It\'s a difficult translation, isn\'t it? And one that I have more often than not mistranslated into the sad gibberish of a high pile of losing tickets. Even the years that saw me turn a solid opinion into some sort of profit left me gnashing my teeth at the money over the money I left on the table.
It\'s the white whale of races for me. Foolish as it is to think it, let alone say out loud, what I shoot at is a whale\'s score with one-twentieth of the whale\'s outlay. My mentor, the late and deeply missed Sam, invariably tried to hose down my grandiosity with the thought that the 25 claimer at Aquedump held a lot more promise for the small fish than did the twenty horse stampede at Churchill. Though he was probably right, the stampede is a lot more fun, isn\'t it? Or as the most eloquent man to ever walk through Troy, NY once said, \"to produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.\"
Pardon the flowery digression, but there is an actual point, I think, and it\'s something along the lines of, given that this is not the usual 25 claimer, neither the horses nor the payouts ordinary, and given that I will be spending way more time and money on this race than I will on the usual 25 claimer, I have approach the race differently. First off, have to read myself before I can read the horses.
Where\'s my head at these days? How much can I afford to comfortably blow? Am I running a syndicate full of amateurs or am I playing on my own? What kind of bets can I live with if I miss? How can I turn the yearly dips into pools of a once-a-year size into a once-in-a-lifetime score?
Even when I\'m managing one of those small syndicates I\'ve got at most $1,500 at my disposal. Tiers are too pricey for me; I\'m looking to leverage one opinion, maybe two, that, if correct, leaves me live into multiple scenarios, especially ones that I do not see as likely, since these are the ones that have blown me up. (Like when a 71-1 shot I liked, back when just two sophomore preps was seen as a negative, ran 2nd to a horse that left me telling my father at our Derby party that I was quitting gambling and picking up going to Mass again. He would have been thrilled if it broke that way, but of course neither of those things happened.)
I\'m looking for a big price I can key in the top three or four spots, even if I\'m relatively unconvinced of his chances at the top spot. A 30-1 shot in third amidst the logical ones this year, even if two are them are Baffert in the neighborhood of 3-1 each, that will still pay out nice.
I can\'t afford to cover every plausible scenario, let alone the plausibly implausible ones. I don\'t have much of a margin for error, I gotta take a stand and work around it. It\'s frustrating when you just miss (easier mentally to just completely whiff on the race), but given the way the gimmicks pay in this race, as a small player, I basically have to get it right once in my life to come out on top.
And if I never get it right, well, it\'ll still be a good time.
