Who Will Win the 2014 Kentucky Derby

At the end of Friday’s on-track betting, California Chrome is the early favorite for the 2014 Kentucky Derby at 3-1. Danza and Wicked Strong are right behind it, both at 8-1 odds. One of the exciting things about this Derby, though, is that anyone has a realistic chance of winning since the field is packed at 19 horses that have never run a race close to the distance of the Kentucky Derby. There were 21 horses entered after final declarations were made, but Hoppertunity and Pablo Del Monte have since scratched.

This is the 140th running of this race, and it looks to be a very exciting one. The difficulty in predicting a winner every year is because the race is 10 furlongs long, and most of these horses have never run over a mile (8 furlongs). One method of predicting winners looks at lineage and how horses related to them have run. For example, Intense Holiday has the best numbers in this regard, with a dam that has an 8.25 AWD ranking–the highest of all the dams of entrants this year. Generally speaking, the higher the dam’s AWD, the better the colt will be at running long distances. The downside is that Intense Holiday is not currently considered a threat to win based on the 13-1 odds after Friday. This is also a good thing for bettors. If he does win, then the payout will be much higher. Sometimes being under the radar is a very good thing.