Avoid horses from this circuit when playing Saratoga this week

Every year and condition book is different, but as we head into a special five days of racing at Saratoga, it is worth noting that horses who made their last start at Aqueduct performed very poorly last year during Belmont Stakes week.

Other than the last line, the above chart includes only those horses who had raced within 180 days of their Belmont Stakes week start. Of those, horses who made their last start at Aqueduct won just 8 percent of their races while posting a flat-bet loss of -67.9%.

If this were a battle between East and Midwest, Kentucky would win by technical fall, as shippers from the commonwealth stormed the Capital Region to win at a 17.7% clip with a +30% Return On Investment.

One caveat to this is that because Aqueduct had more starters than the other tracks combined, many of them were long shots. This is where a figure such as the Horse Racing Nation Impact score comes in, as that measures expected wins versus actual wins but ROI measures only against actual wins.

The -28% HRN Impact for Aqueduct shippers is not nearly as bad as the ROI suggests. When filtering for favorites only, eight winners last raced at Aqueduct, six at Churchill, and three at all other tracks. In this era of computer-assisted wagering, I am not above using the toteboard for clues, and all this tells me that the high-priced Aqueduct shippers can be ignored. In fact, horses shipped from Aqueduct who were at least 10-1 went 0-for-92 during Belmont Stakes week last year at Saratoga while Kentucky had three winners from 40 starters for a +45% ROI.