Wednesday, September 06, 2006

All seems to be well.....

..in my little blogosphere so here's what's up:

-24 hours from now I'll be in Vegas. 24 hours and 5 minutes from now, I will have dropped a 20 spot on 2BLACK and 14RED....let it ride!!

-My lock sports bet of the weekend is KANSAS (Jayhawks) -22. Bet the house and the farm. I'm looking for that one to be a nice score.

-Belmont opens Friday and I am more than delighted to be able to catch the whole card. I will be front and center at the Mandalay Bay sportsbook, 9am sharp Friday morning. My first bet of the day will be 1,2,3 tri box ($6). This is an old superstition that I have dating back to the first day of the Saratoga meet in the year 2000. I hit a huge tri in the first race of the meet (a steeplechase, herego, no real handicapping for me) and from then on, I've been betting the 1,2,3 on the first race of every NYRA meet.

-Looks like Tom Durkin is officially out of the BC race callers booth. I am not too upset at this. I love Durkin and his calls, but it will be nice to change things up a little bit. Using Trevor Denman is a solid, conservative pick. Once again, I feel like the NTRA made a mistake letting a good promotional marketing opportunity slide through their fingertips. I thought it would be a good ploy to spread the calls over 4 different announcers. It would have made for some nice changes had Denman, Larry Colmus, Luke Kruytbosch and another could have taken two races apiece. Why not? The race isn't branded by the race caller.

If they wanted to get truly wacky (which I am not backing 100%, just throwing out the idea) the NTRA could have held a contest where people could submit tapes and try out for one race. This would have been a great publicity stunt. Although TV would never allow it, maybe the caller could have made the call on a closed circuit or something like that. Either way, I think the NTRA could have used a little more creativity to squeeze some much needed extra promtotion out of this affair.

-

4 comments:

Alan Mann said...

I saw the pp's of the first at Belmont, and I think you'll have another huge trifecta if this comes in.

The #1 entry will probably be a scratch though unless it rains - one's on the AE list and the other is main track only.

Ruben Bailey said...

Thanks.

I have not seen the pp's yet. Maybe there is no #1 and I'll have to change on the fly.

We'll see....

John said...

I liked your ideas about having different announcers call the races. Denman is a good choice though.

Ruben Bailey said...

Yeah, I think that would have been way more gooder.