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					Originally Posted by philcski  I don’t disagree that horse by horse the impact is relatively small... but that’s because it’s a 20 horse field. Let’s take a 3 horse field instead:Horse A: 4/5
 Horse B: 2/1
 Horse C: ?
 
 At a proper ML matching takeout, it should be 2/1. At the 138% ML, it’s 1/1, so a huge difference.
 
 My point is on the most important race in the world, where the participants have been known for weeks, shouldn’t we have a pretty tight ML?
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 Too funny, philski.   I just did a search, and we had a very similar discussion about a poor Derby ML almost exactly 11 years ago!
http://www.derbytrail.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22079
Has anything changed in 11 years?!  Check it out.
Anyway, I was curious how this year's 138% compared to some of the other CD stakes races this weekend.   Here's what I came up with:
Turf Classic	131%
Pat Day Mile	134%
Amer Turf	136%
Alysheba	131%
and, somewhat weirdly, the Ky Oaks, 99.8%
With a 17.5% track take, the apparent odds from the morning line should add up to 121%.    So the Ky Oaks ML odds would appear to be even further off than the Derby ML odds.
At any rate, I agree that the ML should be a set of odds that actually add up to what one might see when the betting is done.  
Looking forward to grousing about this again 11 years from now!
--Dunbar