Hey Ryan,
Sounds like you know a
little something to have made that $$$ betting on Shackleford and Astrology - congratulations! But, do the folks at RIM back in Waterloo know the Halifax office is betting on horse races in their spare time? Or are you doing Quality Assurance on the new Playbook
(Little known fact, at least from an unscientific poll I did traveling in the States or querying my American friends: Blackberry is a Canadian invention).
Seriously, good to have you aboard. A few comments on your initial questions:
Quote:
Question 1: I see there is many different classes. My understanding is it's a bit like baseball. You have MLB, AAA, AA, A. Naturally the best horses race in the "MLB" class if you will.
Does each race track only race 1 class of horses? Or will they host all kinds of different classes?
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Horseracing seems to be a joyful confusion of contradictions mixed with some order within chaos. There are high class tracks and circuits (such as Belmont, Aqueduct, Saratoga - New York; Santa Anita, Hollywood Del Mar - So. California) and upper middle-class tracks such as Churchill Downs, Arlington Park, Woodbine, and 'low' class tracks such as Fort Erie, Evangeline and Prairie Meadows (and lots of other tracks in between).
'Low' class is not a pejorative term, merely indicating typically lower purse prices, slower horses or horses who tend to keep their form for shorter periods of time. Within each calibre of track, there are also grades of races, from Maiden Claiming races and conditioned claiming races at the low end, through Allowance races, to restricted Stakes races and various forms of Handicap and Stakes races at the upper end. Horses competing in high end races at Charles Town (low class track) may run competitively in the lower levels at Philadelphia and at New York tracks.
Many medium to lower class tracks will have a few seasonal high calibre Stakes races with big purses to draw attention and promote their other racing product. For example in the Winter and Spring preps for the Triple Crown races, you have modest tracks like Tampa Bay, Oaklawn, Hawthorne and Sunland running high class Graded Stakes races for $100K+ purses, but really the rest of the races (even on the same day) are mostly of very modest class.
Obviously on big race days you tend to get a collection of big races with big purses which attract higher calibre horses from around the region or the country. For example, Pimlico runs fairly modest purses and calibre horses in a short specialty Spring meet (used to be longer), with one BIG RACE in May (the Preakness Stakes). Same with Churchill Downs most of the time (a big higher level).
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