Daily to Derby: It’s Finally Here. 🌹 (Saturday, May 2, 2026)

It’s Finally Here. 🌹

Twenty-three editions. Three original features. Twenty Monster Pods. Four ATR previews. Six Derby Drams. One Bet Share hit on Oaks Day. And one very long road from Edition 1 on April 10 — when Irad picked Renegade and Chief Wallabee was still on the bubble — to right now: Derby Day.

Kentucky Derby 152. Churchill Downs. Post time 6:57 PM ET. NBC and Peacock.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for showing up in Lexington and Louisville this week. Let’s go to the races.

🚨 The Puma Scratched — Field Is 19

The Puma (Delgado, post 9, 7-1) scratched Derby morning with swelling in his leg due to a skin infection. Gustavo Delgado: “It’s incredibly disappointing, but the swelling should go down within a day or two. It’s just really bad timing.” Treated with antibiotics — Preakness candidate.

Right to Party (McPeek, post 5) also scratched this morning. Robusta draws in. JK keeps his hair.

The field is 19. Four scratches total: Silent Tactic, Fulleffort, Right to Party, The Puma. Commandment and Further Ado — the horses who beat The Puma — are the primary beneficiaries.

👉 Ocelli & Robusta Monster Pod

📊 Live Market — Derby Morning

The tote board with The Puma out tells the story of Derby week in one line:

Renegade 5-1 · Commandment 5-1 · So Happy 5-1
Further Ado 6-1 · Chief Wallabee 7-1 · Emerging Market 9-1
Danon Bourbon 14-1 · Potente 21-1 · Wonder Dean 22-1
Great White 23-1 · Golden Tempo 25-1 · Incredibolt 25-1
Litmus Test 28-1 · Six Speed 35-1 · Albus 44-1
Intrepido 46-1 · Pavlovian 46-1 · Ocelli 85-1 · Robusta 84-1

So Happy has gone from 15-1 morning line to co-favorite at 5-1. That is the single biggest market move of the entire Daily to Derby series. The Glatt story, the Mike Smith narrative, and the workout reports have pushed an ocean of money his way.

Commandment has firmed from 6-1 ML to 5-1, absorbing The Puma’s Florida Derby money. Further Ado holds at 6-1. Emerging Market has shortened from 15-1 ML to 9-1 — the Prat Fact is doing its work.

Win pool is already at $8.1 million. This is going to be a massive handle.

🎰 Bet Share Hits on Oaks Day: A Reverse Bad Beat Story

One of the perks of being an ITM Inner Circle member is our Bet Share. We just closed our most recent one where we’ll be focusing on the Triple Crown season but will open it up again for the summer meets.

The bet share often starts with a show. Friday morning the Inner Circle crew got together to talk through the late Pick 5 race by race — best bets, opinions, where we agree, where we don’t — and we use that conversation as the raw material for the tickets. By the time we walked away from Oaks Day, the late Pick 5 paid $2,351.11 for fifty cents, and the bet share hit it twice. Here’s the story behind how those tickets actually got built. This is not a humble brag – let’s be honest, you don’t play the Pick 5 on Oaks Day hoping to get 6/5 on your money – but I do think the process might be educational enough to share.

The package started conventionally. We sized up a $1,500 budget, mapped each capper’s strongest opinion, and built a tiered structure — All As, One B, Two Bs — with side tickets for beating Baeza and Gezora. Standard Pick 5 A-B architecture.

I sent the tickets to the team looking for feedback. Jackson stepped in with two notes that quietly rebuilt the package. First, he flagged that #1 Storm’s Wake had to be on the Edgewood ticket. (“If that horse beats us again we should just retire,” he said relating to the debacle at Keeneland where we left her out despite being our man Nick Tammaro’s best bet that day). Second — and this was the structural call — he suggested making Fully Subscribed a lone A in the La Troienne, dropping Shred The Gnar from A to B. The reasoning was sound: if you’re going to single anyone in that race, single the horse you’re most confident about, and let the others ride as Bs where the leverage is. We ALL agreed about Fully Subscribed on the show – a rarity. Doing that freed up budget that will come into play later. And even though we demoted the eventual winner, this was really the key thing that enabled us to win. Wild, huh?

When Shred The Gnar won the La Troienne at 3-1, every ticket with Fully Subscribed as a single died. The only tickets alive were the ones with Bs in R11 — which now included Shred. The Two-Bs tickets carrying R9 and R11 chaos were suddenly the live ones.

But here’s the thing: even with Jackson’s tweak in place, the package as it stood would not have cashed. At that point, the Oaks As were Explora and Zany only. Always a Runner — the eventual winner — was a B. Meaning had we not made the next move we ended up with the dreaded 3B scenario where we have all the horses and cash for zilch.

Not for the first time in the Bet Share, it was Mikee P to the rescue. The last move on the package was promoting Always a Runner and Prom Queen from B to A in the Oaks. That decision was, honestly, less about Always a Runner and more about Prom Queen. Ryan Petrunyak had been pounding the table on her — fourth start, primed for an A effort, the Oaks pick. The idea was to make sure his strongest opinion sat on the spine of every ticket. But Mikee recognized that there was also plenty of consensus around Always a Runner so she came along for the ride as well.

As I looked at the budgets and really thought about what we wanted to do I decided to go back and make sure we had good coverage on the last three legs in the event both Baeza and Gezora lost. We increased the budget to $2k and did some reshuffling — Ticket 1 cut from $10 to $5, the Beat-the-Chalk tickets resized — but the structure held. We doubled down on 3a (Two Bs in R9 and R11) as a duplicate ticket, and that doubled stake is what turned a single hit into a double hit when Always a Runner crossed the wire.

The way it played: Corp Power broke open the Alysheba at 6-1. Shred The Gnar won the La Troienne. Imaginationthelady held off Tam Tam in the Edgewood by a head. And Always a Runner, who had been a B until late in the planning, drove past Meaning in the Oaks to pay $13.04.

A 50-cent bet returning $2,351.11 is a real number. The bet share got there twice. None of it works without Jackson’s R11 call and Mikee’s idea to reimagine our approach to the Oaks with that freed up capital.

Next time we open the bet share, we’d love to have you along for the ride. Join ITM Plus →

📄 Everything You Need for Derby Day

👉 Horse-by-Horse Guide: Kentucky Derby (ATR)

👉 2026 Kentucky Derby Preview (ATR)

👉 Can You Win the Derby From the Rail?

👉 Why You Can’t Bet the Derby on Kalshi

👉 Is Todd Pletcher Actually Bad in the Derby?

👉 All 19 Free Contender Profiles

👉 Derby Best Bets with Bailey & Moss (30K+ views)

👉 Final Answers — Full Show from Lexington

👉 Sean Boarman’s Derby Breakdown

👉 Monster Pod Full Compilation — 2+ hours

👉 Free Bris Derby PPs (PDF)

🥃 Derby Dram No. 6 — Oaks Day

Maker’s Mark Cellar Aged

MSRP $175 · 112.9 proof / 56.45% ABV · Maker’s Mark Distillery, Loretto, KY

Maker’s Mark spent decades making excellent bourbon without ever releasing anything aged more than a decade. The Cellar Aged series changes that, blending 11, 13 and 14 year old whisky matured partly in Maker’s limestone cellar where temperature holds at a steady 47°F year-round. That cool, slow maturation coaxes out richness and complexity without the bitter oak edge that can come from traditional long aging. At 112.9 proof it announces itself immediately — big, boozy, Maker’s on steroids — with classic vanilla and dark cherry on the nose. The palate delivers chocolate and toasted hazelnut alongside that cherry, with a medicinal cherry cough syrup quality that’s powerful but not unpleasant. A warm, drying finish. Worth the $175 at MSRP. Don’t pay secondary.

🥃 Derby Dram No. 7 — Derby Day 🌹

Pappy Van Winkle 15 Year Family Reserve

MSRP $120 · 53.5% ABV / 107 proof · Buffalo Trace Distillery, Frankfort, KY

All week we’ve been building to this. Pappy Van Winkle 15 Year is the white whale of American bourbon — produced at Buffalo Trace from the same wheated mashbill as the Weller 107 we featured earlier this week, aged fifteen years and selected with considerably more scrutiny. The nose is richer and fruitier right out of the gate — dried apricot, vanilla, and a distinctive furniture polish quality that serious collectors call a hallmark of properly aged Van Winkle. The palate is silky smooth, the same dried apricot carrying through with a fullness and integration that only time produces. The finish is long, smooth, and fully integrated — a subtle kiss of mint woven in seamlessly rather than announcing itself. This is what fifteen years of patience tastes like. MSRP is $120. Secondary market is $2,000+. If you find it at MSRP, buy it. Happy Derby Day. 🌹

🎵 Musical Interlude

Dead Flowers — The Rolling Stones

🌹 See You at the Finish Line. Post time 6:57 PM ET. NBC and Peacock. Nineteen horses. One and a quarter miles. The most exciting two minutes in sports. Let’s ride.

Previous editions: Edition 22: Bailey & Moss · Edition 21: Scratches & Kalshi · Full archive