know that. This is not a Statistics seminar. The best we have is anecdotal material which serves as a springboard for what can occasionally be interesting bar talk. As those kinds of things go, this material is reasonably solid.
