The Anatomy of a BC Longshot

By ITM Staff

Since 2002, 1,607 horses have gone to the Breeders’ Cup gate at 15-1 or bigger. Only 211 of them hit the board, about one in eight, and 50 won.

We went looking for what those 211 had in common, and the answer surprised us: almost nothing. On paper, the longshots who ran big look just like the ones who ran up the track.

What they do share is where they ran and the circumstances around those races. A Breeders’ Cup bomb isn’t a type of horse exactly. It’s a type of race.

Lack of common DNA

We compared the 211 longshots who hit the board with the 1,396 who didn’t.

Having a top-five recent Beyer in the field nudges the raw strike rate up. But those horses also tend to be at the short end of the 15-1-plus range. Allow for price and any potential edge disappears from the sample. Post position and age didn’t separate the two groups either.

It turns out that the crowd is a pretty great handicapper. Put another way, the tote is very good at pricing the horses. But all races are not created equal, and that’s where our analysis will head next.

The habitat: dirt sprints

Across all races, 15-1-plus shots hit the board 13% of the time. In the dirt sprints (the Sprint, the Filly & Mare Sprint and the short-lived Juvenile Sprint), horses at 15-1 to 29-1 do it more than twice as often.

The rate is identical in both 12-year halves, so this is no hot streak. Work All Week (18-1), Shamrock Rose (25-1), Whitmore (18-1 in 2020) and Soul of an Angel (18-1) all won from that bracket.

It has paid, too. Using the charted payoffs, a flat bet on every one of those 122 horses returned $1.57 to win, $1.15 to place and $1.23 to show for every dollar wagered. Even counting every 15-1-plus shot, the dirt sprints were the only race type where longshots made money in all three pools.

As the late, great horseplayer Jeff Sotman used to say, “short field, long price.” At the Breeders’ Cup, that has proven true. Small fields are the other habitat. In fields of nine or fewer, 15-1-plus runners hit the board 22% of the time. In fields of 13 or more it was only 11%. Part of that is arithmetic: in a nine-horse field, a longshot only has to beat six rivals to hit the board. But it goes beyond that. Even after allowing for the odds, short-field longshots hit the board more often, and a $2 show bet on all of them returned 87 cents on the dollar, against 69 cents in fields of 13 or more. The crowd prices a horse’s chance to win well, but it doesn’t fully adjust its chance to place or show for a short field.

The graveyard: turf routes

The opposite end is where much of the Breeders’ Cup longshot talk lives: the turf routes. Longshots there hit the board only 10.8% of the time, and a $2 show bet on all of them returned just 63 cents on the dollar.

Price matters everywhere, too. At 15-1 to 29-1, longshots hit the board 18% of the time. At 30-1 to 49-1 it was 11%, and at 50-1 or bigger it was 5%.

Pace: the extremes, not the middle

Do crazy races produce crazy results? We ranked 215 Breeders’ Cup races from 2010 to 2025 by their Racing Flow FLOW figure, which measures how much the race favored closers. Then we split them into five equal groups.

The races that set up for closers put twice as many bombs on the board as the middle-of-the-road races. At the extremes, a 15-1-plus shot won 19% of the time, against 12% everywhere else. In the 42 most “normal” races, a longshot won just twice.

The catch is that FLOW is measured after the race. The skill is seeing the meltdown, or the uncontested lead, before the gates open. Later in the week, we will do a detailed analysis of the pace of all 14 BC races. Sign up to ITM Plus if you want to read it. It won’t be foolproof, of course. As PTF often points out in his TV appearances when a pace doesn’t turn out as expected, “Jockeys and their agents read the past performances too.”

Volatility: chaos isn’t the same as bombs

Ken Massa of HTR built his Volatility Index (Vi) to estimate how often the favorite wins a given race. In his published work, a Vi below 30 marks a vulnerable favorite (HTR Report, Mar/Apr 2008). As Massa put it in an April 25, 2014 email to PTF: “Any Vi lower than 30 is an especially healthy signal for potential price winner.” We rebuilt a version of the index for every Breeders’ Cup race since 2002, using the parts of his 2002 formula our data covers.

How our version works: every race starts at 30, Massa’s baseline for how often favorites win, and gets points added or taken away. Lower means less predictable.

• Field size: 5 or fewer +8; 6 runners +5; 7 runners +2; 8 runners −1; 9 runners −2; 10-11 runners −3; 12 or more −5.
• Favorite’s price: 2-1 or shorter +2; 3-1 or longer −2.
• Favorite’s time off: 14 days or fewer +1; 91-180 days −1; 181-360 days −2; longer −4.
• Favorite’s best Beyer of its last three: top in the field +2; fourth or lower −2.

Massa’s own Vi also adjusts for race type, the favorite’s early-pace rank and its class rating, and it uses the morning-line favorite. We used the final tote favorite and left out the adjustments our data doesn’t cover. So treat this as a close cousin of HTR’s number, not the number itself.

It works on favorites: they won 21% of the 57 most volatile races and 45% of the 22 most predictable. But the upsets went to the middle of the market. In the most volatile races, 5-1 to 14-1 shots won more than half the time, while 15-1-plus horses won about one race in five at every Vi level. A beatable favorite tells you to look past the chalk, not to go to the bottom of the board.

Fishing in the right pond: the vulnerable favorite

Half the battle with longshots is fishing in the right pond. A price can only come home if the favorite doesn’t, so we went back through all 301 Breeders’ Cup favorites since 2002 to see which ones the market overrated.

Two things stand out. Favored 3-year-olds facing their elders have come up short more often than their price says: only 16 of 74 won, against about 22 their odds implied. It isn’t just the favorites. Across all 591 3-year-olds who’ve taken on older horses since 2002, the US-based ones won about a third less often than their odds implied, while European-based 3-year-olds actually beat their odds. Most of that gap dates from 2002 to 2013, though. Since 2014 the US 3-year-olds have been much closer to fair value, so treat it as a lean rather than a rule. This applies to Englishman this year.

And the market overreacts to the last race. Favorites coming off a slightly improved figure won just 23% of the time. The ones whose last Beyer was flat or lower won 40%, which held in both halves of the sample. Those favorites may have been prepping rather than peaking.

The obvious knock, a favorite without the field’s top figure, is already in the price. Those horses won 27% of the time, right in line with their odds. And when the favorite is 3-1 or longer, the race is wide open: those favorites missed the board 55% of the time.

Using these ideas at Keeneland

• Spend your longshot money in the Sprint and the Filly & Mare Sprint. Focus on the 15-1 to 29-1 range rather than the 50-1 dreams. As of Oct. 24, the Filly & Mare Sprint runners in that range with bet365 were Majestic Oops (16/1), Nooni (16/1), Kerry’s Kiss (20/1), Foie Gras (20/1) and Praying (25/1), with Simply Joking on the edge (33/1 at bet365, 20/1 elsewhere). Those are fixed-odds prices a week out, while our study used final tote odds, and longshot prices move a lot before post time. For better results, check the odds on the day and look at the horses in the 15-1 to 29-1 range when the gates open. 
• Go deeper in short fields. Nine or fewer runners nearly doubles a bomb’s chance of hitting the board.
• Tighten up in the turf routes unless you have a strong reason to play a price.
• Spread when you can project an extreme pace, whether a meltdown or a lone speed horse. In races that look like they’ll run to form, they usually do.

None of this is a guarantee. The dirt-sprint sample is 122 horses, and nine winners drive the win profit. But it has held for 24 years, at eight different host tracks.

Data: Breeders’ Cup charts for all 3,451 starters, 2002–2025 (final odds, official finish and mutuel payoffs). Pace figures from Racing Flow, 2010–2025. “Longshot” means final odds of 15-1 or higher.

More Breeders’ Cup analysis: Who wins at the Breeders’ Cup: trainer records that matter