Because I was out the entire day, I did not post for Garden State on Wednesday, October 6. Despite this, several of our Gold Club "spot list" horses performed very well this night, making this night potentially profitable.

This week, I'm going to focus in on Race 9 from this card, which contained 3 horses on the Gold Club list. The exacta, containing 2 of these, returned in excess of $200. But forgetting the big price, these two horses are excellent examples of two principles which readers here have heard me mention time and time again.

The "Hold-Over" Horse
In our last installment, I spoke of the dangers of continuing to follow a horse when the reason you were watching him in the first place no longer existed. Of course, the flip side of this is, that if such reason continues, you may continue to follow him. An excellent example of this in the 9th race is 2-HO THREZA CHARM LO who made my watch list off the effort on September 10. Here's the chart of that race.

We can see that in this race, all 18 oars were basically in the water, with Wild Dancer, Tightwad, and Riverboat Gambler stroking along on the rail, and Thunder Quest playing traffic cop on the outside. HO THREZA CHARM LO saves ground and when he gets the room, closes extremely well. Despite picking up only one horse, he is the big gainer in the stretch outgaining everyone. Ordinarily, one might not be attracted to the horse who gets lucky and slips up the rail while the whole outer tier is stuck behind a policeman, but the final half and particularly, the final quarter of this race, were extremely fast for this night as a whole. This makes me look doubly hard at gainers from the rear such as HTCL. So on to my watch list he went.

Lo and behold, when his next race came along, I was at the Jug, but ran from Delaware Park to Beulah Park for simulcasting, principally to bet on this animal but, as often happens, fate conspired against me. Off went Hrabovsky in favor of Smith, and off he goes at even money. He makes a sweeping move past the quarter, yields after the half, comes out at the top of the stretch and wins very easily, paying bupkus. In isolation, there would be nothing to attract me to this race, except for the fact that he was ALREADY IN SHAPE.

So now, on 10-6, he draws inside again, against a similar group of cheese eaters. He was in shape and on my spot list 2 weeks ago. He delivered (even though unbettable) last week. He is still sharp. There is no reason to go away from the horse at this point. He proved us right the week before, and there is no reason why he cannot do it again. The only question is: will the crowd be on him like stink on dog shit? Sometimes they are, and if you are a value player, you must back away. But in this case, they did not bet him heavily, letting him go off at 6-1. He gets another decent trip, and wins - by a nose - paying $14.

The Change in Character
Another horse on our Gold Club spot list coming into this week was #9-MP HANOVER. Here's a horse that has looked dead as a dingo's donger for the past month and a half. He has shown no propensity to leave. He has been going off at 32-1, 61-1, 100-1, and 7-1. Suddenly, last week, they must have showed him videos of other horses leaving in the barn, because he gets bet down to 2-1, draws the 9 hole, and leaves! After securing position, he makes yet another move back to the front, and continues all the way to the autotote machine. Another important thing to point out is that the first half of this race was unusually quick for the night in question, relatively speaking. During this ultra-fast first half, he had made not one, but two moves! So onto my list he went.

As you see from the chart below, he started following cover, which disappeared, leaving him first over for a good portion of the race. He took the lead and nearly held off the charge of HO THREZA CHARM LO, who rode his cover right into position. He was 28-1.

 GSP  ,19991006,6,09        GARDEN STATE PARK           RACE DATE:   10/06/1999
RACE: 09       TYPE: LATE BETTING         CLASS: nw4650L6cd         GAIT: PACE
EVENT:
PURSE:     4,000  TRACK COND: FAST     TIME: 0:27.2 - 0:55.2 - 1:24.1 - 1:53.2
                                                            -- TIME --
    HORSE NAME      POST  1/4  1/2  3/4 STRETCH   FINISH    ACTUAL  LQ   ODDS
HO THREZA CHARM L     2    6    6   5p    4/1H     1/NS     1:53.2 28.2    600
MP HANOVER            9    8   7p   3p    6/1T     2/NS     1:53.2 29     2800
STARBREW              4    3   4p    4    2/T      3/NK     1:53.2 28.4    380
LOVE WINS ALL         6    1   2p    1    1/T      4/T      1:53.3 29.2   *190
PACIFIC BULLET        8    9    9   7p    7/3Q     5/1      1:53.3 28.1    830
KEYSTONE AMARILLO     1    5    5    6    5/1T     6/3Q     1:54.0 28.4   2130
I'M THE CHAIRPAN      7   4p    1    2    3/1Q     7/3H     1:54.0 29.3    240
CHAIRMAN S J          3    7    8   9p    8/9Q     8/10     1:55.2 29.4   7070
KIZEMA N              5   2p    3    8    9/10Q    9/12     1:55.4 30.2   3580
DRIVERS: S.M. SMITH, J.L. RANDALL, R.J. STEVENSON, J.R. PLUTINO,
J.P. SCHWIND, J.D. PARKER JR, D. DUBE, J.C. PAVIA JR, M.R. MC NICHOL

This is an excellent example of an animal that shows a big change in character, and does so in impressive fractions, who gets totally overlooked. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes the crowd is all over them like a cheap suit. But frequently, particularly when the draw outside, the get totally ignored, setting up a nice opportunity to catch one.