(spin979)

Just when you thought you’d heard all the stories there are to be told about the Breeder’s Cup, here’s one more… the TBA is full of kick ass handicappers!

We have an evolving tradition of posting our picks for big events. For last year’s BC we posted them on Patrick’s blog (I picked 3 winners). I believe we posted our picks for the Derby card by way of Google docs but can’t find them (does anyone have that link?).

This year, we posted our BC picks on the TBA homepage (permalink here). We picked a winner for each race and used a mythical $2 WPS bet to track how we faired.

At first I was bummed, using this method I didn’t break even. Then I realized that I picked FOUR winners, which is not too shabby. In fact, not only did I pick 4 winners, so did 4 other folks AND Michael of Gathering the Wind picked FIVE winners! This prompted me to look around a bit to see how fared against others.

The NTRA posted, in their words, Expert Picks, which indeed did include many an expert. How did we do compared to them? Pretty damn good! None of the experts at NTRA picked 5 winners and only Larry Borstein and Mike Watchmaker picked 4!

Let’s look a little closer at the TBA picks. Not only were we impressive in the straight up picking winners department, but our In the Money (ITM) percentages were pretty darn good too. Kevin of Colin’s Ghost was 9/14 ITM for a whopping 64%… take that Pletcher, Asmussen, Dutrow! Also, 17 of the 18 TBA handicappers were 29% or above ITM!

Google docs spreadsheet didn’t let me link the blog name but you can link directly to them by using the TBA navigation to the right, except for the Magic Beer Bottle, which you can find here.

Congrats TBA handicappers, I’d say we did as well as fillies and Euros this year!