For a financial planner like Dave Smyth, the winner of this year’s Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge, return on investment is everything.
All told, Smyth put in 18 hours handicapping the Saturday Breeders’ Cup card for the tournament, the biggest live-money contest in the United States. By the end of the day, he had walked away with $607,800.
The ROI on his labor? Nearly $34,000 an hour.
The 50-year-old Smyth, who has lived in Central Kentucky for 33 years and proposed to his wife at Keeneland’s iconic Rolex clock in 2020, is a spectacularly thorough handicapper. He not only pores over the data in the past-performance lines in Daily Racing Form, he actually reads the articles. He takes copious notes on track conditions and biases. He listens to racing podcasts and radio shows, and he feasts on racing replays, all looking for that edge.
“What I am really looking for is those extra lengths that a horse might be able to get, not because of its last race, but because of all its races,” Smyth said. “I’m looking for value. And when you think about it, that’s what I’m doing as a financial planner. I know so many financial advisers who are also handicappers. And that’s because what makes us good at one makes us good at the other.”
For this year’s Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge, Smyth focused his handicapping efforts into the Saturday card, a reflection of knowing his limitations, he said.
“I know what I’m not good at, and the 2-year-old races do not fit into how I handicap,” Smyth said, referencing the Friday Breeders’ Cup slate, which was comprised of five races restricted to juveniles. “I need all those races from the older horses you get in the Form, going all the way back. I need to be able to look at how they are coming up to the races, what their trainers were trying to do to get them there.”
While big bets on Forever Young to win the Classic and a huge double on the last two races sealed the win for him, it was a race earlier on the card that got him firmly into the running. Smyth loved Scylla in the Breeders’ Cup Distaff, and she won by 5 1/2 lengths at odds of 7.60-to-1.
The Scylla score justified all the hours that he put in, he said.
“I knew from her replays that she could get the lead,” Smyth said. “Then you had the way the track was playing. And you had [Bill] Mott using [Junior] Alvarado on her. Everything pointed to her.”
It wasn’t a popular play, at least among two of his friends who also had entries in the BCBC. On Saturday morning, the trio were sitting around a bonfire near Del Mar, site of this year’s Breeders’ Cup, performing a morning handicapping ritual in which the friends have to justify their selections.
“I took a lot of heat on that one,” Smyth said.
Smyth was born in Seattle, but his grandmother lived in Wilmore, Ky., about 15 miles outside of Lexington, and generations of his family had gone to Asbury College there. He frequently spent summer vacations in Wilmore as a child, and one day, his grandmother told him that she was taking him to Keeneland.
“I was just a little kid, but I was hooked,” Smyth said. “I liked everything about it.”
Like family members before him, he attended Asbury and has been in Central Kentucky ever since. He and his wife have five sons in a “blended family,” and his vacations frequently take him to racing spots.
In fact, earlier this year, to celebrate his 50th birthday, the family made a racing trip to Saratoga Springs. After handicapping a card in the morning, he entered his picks into a BCBC qualifier tournament at horseplayers.com. The entry won, and he was on his way to Del Mar.
The plan was to play the tournament, without any expectations of winning, and then head to Las Vegas for a friend’s birthday party, “maybe take in a show at the Sphere, a club, maybe a nice dinner, then the party,” he said.
“It turned into something much, much bigger than that,” Smyth said.
:: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.