2012 Belmont Stakes Post Time – When The Real Betting Begins

By Author: Lee Lane-Edgar
Total Articles: 365
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The 2012 Belmont Stakes post time will be approximately 6:35 PM Eastern, 3:35 PM Pacific, using 2011 post times as a guide. This is the time when horses begin making their way to over to the starting gate. This process typically takes a minute or two and then another minute or two to load all of the contenders into the gate. So the time they are “off” will generally be about five minutes after the actual post time. In 2011, they were off at 6:39 PM Eastern.
For a big race day like the Belmont in which an enormous amount of cash is wagered, race officials will sometimes, but not always, delay the official post time just a bit to allow bettors to make all of their last minute bets.
It is often wondered whether certain insiders have inside information on a horse that the general public is not privy to. There is no secret group of people that know something we don’t. In short, there is no such thing as inside information. That is not to say that a handicapper cannot learn something about a horse that the general public does not know. A horse player that hangs around the track a lot and manages to get close to ...
... the connections of a mount might be able to learn an opinion about how a particular horse is doing, if they ate up all their food in the morning, etc. But even so, having access to inside information does not necessarily mean that the bettor knows how to weight that new information with the overall picture.
A friend of mine once gave me a tip that he had gotten from the owner of a horse running at Monmouth Park. The owner said that the trainer said the horse was “jumping out of his skin”. The horse ran a distant third, but probably outran his odds slightly. It would have been a mistake to bet on this horse just because he was ready to run. He probably was ready to run, but upon comparing his ability with the other horses in the past performances, he seemed to be a cut below, even on his best day.
Certainly for big races such as the Belmont Stakes, handicappers and reporters are trying doubly hard to obtain access to any bit of information they can scrounge up from trainers, owners, jockeys, and even grooms.
Some of the big time bettors place their bets early, hoping to drive the odds up on other horses so that more will be wagered on the other horses because of more appealing odds rather than because of their respective abilities, which will ultimately drive the odds on their horse up. Other big handicappers like to wait out the market and will bet only if their horse remains at or does not go below a certain fixed price that they have set in their minds.
Belmont Stakes Day is one of the biggest betting days of the year. This year, an on track crowd of 55, 779 wagered a collective total of $10,098, 573 on Belmont Stakes Day races.