Handicapper's Corner: 2026 Pacific Classic (G1)

  

On the Warpath Against Pacific Classic Favorites

By: Stuart Marc deVoe, ThoroFan Handicapper 

It’s great to see a full field in a G1 race for a change.  I applaud all those taking a shot in the Pacific Classic and for the East Coast boys to ship in.  Eleven runners will line up in the 1 14/ mile race with many liking the front end. 

There are a few closers signed on and the favorite, Knightsbridge, will try and stretch his speed another eight of a mile after a stellar performance that earned a 122 Beyer Speed Figure.

Let’s look at the field: 

 

1.   Om N Joy (20-1)  She’s a nice mare who will get the distance and will be closing in a speed laden field.  I can see her getting a piece.

2.   Forged Steel (5-1)  His best running is when he makes the lead which didn’t happen in his last, the G2 Suburban.  He got rank and never settled when behind runners.  If he is to clear today, he’ll need to break and be aggressive.  He’ll have to go fast to do so and then keep going.  He did that in the Gold Cup in May, but this is a much larger and speedy field. 

3.   Finger (JPN) (8-1)  It would be no surprise a Japanese runner came in and stole a big pot.  He seems like another forward type runner but gets in light.  Reports say he doesn’t need the lead and may sit a perfect trip.  Don’t ignore…

4.   Subsandador (ARG) (12-1)   His best days are behind him.

5.   Malarchuk (10-1)  Got trounced by 9.5L in his last by Forged Steel.  That again was in May.  Best of luck to him.

6.   Original Sin (15-1) An interesting long shot.  Juan Hernandez rides for Brendan Walsh and east coast trainer and not for any of the hometown boys.  His versatile running style can put him in a good spot, he’s beaten Hit Show on the square and the price will be right…

7.   Hit Show (6-1)  I’d love to own this guy.  He just earns and earns ($9.5mill in the bankroll).  He’ll be coming forward in the stretch, and his best puts him in the mix.  Maybe…

8.   British Isles (12-1)  I’d have to come up with a lot of excuses for his recent form.  Not for me. 

9.   Navajo Warrior (8-1)  I guess we’d call this the acid test for Navajo Warrior.  Saffie scratched him out of the Whitney for this (I think) and he’s really come along with progressive speed figures and wins.  At first blush he looks like another speedy sort.  If you watch his last two races, he went to the lead on a loose rein, got into a good rhythm and went on with it.  He can sit a trip and get first run.

10.    Full Serrano (ARG) (8-1)  His best puts him right there.  His Pegasus and Oaklawn Mile efforts were good.  In fact, the OP race was great given his horrid start.  But he missed the San Diego with a foot issue and comes back at a mile and a quarter off a layoff from an outside post.  A tall order.

11.    Knightsbridge (5-2)  He’s the deserving favorite as that gaudy last race Beyer of 122 sticks out further than his post for this race.  If you put your finger over that effort, his other races still make him the favorite.  His second place to Nysos in the Met Mile was a solid effort as were his three romps in south Florida.  Here is the rub…his best running is on the lead.  He is outside plenty of other speed here and hasn’t gone this far.  If he clears, he will fly early and have to carry that pace.  If he tries to rate, which I think he can, he may be wide around the first turn and then must work a trip from there.  At what price are you willing to take to see?

SUMMARY 

I’m going against Knightsbridge.  If he wins, hats off to him.  I just can’t take a short price on a horse coming off a monster effort, shipping, stretching out to his furthest distance who may have to alter his running style to win.  If he goes for the lead, it may be suicide.  If he takes back, he’s wide.

I am looking at Navajo Warrior to sit the trip.  The 8-1 morning line seems fair enough and he needs only to repeat his last 2 efforts to win.  I can come up with a few others to hit the board, like Original Sin, Om N Joy and Hit Show.  I can see Forged Steel getting brave as well as the Japanese horse, Finger (JPN), to trip out.  If the favorite runs out of the money, there may be a nice payoff to be had.

THE BET:  (based on $100 wagered)

$40 win Navajo Warrior

$8 exactas Navajo Warrior with Original Sin, Hit Show, Forged Steel

$4 exactas Original Sin, Hit Show, Forged Steel with Navajo Warrior

$2 Trifecta Key Navajo Warrior with Original Sin, Hit Show, Forged Steel, Finger

Here’s to taking a swing!  Good luck

Handicapper's Corner: 2026 Whitney Stakes (G1)

 

 Graveyard of Champions: Looking past the obvious in the Whitney Stakes

By: The Turk, ThoroFan Handicapper  

Welcome, Friends. My primary focus in horse racing is Turf Handicapping and Exacta Bet Construction. That said, I handicapped Dirt racing for the better part of 35 years before I settled on Turf as my niche.  

This year I've been rather quiet with my blog, not that I'm quitting; I'll never truly give up my love of the races and blogging, but every few years I take a pause.  Whenever I return to racing from these "handicapper holidays," I return a bit rusty, but with a renewed sense of enjoyment.  I'm currently on one of these handicapper holidays, but the good people at The Thorofan asked me to share my thoughts on a very loaded Whitney field, and how could I refuse?    

Loaded.  Career Earnings:  Magnitude: $9.6 MM.  White Abarrio: $8.6 MM.  Sovereignty: $6.3 MM. Nitrogen: $2.7 M.  Baeza: $2.2 MM.  Antiquarian and Tiztastic each other: $1.2 MM.  Only one horse in the field below one million in career earnings, 4 YO Forged Steel, sits at $0.4 MM.  

This isn't the sort of race that requires a lot of hand-wringing as a handicapper.  Multiple potential winners exist in this field.  Only one question comes to mind when I look at this field:  Can I find value compelling enough to bet? 

I'm not the sort of horse player that plays for "action"; I no-bet many more races than I actually bet.  What sort of horse player are you?  If you do this long enough, if you invest enough of your hard-earned investment capital into this sport, you have to be able to answer that question.  We've seen so many good players die off, age out, or simply jump to other sports books.  It's a craft; please work at it and think about your strengths and weaknesses. I tend to get a bit nerdy with my analysis, but there are many ways to go about picking winners. 

As I said, I'm a bit rusty, but this race as I will explain (if it is not obvious) is less handicapping and more bet construction.  Win bets with a few horses down the tote board might be worth the investment.  Exacta bets? I would have liked to see a few more 8-to-10-to-1 closers to couple with a speed horse, but you have to work with what you got.  Let's build a base handicap first and then jump to bet construction.

Let's get after it!

First, some videos of interest.

While it was a smaller field, and the track was off a bit, The Stephen Foster G1 might be a good example of how The Whitney will unfold:  Magnitude was hustled out of the gate and took the rail.  White Abbario pressed.  Sovereignty and Baeza laid back and came late, but Magnitude really impressed with a late turn of foot.  

27 June 2026:  CD:  The Stephen Foster Handicap G1;  1 1/8 Miles on Dirt slop.  

4 July 2026: SAR: The Suburban G2; 1 1/4 Miles on Fast Dirt.

5 June 2026: SAR: The Ogden Phipps G1 (F); 1 1/8 Miles on Fast Dirt

I built this chart to try and capture current form on these big Beyers (Dirt Starts only).  The mean is denoted by the vertical tick line, and circles in green are the last three races, and circles in red are older efforts.  I can't say I'm a fan of the idea that Nitrogen is entered here. She clearly loves Saratoga, 3 for 3 with three Graded Stakes wins, two Grade 1s,  including the prestigious Alabama.  Still, these are pretty deep waters for her.  Ortiz jumps off for Magnitude and Velazquez is up. 

This next chart visualizes the Timeform US Early to Late Pace figures.  It's important to combine this with the eye test, with Magnitude's late speed in The Stephen Foster just as up to the task as the others.  What throws off a horse like Magnitude?  Winning by 9  in the Risen Star and Iowa Derby doesn't help.  Coasting.  Sovereignty cracking to White Abarrio in the Oaklawn Handicap and getting toasted by Baeza up the stretch in the Stephen Foster belies his late speed impregnability.  

Numbers/Figs + Eye Test + Running Lines/Call Positions is the proper way to interpret these athletes.  

If I had to guess, I'd say the track will be Fast by post time, but some heavy rains are possible Friday.  Check here for track condition/scratches and changes.  For as inefficient as I think of NYS government, NYRA is a pretty well-run website.  

I'm really much more interested as a fan of the sport than as a horseplayer.   If you look at my chart above, you'll see the morning lines add up to 131%.   Two things drive the excess. The first is takeout: New York win pools hold back roughly 16%, so even the final odds on the board will sum to about 119%, not 100%. Pari-mutuel odds are computed after the track's cut comes out of the pool, so they can never sum to 100% by construction. The second is that the linemaker adds cushion on top: he's projecting how the money will fall, and rounding to standard increments (nobody posts 7.3-1), which pushes the total higher still.

If the Turk had more people and access to streaming API data, he'd auto-populate that chart with a column that compared the Adjusted Morning Line to the Fair Odds to the Actual Betting Odds.  Until the powers that be in horse racing stop overcharging for data streams, that won't happen, and it's not worth the effort to do for the blog, but I absolutely do it at the track.  I literally just sit there right up until post, comparing my fair line to betting odds.  That's what you need to do to find value!

Worth noting, Tiztastic at 1.0% and Forged Steel at 2.0% imply 100-1 and 48-1. In a field this small, with no first-time starters and every runner graded-stakes placed, almost nothing is truly a 1% chance. A bad trip for three horses ahead of you gets a live longshot into the picture more often than that. Squeezing the tail is also what funds the top-heavy numbers: Turk's top three combine for 84.1% (win odds) against the public's 63.2%. While I don't disagree and know what I did with the fair odds,  I just don't feel the need to take into account the 3 times in one hundred that one of those two horses would run and win this race in a simulation.  

If you're really nerdy, I take some shortcuts with my Turk Fair Line that I've never really explained. Let's explore the math.  

 The Turk takes the Morning Line and creates an Adjusted Morning Line, which proportions each horse to fit within a 0-100% scale.  There are other ways to do this.

• Turk's Adjusted ML Method: Proportional takes the same percentage off everyone — 23.7% of each horse's raw number. Simple, always valid, and it's what most people use.

• Additive takes the same number of points off everyone: 3.89 each (31.13/8). But the problem is, Tiztastic goes negative, which is why nobody uses it on a 131% line with a long tail of marginally poor runners. 

• Power solves for the exponent k that makes the total hit 100.  In this example,  k = 1.173. Because raising a small number to a power above 1 shrinks it harder than a large one, the tail absorbs more of the vig. Tiztastic goes from 39-1 under your method to 55-1.

• Shin (Professor Hyun Song Shin- for another Turk rambling day) models the line as containing some fraction of informed money — z = 4.84% here — and backs that out. It hits the tail hardest of all: Tiztastic at 75-1.

Power and Shin are better suited for horse racing because of the favorite–longshot bias.  Bettors systematically overbet longshots and underbet favorites, so a longshot's posted price carries more of the margin than a favorite's. Both methods capture that.  

Proportional (what the Turk does) assumes the margin is spread evenly, which the empirical record says it isn't.

Proportional makes longshots look more likely than the public really thinks. The Turk's adjusted column says the public gives Tiztastic 2.46%; Shin says the public's real opinion will be closer to 1.3%. 

How I adjust for this, and where I say I'm cutting corners, is when I buold my Fair Line odds table and apply a Shin-like adjustment mentally (again, the back office of monkeys is just me), so the 1.0% on Tiztastic isn't as far off the public as Proportional suggests.  

This goes both ways, as Turk's fair line 33.3% on Magnitude looked like a big edge over the adjusted 27.24%. Against Power 29.88%, the edge shrinks by a third.

Ultimately, all that really matters is what the public thinks of the horses on the tote board, and one factor that is making it harder for the little horse player to look at these odds against the tote board is how the tote board can move so rapidly through Computer-assisted wagering (CAW).

Unless you're under a rock, a handful of high-volume teams get access to a direct data feed (which the Turk and any other smaller bettor can't get) from the tote system and place enormous bets through automated systems in the final seconds before the gates open. Because pari-mutuel odds are just a function of how the money is distributed in the pool, a large late injection recalculates everything — and by the time the new odds display, the race is already running. You bet a horse at 8-1 and watch him finish at 9-2, all the while these whale teams are getting huge wage rebates.  It's just of a number of factors that are making it harder for Joe Horseplayer to scratch out positive returns.  

Anyway, I think I digressed.  

I like Sovereignty at Saratoga, but I like him at Classic distance more than this.  I think Magnitude will take the lead early. Will he get pressured early? Just thinking about the trainers for a moment.

Asmussen's Magnitude stablemate, Tiztastic,  will only harass early if Magnitude isn't in the lead, but he's really shown no ability to press early.  Mott's Baeza and Sovereignty won't show each other any quarter.  Joesph perhaps will press Forged Steel hard into Magnitude early and keep White Abarrio pressing for his opportunity.  Same owners makes that decision easier for the conditioner. 

It's important to remember we aren't running this race as a Monte Carlo simulation, over and over again within a computer.  

I'm going to box Antiquarian who trained very sharp at Saratoga for Pletcher last week, Baeza and Magnitude, a 3 horse, $2 bet for $12.  If Baeza or Antiquarian can somehow win and Magnitude in Place, there's value worth hunting.  

Why Antiquarian? Why not.  I liked him better than the filly, better than White Abarrio.  This is more about value and looking for slightly improbable than betting highly probable chalk.  

Turk Out!

Handicapper's Corner: 2026 Stephen Foster Stakes (G1)

 

 Stephen Foster: Five Horses, One Breeders’ Cup Classic Ticket

 By: John Caro, ThoroFan Handicapper

Saturday’s $2 million Stephen Foster originally drew a field of seven to travel 1 1/8 miles. This is now a smaller group after two horses have scratched, leaving five to battle it out in the first 2026 Breeders’ Cup Classic qualifier and a chance at older horse of the year honors.

After looking at the roster of runners, it seems pretty wide open for four of the five, with one who may be behind the power curve for the race.

Featured as race 11 on a stakes-filled card, post time is 6:14 PM EST. The weather may present an off track, but with the crew at Churchill, it's likely not a factor and the main contenders are all proven on an off track. 

 

 Let's look at the contenders.

1. Willy D's – Maker/Saez  - He won his last two races; the Kentucky Cup Classic going the distance on synthetic, and a front-running mile and a sixteenth black type at Oaklawn on Derby Day. Since then, he has had a steady diet of 5 furlongs five times to prep for this race. Class-wise, he is behind the remaining four, but he did have a great effort last year when he clocked a 1:48+ and 108 Bris speed effort at Saratoga after stumbling at the start with Saez up for the ride.

Wasn’t Saez the guy who took Maximum Security to the front in the Kentucky Derby and never looked back? Albeit disqualified for hopping sideways, it shows Saez's talent, and his entry here shows Maker's guts to duel with this field. Willy D’s running pattern says he may be the rabbit for the race. Everyone has him as a Toss. I'd be cautious about throwing him off the ticket. Exotics play at 20-1 ML? I'm in!

2. White Abarrio – Joseph/Ortiz, I jr. – He is the oldest of the runners, and his purse winnings are extraordinary at $8.4M. He was last seen winning the Oaklawn Handicap two lengths in front of Sovereignty. He has accomplished so much in his career, it's hard not to appreciate his ability and combined with the skills of his jockey, he may well pull off another win here. Win Contender? Possibly

3. Sovereignty  - Mott/Alvarado  - Anybody who's into horse racing knows who he is and what he's capable of. Last seen losing to White Abarrio at Oaklawn when he broke to the front in uncharacteristic fashion and got caught. He wins four in a row, Kentucky Derby, Belmont, Jimmy Dandy and the Travers while tracking. I'm confused as to what happened at Oaklawn, but he was coming off a long break, and maybe it was a test to see if front-running was a good place for him. In any case, I'll put a line through that race and except it as a long workout. He's beaten the last two listed high horses in the past, and I expect he will move forward. He is two for two at Churchill. Cheered for him throughout last year, and he's my favorite to win.

4. Baeza – Mott/Prat – John Shirreffs passed the torch to Bill Mott. Quality breeding, competitive and ITM a lot, Baeza is a closer who often times makes that move too late. Lost with that move to Sovereignty three times but won with a good middle move against Magnitude. He's just too polite for me, and he seems to have trouble from the gate, which may be why Mott gave him a gate work before leaving Saratoga. I think he'll be ITM, and he has the jockey who can capture Graded races so often it's scary. Have to include him in any exotics.

5. Magnitude  - Asmussen/Ortiz, J. – Top money winner in the field because he won the Dubai World Cup this past March and beat Forever Young by a length going very strong down the stretch. If you measure horses by their times or speeds, that's a good measure. I also like to know who they ran against.

Winning a World Cup race against top company and beating a horse who may be number one in the world says a lot about Magnitude’s ability. In the last seven races, he's won five times and had a second-place finish to Baeza in the PA Derby. Jose has been up for the last three races and won. His training brought him from the World Cup to Churchill with this race in mind, and he's been working well, including a bullet 5 furlongs under a minute. Pretty sure he's ready, Jose is obviously ready, and well, Asmussen is the winningest trainer we have. Gotta match him with my top pick.

Handigambling

I think the money is so shallow that it might be time to just enjoy their rides. But if you must spend money to make money, this is what I see as the best solution. And give Mike Maker some credit for showing up against this company. 

$.50 Trifecta – 3,5 with All with All = $12. You can multiply as you like to fit your budget

If Willy D's odds stay above 15-1 — $5 win, $8 place, $12 show and a $3 Exacta All with 1