DeRosa's Blog

DEROSA'S BLOG

OCTOBER 22, 2013

Will all seven defending Breeders' Cup winners exit as losers?

by Ed DeRosa

One of the more interesting prop bets as the 2013 Breeders' Cup World

Championships unfolds is "How many of the seven defending winners will repeat?"

If I were to accept wagers on the outcome, I'd set the over-under line at 1.5

with 3-to-5 on the under and 7-to-5 on the over.

Individual odds would look like this:

# wins	Odds
0	3-1
1	3-2
2	5-2
3	8-1
4	40-1
5+	400-1

I arrived at these odds by assessing the following chances to each of the

returning seven winners:

Horse	Race	Odds-1	% chance
Fort Larned	Classic	6.00	14.29%
Groupie Doll	F&M Sprint	4.00	20.00%
Little Mike	Turf	8.00	11.11%
Mizdirection	Turf Sprint	4.00	20.00%
Royal Delta	Distaff	2.50	28.57%
Trinniberg	Sprint	20.00	4.76%
Wise Dan	Mile	2.00	33.33%

Given those odds the chance that they ALL win is about 347,000-to-1, which is

less likely than randomly picking the Super High 5 in a 14-horse field

(240,239-to-1). The most likely outcome is one winner followed by two then zero.

The art is discerning the odds-to-1 of each of the returning winners. After

that it's all science to come up with the odds of a certain number of them

winning. Do any of these prices look good to you?