Your Mahoning Valley Opening Day Answer Key

Mahoning Valley Racecourse opens today, and that means while the Brisnet.com Ultimate Past Performances are full of great information, we have no past performances on the track itself, which has yet to run a race.

But we can make some assumptions based on the horses and horsemen assembling for the inaugural meeting, and its place on the map and racing calendar.

1. Mahoning Valley is the former Beulah Park. Hollywood Gaming closed its Columbus-area track and moved its live racing permit to this new racino near Youngstown;
2. The track is near Thistledown and Mountaineer. It’s near Presque Isle, too, but because that surface is synthetic and attracts more Midlantic horsemen than Mahoning Valley will, I wasn’t as keen to use information from that facility;

In the end, I decided to favor Thistledown, Mountaineer, Beulah, and Belterra Park as the tracks that would best indicate how racing might go at Mahoning Valley.

Thistledown appears in the opening day running lines 336 times and Mountaineer 215 times. Belterra Park, which also opened a new track this year, appears 105 times. Hazel Park appears 64 times, which is about 50% more than Beulah’s 42 times, but I stuck with Beulah since this is essentially that meeting.

I used my ALL-WAYS software to run the impact value of common handicapping angles (e.g. Brisnet.com ratings like Speed, Pace, Class, and Prime Power, running styles, etc.) at the aforementioned tracks then applied those values to the opening day card at Mahoning Valley to come up with the following ABC grid for the 8-race card.

I’ll mostly focus on rolling Pick 3s with their $.50 minimum and 15% takeout, but this is a rare day where there will be casual money in small pools, so watching the board for overlays is important, too.

Race:	A:	B:	C:
1	7	3, 6, 11	5
2	1	3, 4, 6
3	1	7	5, 6, 8
4	2	3, 4	5, 6
5	2, 6, 12	3	4, 5
6	10		4, 6, 7, 9, 12
7	1	4	8
8	2	11	3, 9

Good luck!