Will all seven defending Breeders' Cup winners exit as losers?

October 21st, 2013

One of the more interesting prop bets as the 2013 Breeders' Cup World Championships unfolds is how many of the seven defending winners will repeat? If I were to accept wagers on the outcome I'd set the over-under line at 1.5 with 3-to-5 on the under and 7-to-5 on the over.

Individual odds would look like this (about 6.5% takeout):

# wins Odds:

0

  3-to-1

1   3-to-2
2   5-to-2
3   8-to-1
4  40-to-1
5+ 400-to-1

I arrived at these odds by assessing the following chances to each of the returning seven winners:

Horse: Race: Odds-1 % chance
Fort Larned Classic 6.00 14.29%
Groupie Doll F&M Sprint 4.00 20.00%
Little Mike Turf 8.00 11.11%
Mizdirection Turf Sprint 4.00 20.00%
Royal Delta Distaff 2.50 28.57%
Trinniberg Sprint 20.00 4.76%
Wise Dan Mile 2.00 33.33%

Given those odds the chance that they ALL win is about 347,000-to-1, which is less likely than randomly picking the Super High 5 in a 14-horse field (240,239-to-1). The most likely outcome is 1 winner followed by 2 then 0.

The art is discerning the odds-to-1 of each of the returning winners. After that it's all science to come up with the odds of a certain number of them winning. Do any of these prices look good to you?

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