I haven't posted because I'm still recovering, and it's all a blurr.

With 6 tracks to handicap, and especially with choices to make of which races to play, it took me 10 hours to prepare for the first day, and I'm a guy that usually handicaps very quickly. About 2 hours of that was spent after weeding out the races in creating a color-coded chart listing mandatory races (red), races I was almost sure to bet (blue with a star), and other races with potential bets (blue with acceptable odds), and listing them by post time-- with the time zone differences, that was a very big issue, and several bets came a couple of minutes apart.

So after all that the first race Friday goes off at 9:25 local time, and you're in a very busy, high stress environment for 8 hours (especially busy for me, there were a lot of hands to shake). Then I went back to the room and did 5 hours work for Saturday, when I got to put myself through the same thing again. I was in Bally's for all but 2 hours of the entire weekend.

I had looked at the Sunshine Millions pre-entries, and loved a couple of longshots (Mach Ride and Hollendorfer's filly), so my plan was to try to do what I did at Del Mar-- be close after day one, go for the prices on day two. The first part of the plan worked, and I was in 28th after the first day. When I got to the racebook Saturday, I discovered that BOTH my longshots had been scratched. At that point I could stick my color-coded chart and plans, and I was scrambling the rest of the way-- unsuccessfully. But even if I had known of the scratches the night before, it probably wouldn't have made a difference. An awful lot of chalk came in over the two days, along with a couple of bombs, and only those that hit those few bombs were going to get there. To give you an idea, the previous low winning score was $205, and most were around $240. This year, the winner had $189.