Shoot the 7 and I Got It!

Is there anything you hate worse than watching your trifecta run 2,3,4 behind some longshot winner that you didn't figure? That's when even the most optimistic of us start suspecting foul play.

I just watched two races in a row where the seven horse wiped out scrumptious superfectas by romping to an easy win. The saddle cloth number doesn't matter, just the fact that there was no way in my world view that horse would hit the board, much less annihilate the field.

For Southern California, I started a text file I call cheaters.txt just for this type of horse. I'm not going to post it because it's an incomplete work in progress. Maybe they're not "cheaters," either but something was weird according to my race perceptions.

So far, two theories stand out:

1) If the trainer and the owner are "connected" (same guy, same family, his farm) and the odds are good, look out.

2) If the jockey is J Rosario and the odds are good, look out.

This isn't going to work at small tracks where the trainers and owners are nearly all inter-related. Hell, it may not make money at a big track where trainers have many clients -- it just seems like it could.

:PS
The Pamplemousse is out of the Kentucky Derby and will likely miss six months of racing.