The Derby List Triple Crown (DLTC) handicapping contest ended Sat. June 5 with the Belmont Stakes.
Seven ARV4Fun people participated in the contest, out of 120 total contestants.
The contest consisted of 35 races over 17 weeks, with an average of 9.3 starters per race.
There were two separate contests: the Points contest, where one earns 6 for Win, 4 for Place and 2 for Show, for each successful prediction in the 35 races; and the ROI (a.k.a. @s) contest, where one can wager any amount on any or all horses in a race, while one still has @s left from a starting bankroll of @20,000. (Bets were made in equal amounts to win and place).
Points Contest
In the Points contest, the DLTC winner had 100 points.
The best finish by an ARV4Fun person was by HotLips (Joanie Sullivan) with 56, good for 59th place; she was the only ARV4Fun person to finish higher than the median DLTC score of 53.
Only two of the 7 ARV4Fun people finished higher than the random score of 45 (the number of points one would get by throwing darts to make picks).
So ARV was not particularly successful at predicting in-the-money finishes in this contest.
This was not unexpected; ARV often has a low win percentage for horse races, but this is frequently offset by high average mutuels, which are not used in the Points contest.
Here are the results presented graphically, with the 7 ARV4Fun contestants at left:
ROI Contest
The ROI DLTC contest winner had 376,200 @s.
The ARV4Fun group fared better here, which was expected, since longshots are what win in this contest, and ARV is good at that.
InsightRV (Loraine Connon) finished 7th of 120, with 59,401 @s, and horsepicker finshed 19th with 22,250 @s.
Four of the 7 ARV4Fun participants finished above the median DLTC score.
(Along with many non-ARV4Fun participants, some of us bet all of our @s on our Triple Crown race picks, ending at or near 0 if our selections lost.)
This contest is a combination of race picks and wagering strategy, and ARV was not used for the latter, so no conclusions can be definitively drawn about ARV and horse race predictions with respect to this data – but the results are promising. Some of us did hit several nice priced winners, including Drosselmeyer in the Belmont and Super Saver in the Derby.
Here are the details:
DLTC winner with 376,200 @s is not shown; 3 ARV4Fun participants has scores of less than 100 @s, so are also not shown.