“The only thing I’m addicted to right now is winning. Just winning every second. Winning, anyone? Duh, winning!” – Charlie Sheen
On September 3, 1965, a baby boy named Carlos I. Estevez was born in New York City to his parents Janet and Martin Sheen. Known to us all as Charlie Sheen, the boy achieved stardom in the 1980’s with movie roles in Platoon, Wall Street and Major League. Despite his notorious lifestyle, Sheen’s success transferred to television, and in 2010 Sheen was TV’s highest paid actor for his role in Two and a Half Men, earning $1.8 million per episode. He currently has 11.6 million Twitter followers.
On the same day in 1965, this blog’s author was born in St.Paul, MN. It’s fair to say that on life’s excitement scale, it’s not exactly a push between Mr. Sheen and myself. But last Saturday I did have one additional thing in common with the above-mentioned Charlie Sheen besides our birthday.
We were both #Winning.
For the first time since I started blogging the results of some of the free Canterbury contests, I emerged victorious with a score of 1,395 points in the Saratoga Saturdays weekly contest. The maximum points available this week was 2,633 so I earned 53% of the maximum. I was not really thinking I had a winning score when the week ended, but was hopeful for a top 6 finish and figured I would be in good position overall. But in the end the results went in my favor.
Here was the winning contest card:
5 2nd at 9/5 71 points
9 7th at 5/2 71 points
5 1st at 6/5 150 points
6 5th at 8-1 150 points
2 1st at 6-1 380 points
3 3rd at 13-1 440 points
6 8th at 10-1 440 points
6 1st at 13-1 924 points
10 3rd at 15-1 998 points
7 7th at 10-1 998 points
7 1st at 9-1 1,395 points
I’ve written a lot about playing longer priced horses every race in contests with this format, and I tried to execute that strategy. I try to guess which of my contenders will be the highest odds, and play that horse. Races 1 and 3 were very short fields so it was hard to find a longshot, and Race 2 my horse was ML 12-1 but got hammered at the windows, to no avail. Bad guess! It wasn’t until I found that 13-1 winner in Race 8 that winning the contest even entered my mind, and I still needed a lot of luck. For example, in the featured Grade 1 Alabama Stakes, I missed badly with Catch My Drift, but favored Stopchargingmaria (Even) bailed me out by narrowly defeating Joint Return (24-1). If Joint Return wins, the leaderboard for the week would have been completely different. Surviving an inquiry in the finale was just the final exhale on a day when I caught some good breaks.
This Saturday we do it all over again, and it’s Travers Day. That means the return of Bayern, Tonalist and Wicked Strong. First post is 10:30am.
Good Luck!
If you would like to help me catch Charlie Sheen in Twitter followers, you can follow me @oracle65
The Oracle
