Weekend Winners Club

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Monday, July 2. Happy Dominion and Independence Week! To celebrate the occasion, we will have a Free Grid PP every day this week. We start with Hastings today which is in a province far far away.
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There weren’t many tracks to choose from today in the first place, so Hastings made the grade by having the only stakes race of the day. Worth a whopping $50k, it’s called the Supernaturel (French spelling.)
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The Canadian socialists should be happy that they’re getting more free stuff from the US. And whether they play Hastings or not, they should be elated that every day is Free Grid Day this week.
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Download Hastings Grid right here free and easy.
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Saturday, June 30. Gulfstream Park has another big race day in its legendary year-round racing meet. The Summit of Speed is highlighted by the Smile Sprint G3 for all horses and Princess Rooney G2 for fillies and mares. Listed stakes Carry Back and Azalea will be for 3yos and 3yof’s respectively.
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All eyes and most bets will be on frontrunner X Y Jet, who would be 3 for 3 this year except for a narrow loss in the Dubai Golden Shaheen G1, in which he also finished 2nd in 2016. The 6yo grey gelding has enjoyed much success at Gulfstream Park and will certainly get a warm welcome in his first race back from Dubai.
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Classic Rock will look to have something to say about it as the 2nd choice and is 3 for 3 this year, all at Gulfstream Park. If they get into a duel up front, look for Mo Cash, Reason to Soar, and Mr. Jordan to get in on the action.
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The Princess Rooney G2 is the most important race of the day since it’s a Breeders Cup Challenge race, meaning the winner gets a free entry into the G1 Filly and Mare Sprint.
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Curlin’s Approval is a solid favorite, but Ms Locust Point will try to ride an uncontested lead, and My Miss Tapit is good closer. Stormy Embrace is great at this distance and has nice odds to beef up your exotics.
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Gulfstream Park’s Pick 6 Jackpot is almost at $900k so gamblers should be eager to get in on that action, as the pool will certainly reach $1 million today.
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Download the Gulfstream Grid of the Week here.

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Saturday, June 23. Thistledown has it’s big day of the year with the Ohio Derby, featuring mostly some great horses that either didn’t make the Kentucky Derby or didn’t do much in it.
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Flameaway, Lone Sailor, Dream Baby Dream, Diamond King and Core Beliefs highlight an initial field of 12 in what looks to be an entertaining and competitive race. 3 other stakes races are on the card.
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While our premium subscribers get 9 Grids for Saturday, you can get this one free!

Download the Saturday Thistledown Grid free here now.
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Saturday, June 16, Churchill Downs. Horse racing has not suddenly come to a halt after Justify won the Triple Crown! Churchill Downs has it’s 2nd biggest race day of the year on Saturday, hosting 5 graded stakes races.
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Kicking off the stakes racing will be the Matt Winn G3, featuring Baffert’s Sir Barton champion Ax Man, taking on Kentucky Derby participant Combatant and other talented 3yos.
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The featured Stephen Foster G1 will have Triple Crown competitors from yesteryear such as Irish War Cry, Patch, Pavel, and Lookin at Lee taking on favorite Backyard Heaven.
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It’s set to be a great racing day at Churchill Downs on Saturday and you need to be in it to win it!
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Download Churchill Downs Free Grid of Week Here
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June 12. This week’s Grid of the Week will be Churchill Downs on Saturday. The following big races are on tap. Check back on Thursday night for the Grid posting.
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Fleur de Lis H (GII) BC CD Jun 16 $200k g 3&up f/m 9f Dirt Closed on Jun 2.
Matt Winn S (GIII) CD Jun 16 $100k g 3yo 8.5f Dirt Closed on Jun 2.
Regret S (GIIIT) CD Jun 16 $100k g 3yo f 9f Turf Closed on Jun 2.
Stephen Foster H (GI) BC CD Jun 16 $500k g 3&up 9f Dirt Closed on Jun 2.
Wise Dan S (GIIT) CD Jun 16 $200k g 3&up 8.5f Turf Closed on Jun 2.
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This summer we’re doing something a little different. In addition to the usual Spectacular Summer Subscription Selections Suggested (I ran out of S words) at this link, we also will be offering a new Selection for only $1!.
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That’s right, only $1 for a month of access to not only all of our expert analysis, but also a Free Grid every week, for a selected track on Saturday. Sometimes there will be more than 1 Free Grid per week.
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If you think racing is over now that Justify won the Triple Crown, it’s definitely not. He could go on to win the Haskell, Travers, and Breeders Cup! Summer racing has just begun.
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The Grid, as you probably know, is our version of condensed past performances, color coded, and packed with as much information as you can fit for a track’s full day race card on 1-2 pages. It helps you make quick decisions on horizontal and vertical wagers with or without page pp’s.
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In order to allow you to be acquainted with using the Grid without committing to a monthly or prepaid subscription term, which is well worth the cost, you can now get it free every week for just $1 per month, using this secret link! There’s no login or password required, just the secret link to our Free Info.
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The site is regularly updated with great analysis and information. For example, you didn’t have to buy any product, but look at our Kentucky Derby week articles, and easily take home a winning exacta or trifecta.
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If there’s any other service with regularly updated useful information you can get for $1 per month, let me know, so I can sign up for that too!

Click Here for $1 All-Access and Free Grids!

Good Luck!
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Monday, June 11, 2018, Belmont Park. The usual Monday morning jockeying has been going on since Saturday night, with the backers of the favorite happily saying they told you so. These were the same people who wanted to tell you so 12 times between 1978 and 2015, but couldn’t.
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Then there are those looking for excuses, some claiming collusion with stablemate Restoring Hope, who set out in pursuit of the champ from the gate. What are stablemates for anyway? Although he did appear to box in Bravazo, who I told you was a non contender beforehand, they both faded anyway.
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What happened was that the favorite won! Imagine that. Justify was the betting favorite, as most Kentucky Derby – Preakness champions are, even those such as Charismatic and War Emblem who had trouble getting backers on Preakness day. But he’s also only the 2nd such horse in the last 14 attempts to win the Belmont.
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Justify is clearly an excellent racehorse, and the best of this group of 3yos, and deserved to win, whether Restoring Hope was in the race or not. Rumor has it Baffert didn’t even want the other one in the race, but the owners wanted the chance at Belmont glory. Good for them.
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Undefeated and with 4-5 odds, most people thought Justify would win. I personally thought he would finish 2nd, given that the Derby-Preakness favorite has lost 12 of the last 14 Belmont Stakes, normally finishing 2nd or 3rd. But I was hardly surprised that Justify won, and nobody should be.
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What many are probably surprised about was who finished 2nd. Gronkowski, obviously still no favorite or friend of New York, had a great late kick to chase the favorite into the wire for 2nd at 25-1. This one was hard for most to figure out, given his track record. Let’s look at that record.
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Gronk came off 4 wins on polytrack at a mile each in Europe, including 2 Kentucky Derby qualifying races, which gave him the right to run for the roses, which he did not. But Chad Brown is a favorite and friend of New York, and probably not have put him in the race if he thought it was too tall an order.
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Unfortunately, like most American racing statistics outfits, including the biggest ones like DRF and Brisnet, we don’t have the full race data and fractions for European races. Therefore you see a bunch of blanks where speed and performance figures should be.
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Except that DRF issued Timeform ratings for him, along with Beyers for the other horses, expecting you to make some kind of comparison. Which you actually can, because we have a conversion chart for that. In the future, hopefully we can just get the data from somewhere and insert it into our own database.
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So like most Triple Crown races, there was at least 1 wildcard longshot finishing in the superfecta that few people expected. The next 2, Hofburg and Vino Rosso, were back to exact betting order. In 5th place was 5th choice Tenfold, edging out Bravazo who was the 4th betting choice.
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So, we have a new Triple Crown Champion, obviously. Perhaps more importantly, Bob Baffert now has two such champions, joining an elite group of 1 or maybe 2 other trainers, depending on who’s counting. Some people have it that Citation was a collaboration between Horace Jones and his father Ben, who had also trained TC champ Whirlaway.
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Whatever the case, training a Triple Crown Champion horse is still a very short list, with now a total of 13 such champion horses in history. We can now proudly add Justify, also just the 2nd TC champion to be also undefeated, like Seattle Slew, who went on to win 5 of 8 more races. Also a very short list.
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What does this mean moving forward? Will Justify run another 8 races, or another 13 like TC Champion Affirmed did, winning 8 of those? No, this isn’t the 1970s. American Pharoah went on to run 3 more races, winning the Haskell and Breeders Cup Classic, before retiring the same year he won it.
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As lightly raced as Justify, who has the least amount of races of any TC Champ, may be, chances are he won’t run past his 3yo year. There is not much left to prove except the BC Classic. It would be nice to see him in there, but he might just as well be retired before that ever happens. Others who never won more than 1 Triple Crown race have been retired before November.
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In my opinion, they will pretend to be training him for the Haskell, Travers, and BC Classic, then retire him, claiming random inflammation somewhere from a mysterious bruise, as if horses routinely die from bruises. But, at least we got to see him while we could, all 6 career races so far.
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We also got to see the first great classic horse from the Storm Cat sireline. Prior to Justify, the SCAT sireline had produced 1 Preakness champion and 1 Breeders Cup champion, both long shots that were considered flukes. It’s now time, with the arrival of Scat Daddy, that we take this sireline seriously in the American classic races.

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Saturday, June 9, Belmont Park. Today we look at a brief history of Triple Crown Champions, adequate to the occasion, since yet another horse, the 7th this century, is trying to win the coveted crown by winning the Belmont Stakes today in what is the longest race that any of them has faced yet.
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You may have heard that Triple Crown Champions come in bunches. Well, they used to anyway. In fact, there were 3 in the 1930s, 4 in the 40s, and then none until the 70s, wherein there were 3 including the great Secretariat. But if you look back about 100 years ago, there was only won in the 1910s.
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Then you can skip several more decades from the 70s to 2015, where American Pharoah became the first to win it since 1978, trained by Bob Baffert and ridden to victory by Victor Espinoza. As covered in a previous article, here is the short list of actual Triple Crown Champions.
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A much longer list consists of those that won the first 2 legs and did not win the Belmont Stakes, some by excruciatingly short lengths of defeat. When I first got into thoroughbred racing, I was treated to 3 years in a row of heartbreaking Belmont losses by Silver Charm, Real Quiet, and Charismatic.
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Since those explosive 40’s, there have been 5 Triple Crown Champions, and 19 who won the first 2 of 3 legs but could not seal the deal. Here is the longer list of the losers who have reason to be sore.
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There are some things to be learned from this data. To the untrained eye, you see 19 who lost the Belmont, highlighted in a shade of blue. Then you see some horses in red print and wonder what that is. Those are the years where Raise a Native sireline did not win a single Triple Crown race that year.
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Raise a Native (RAN) had his first eligible Triple Crown crop in 1967. Since then, his sireline has swept the Triple Crown races almost as many times as it failed to win a leg of the Triple Crown. And you will notice from the graphic, on several occasions where the presumptive TC champ was beaten, it was by a RAN sireline horse.
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Why do you want to know all of this? Justify will win the Belmont and nobody can stop him, right? Many said the same thing about California Chrome, Big Brown, Smarty Jones, Funny Cide, and especially Alysheba, Pleasant Colony, and Spectacular Bid, and possibly others of the 19 on that list.
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The fact is, the odds are still against Justify in almost every way. Justify is the first from the famous Storm Cat (RIP) sireline to win the Kentucky Derby, and would be the first to win the Belmont. It wouldn’t be the first time by any means, for a horse by RAN or API to put a stop to his bid.
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If you want to use common sense instead of hype and emotion, you will see that reliable Belmont sirelines such as RAN and API/BR have the best chance of winning. That list makes up half of the current Belmont Stakes field, as you can see highlighted in the Belmont Stakes Grid snapshot below.
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RAN is represented by Tenfold, Blended Citizen, and Vino Rosso, and AP Indy has Hofburg and Noble Indy. These are all in fact, viable contenders, as is long shot Free Drop Billy, whose sire won the Belmont Stakes a few years ago. Let’s take a look at these contenders.
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Vino Rosso (RAN) went 9th in the Kentucky Derby and may not have liked the mud, but sure did like his last jaunt in New York where he won the Wood Memorial going away. Restoring Hope was passed like a rock.
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Blended Citizen (RAN) skipped the Triple Crown so far and came back last month to win the Peter Pan here at Belmont Park, in another come from behind victory.
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Hofburg (API) ran an excellent Florida Derby for 2nd behind 3rd place Kentucky Derby finisher Audible, then wound up 7th in the Kentucky Derby after being steadied twice in the large field.
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Noble Indy (API) had a horrendous Kentucky Derby finishing 17th after his impressive Louisiana Derby win, but should bounce back after a month of rest.
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Tenfold (RAN) did not qualify for the Ky Derby but made a good run at the Preakness for 3rd, losing by just ¾ length to Justify in the end.
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Bravazo (ND) actually did well in the Ky Derby, finishing 6th after a disgusting Louisiana Derby finish. He also closed well for 2nd in the Preakness, just a neck behind Justify. Wayne Lukas knows his way around Pimlico and Belmont better than most trainers do.
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It’s not my point to kill anyone’s Triple Crown buzz here, since mine has been killed numerous times. You just have to get used to reality. Most likely, it will not happen this year. American Pharoah will probably go down as the lone TC Champ from this decade, much like the 1st ever, Sir Barton, in 1919.
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Since this will be the last article before the Belmont Stakes, we might as well give you the picks.
Noble Indy
Justify
Hofburg
Vino Rosso
Blended Citizen

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Monday, May 28, 2018. Start off your Memorial Day afternoon with great racing at Belmont Park including 6 stakes races. Elmont is actually staying dry this weekend unlike the rest of the East Coast. Good time to check in and see how it’s playing.
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Get Belmont Memorial Day Grid here free and easy.
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Saturday, May 26. Monmouth Park has a big day scheduled starting at 12:50 pm with 4 stakes races on the card, including JJ Reilly, Boiling Springs, Salvator Mile G3, and Monmouth Stakes G2.
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Download today’s Monmouth Grid here free and easy.
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