Betting tips for big fields and big payouts at Colonial Downs
Colonial Downs can be an intimidating meeting for handicappers to tackle. It features full fields with horses shipping in from more than two dozen tracks and a jockey colony that mixes some of the best riders from different regions of the U.S.
Sill, with average payouts of better than 9-2 on win and 214-1 on Pick 3, just to name two well-paying pools, horseplayers feel the allure to take a shot at big payouts. Here are data-driven tips for playing Colonial Downs starting Wednesday and racing Wednesday-Saturday, plus Labor Day, for 10 weeks through Sept. 13 for a 41-day meeting.
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And let's start with those payouts. For the purposes of this report, we are considering only data from the 2024 meeting, not the all-dirt Virginia Derby meeting in March. Even though favorites won at a 42% clip last year, the average win price was still more than $11, and betting every favorite to win resulted in just a -5% return on investment.
Colonial also was one of only four tracks in the summer, along with Del Mar, Ellis and Woodbine, to conduct at least 200 races with an average field size of eight. Those deep fields helped multi-horse vertical wagers average more than the corresponding horizontal wager, which is atypical. For example, the exacta averaged more than the double.
The chart below is for where starters in the first three weeks of the 2024 meeting made their last starts with a maximum layoff of 120 days. Local horses fared extremely well, with Charles Town and Delaware Park shippers both posting huge Horse Racing Nation Impact and ROI scores.
A big part of any summer meeting is the 2-year-old racing, and Colonial Downs plays host to plenty of that. The HRN First-Time Power Ratings are an indispensible tool for maiden races with debut runners. Juveniles with 4- and 5-star ratings in maiden special weight races the past two seasons are 24-for-131 with a +19% HRNi and a +19.5% ROI. 1- and 2-star horses are winless in 59 starts.
Post time most race days, including opening day Wednesday, is 12:30 p.m. EDT.