Oaklawn
 

I have played the Santa Anita winter meet for more years than I care to remember. I even lived in Arcadia for 15 years back when you had to bet at the track. This year I switched to Oaklawn and it was the right decision. Big fields, competitive races and even the Arkie-breds are not bad. The only drawback is the lack of a turf course. The entries are drawn well in advance, so you can take all the time you need.

May you continue to enjoy playing Oaklawn!!!

The Arky-breds are on the improve - a couple of years back it became a "breed-back" program, so you can now take a mare, breed it to Into Mischief, etc. and then bring it back to Arkansas, foal here, and breed the mare back to an Arkansas sire and the Into Mischief foal is now Arky-bred.

I'll theorize that the expanded breeding opportunities combined with the advent of late year 2yo racing at Oaklawn may mean we are not too many years away from regularly seeing an Arky-bred or two in the Derby.

I ceased playing Illinois racing in 2015. I began exclusively playing So Cal racing in 2015 and still do today. Like you,I thought of moving on to either Fair Grounds or Oaklawn Park this year. Looks like you made a good decision. After just 12 days of racing, the cards at Santa Anita look a lot like Los Alamitos...or, what we'd expect to see in late May or June at SA. To be this bad in regard to field size in January is disappointing to say the least.

I consider that an advantage.

It's not that I don't like turf racing, but some of my plays are bias related. When a race card is split between some combination of dirt , inner turf, main turf, synth, one turn, and two turn races it's almost impossible to figure out what was going on off a small sample of 2-4 races (let alone determine if track maintenance or weather changed something).

You can always try to outguess other serious players, but I place some value on certainty.

Given we are often working with guesstimate figures and other info, I like it when I feel confident I am actually right about a horse instead of taking a best guess.

A full card of dirt races makes it a bit easier.