DeRosa Diaries: Race selection is key to national contest

A conversation with top tournament player Matthew Bickey on the eve of my first-ever National Horseplayers Championship proved especially prescient as I stared down the barrel of a gun with 16 chambers.

As for ammunition, day one of the NHC in Las Vegas had a retail display of 72 races across 9 racetracks from which to choose bullets for the chambers. The National Thoroughbred Racing Association picks 6 of the races for you. It's open season on the other 10, to mix this metaphor even further.

All that is to say, "race selection is important."

That really should not be a newsflash to anyone who has played the races as long as I have, but it comes into acute focus at the NHC.

And it is for that reason that I have softened my stance on its mythical $2 win-place format. Yes, it is a totally different game than pari-mutuel betting and is not the best test of the horseplayer in a way that real-money tournaments like the Breeders' Cup Betting Challenge are, but especially in the scope of the NHC's three-day optional/mandatory format covering 36 picks on the first two days, it is a fine challenge of leveraging opinions and weighing probability against outcome over a large sample size.

There were two instances on Friday in which I thought two horses, neither favored, offered tremendous value at 2-1. The first was Castlewarden in race 8 at Oaklawn who won at 5-2 and the other was Mubtadaa in race 8 at Santa Anita who won at 12-5.

I did not use either horse, as I resolved to hunt bigger game than $7 win payoffs, but had this been a live-money tournament in the style of the BCBC then either (or both since the first one hit!) could have been worth your whole tournament life. But in the NHC, they were impossible to use.

Now, you could say, "But Ed, having both would have yielded $21.40!" Yes, that is true, and if you do that just 6 more times across the other 14 races then you have a nice 100-point score going into day 2, but a 50 percent strike rate across 16 races on horses who are 2-1 is more difficult than an 18 percent strike rate on 10-1 horses.

So I finished day 1 with $44.20. By no means "in the hunt" in the scope of the full leaderboard, but very much in range to get to the magic number of the approximately $180 I expect it will take to qualify for Sunday and get paid. 

20 races to score 140 pounds. If I can find four 15-1 winners I'm golden like that road in the Price Is Right game.