There will also be a slight twist in this edition, one that I happen to like. Six guests are returning and two, Cristine Kalinski and Eddie Harrison, are making their Casual Bet debuts with some very promising picks and prose. This time around, my guests will be breaking down their picks for the 2021 Haskell Stakes, a fairly straightforward race with horses many of them will recognize from the Triple Crown. In a year, Niko Konstantellis has become a legitimate handicapper without asterisk or exception. Jill Rice and Mia Agostinelli, two highly respectable Observer editors, now have an extensive knowledge of the nation’s top three-year-olds on dirt. Two years ago, I highly doubt that Kristina Stevanovic would have seen herself pulling over her car to watch the 2020 Travers Stakes in a B.J.’s parking lot, or jumping around a pizzeria with $4 to win on Medina Spirit in the 2021 Kentucky Derby. Whether the sport itself is entertaining is a matter of an individual’s taste, but my way of sharing a passion of mine with friends was to show them the inevitably human appeal of forming an opinion, however nonsensical, and having that opinion validated or rejected in an instant. There are an infinite number of ways of looking at a single race, and a good deal of those perspectives will yield the right answer in the form of a winner, either for wildly different reasons or no reason at all. Anyone who has ever gone to a racetrack knows that betting on horses is a collaborative, highly opinionated exercise between people. The original purpose of this article (besides being for my condescending entertainment) was to prove the point that the beauty of horse racing lies in the formation of an opinion. Yet, at the same time, the people that regularly contribute do so with more enthusiasm than I ever could have hoped for. In the early stages, some contributors jokingly commented that the reason the Casual Bet existed was for my condescending entertainment. But after nearly a year of producing various editions of this article, I’m happy to say that it has become a very enjoyable activity with my friends, and has captured exactly what I hoped it would. In many cases, the things that I share about the sport in conversation make up all or most of some contributors’ knowledge.
The value it has to serious bettors has always been minimal and the opinions are, by design, coming from people with a limited view of the racing world. Of all the articles I publish here on Paddy’s Picks, I must admit that the Casual Bet is consistently one of my favorites.
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