American Turf Magazine
/ December-January 2015-2016
36
Turf Investor
Finding Value in Maiden Races
By Frank Cotolo
U
ndermost circumstances
,
find
-
ing valuable wagers inmaiden
races is a difficult chore.Maid-
ens have their own class structure and
there are many handicapping factors
and elements that don’t adhere as
strongly as when you handicap veteran
horses racingagainstwinners—nomat-
ter how many they have won. What we
intend to do in this issue’s column on
investing inpari-mutuels is to showyou
where and how to find the best possible
maiden races in which to invest. It’s
going to take some courage, though,
because the best prices will come from
the most inconspicuous entries.
One huge advantage you can have
most of the time handicapping maiden
races is the fact that most handicap-
pers address these affairs exactly as
they examine any type of race. This is
a mistake. You should not peruse and
evaluate any maiden race as you would
claiming, allowance, conditioned or
stakes races, where entries have, at
least, broken his or her maiden. Any
race for maidens, which are most of
the times young and green runners,
no matter their ages, presents intrinsic
problems for the handicapper; some of
these do not exist in classes that include
horses that have already won. This is
where we may find a proven edge that
enables us to reveal a winner—and
sometimes the best kind of winner, one
that no one expects.
Because themajority of bettors will be
using recent form and speed and vari-
ous other elements to judge maidens,
just as they would “winners,” we have
to look at maidens that do not neces-
sarily show past-performance positives;
we have to explore more deeply horses
that for all due purposes look like hor-
rible prospects to win. Of course that
doesn’t mean backing horses that are
obviously bad and dismissed at huge
odds due to a void of talent showing
in their running lines. It means find-
ing maidens with specific components,
though, as component indicates, they
are unique and abstract.
The Usual Suspects
None of the usual factors that handi-
cappers rely upon will concern us
because the public is smart enough
to calculate every one of them. Even
mildly astute handicappers can read
workouts and honor class drops and
scan past-performance lines that show
a horse is cashing checks. However, the
average handicapper tends to weigh
the common factors far too heavily in
general and when it comes to maidens.
Horses that have sharp workouts may
always work well in the morning but
when they are in the thick of a field
under the afternoon sun or the eve-
ning flood lights, their running lines
may not complement their propen-
sity for workouts. You can see a horse
with good works that has been second
and third and second and third in its
recent races and then see a dozen race
lines below those where it lost every
time. In fact, certain maidens such as
these seem to have a desire to lose,
so to speak, because they fail to win
even when every possible advantage
is afforded them. This is what we call
a “proven loser.” It’s a bad investment
because its parade of losing lines indi-
cates nothing is probably going to
affect it for the better anytime soon,
which certainly negates far more good
points than if it shows speed at dawn.
Class is another common gauge
handicappers use. Horses coming
from straight Maiden events that are
stepping into Maiden Claimers usu-
ally attract a lot of win bets, since
the disparity of the straight-maiden
affair to a claimer (even a high-priced
Maiden Claiming race) is taken as a
huge advantage. It’s true to an extent,
since you can find many examples of
horrid straight-maiden losers turn-
ing into champs when suddenly they
and their foes are racing for tags. Still,
punters take these drops too strongly
most of the time and make straight-
maiden class-dropping horses far too
low in odds by comparison to what
one may consider their true chances
to win, which in reality are debatable
at best unless you have been keeping
meticulous records on the character of
maidens that win dropping into a race
with a tag for the first or second time.
The Road To Faith
What are required to find valuable
winners in a maiden race of any class
are a few things. Let’s review them now
and site an example.
First, we need a horse that is not a
proven loser. We need to inspect the
running lines of a maiden that is green
and for all due purposes erratic in only
a few starts. The least starts the better.
Also, the worse the horse’s finishes, the
better. We want to see elements in such
a horse’s past performances that may
indicate an improvement; usually these
are moves inside of the race, especially
showing early foot for the first time.
We want to weigh heavily a specific
fact or two (the more the better) that
excuse a novice runner from racing
better. We want to find that kind of
horse and make what we call a “leap
of faith” win bet, especially when the
public has dismissed such a maiden
due to evaluating it with no faith it
may be a better horse in the current
race. The average handicapper has
no faith, meaning, of course, he or she
demands evidence indicating a novice
runner will improve. But such evidence
is obvious, even when it isn’t necessarily
