Ten Winners. Two Tickets.

Del Mar — Sunday, August 2, 2026. Rail at 12 feet. Turf firm, dirt fast.

Every winner on Sunday's card was named somewhere on my sheet. I cashed two tickets. Here is exactly how that happened, and what it cost.

I want to start with the number that should have made this the best day of my meet.

Ten races. Ten winners. All ten of them were named on the sheet I published before the first race. Not "I had the race" in the vague way people say that on Monday morning — named, in print, with a reason attached. Five of them were my outright top pick or declared lean: Essos, Avalon Rose, Driftingandreaming, News At Ten, Dea Matrona.

I finished the day down sixty-three dollars.

That gap is the whole story, and I'd rather write about it honestly than pretend Sunday was a bad day of handicapping. It wasn't. It was a very good day of handicapping wrapped inside two very stupid tickets.

The part that worked

My win bets returned $94.20 on $51. Three winners out of seven bets.

The anchor was News At Ten in the eighth — a turf route where he was the only horse with any real early speed, drawn on the rail, for a barn that wins with exactly this profile. I made him my single, gave him the full stake, and he did precisely what the sheet said he'd do. The chart comment reads like somebody copied my own sentence back at me: clear, met bid, cleared.

That single is also the only reason I cashed a horizontal all day. Because I wasn't spending money spreading in the eighth, I could afford a fourth horse in the ninth — and that fourth horse won. The Late Pick 4 paid $75.05 on a $40 ticket. Not a score. But it's the second straight card where the discipline of committing hard to one horse has paid for the width somewhere else, and after a meet of learning that lesson the expensive way, I'll take it.

The part that didn't

Here's where I have to be a grown-up about it.

Race five. I wrote the words "used, not on top" next to Gypsy Tears in my own analysis. She was the Winners Card's top pick. She was nine-for-nothing at Del Mar but had run second and third here repeatedly. I named her.

Then I built my Pick 4 leg with four horses, and she wasn't one of them.

She won at $14.20, rallying up the fence. That Pick 4 paid $740.65 for fifty cents. My ticket died in leg two.

Race six. I gave Yours Sincerely an entire paragraph. Highest Beyer in the field. Best late-pace profile. I wrote, in print, "she will likely be favored." I put her third in my exacta box.

Then I went two horses deep on the Turf Pick 3 leg and left her off.

She won at $8.40. That ticket paid $190.80.

Two horses. Two tickets. Fifty-eight dollars would have bought both of them. Add them in and the same handicapping — same picks, same reads, nothing changed except three names on three tickets — turns a $63 loss into roughly a $940 profit.

I've now made this exact mistake on two consecutive cards. I have a rule against it. The rule says any horse I name in the prose has to appear on the ticket. It didn't catch either of these, because the phrase I used ("used, not on top") wasn't on the rule's list of trigger words, and because my other safeguard only kicks in for fields of nine or more. Race six had seven runners.

So the rule is getting rewritten, and this time as something mechanical instead of something linguistic: if a horse is in my exacta for a race, he is on every horizontal leg for that race. No judgment call, no parsing my own adjectives at eleven in the morning. Either the name is in both places or the sheet doesn't get published.

The one that really stings

Before the card I wrote a bias tripwire — a pre-committed instruction to change my mind if the track told me to. It read, more or less: if the first two dirt winners both come from off the pace, drop Jolene Fury in the ninth and move to Free Closer and Stay Bossy.

Essos won the first, rallying four wide from last. Avalon Rose won the second, tracking and running down the pacesetter.

Free Closer won the ninth. Stay Bossy ran second. The exacta paid $10.80.

I bet Jolene Fury. She finished sixth of six.

I had written the right answer down four hours in advance and then didn't act on it — partly because the trigger required me to judge, in the moment, whether Avalon Rose counted as "off the pace." That ambiguity is the flaw. A tripwire you have to interpret under time pressure isn't a tripwire, it's a suggestion. Going forward mine will be numerical: something I can read off a chart in five seconds and a swap I've already agreed to make.

What the track said

Turf held inside. Three of four turf winners came up the fence, and the exception started inside before angling out. That's two straight cards at a 12-foot rail where nine of ten grass winners have come from the inside. It's a real pattern now — though I'll note that when they moved the rail out to 24 feet a few days earlier, it inverted completely. The setting matters more than the surface.

The dirt flipped a hundred and eighty degrees in twenty-four hours. Saturday, every dirt winner was on or near the lead. Sunday, five of six came from off the pace, on every path — rail rally, four-wide rally, slow break and loom. If you walked in Sunday with Saturday's notes you got taken apart.

Read them as two separate racetracks. Re-test both every single day.

Five to follow

Comeback Girl (3rd race, fourth beaten a length and a half) is the one I'll be waiting on. First start in eleven months, best figure and best worktab in the field, and she broke slowly and got stopped in midstretch in a five-furlong sprint where there's no time to recover from either. Her barn is winless at the meet, so she'll be a price again.

Ketonia (10th, fourth beaten a length and a half) got checked at the break and swung wide. She was the morning-work horse everybody liked and she never got a clean run at it.

Thebeachisback (2nd, third) tossed her head, came out in the stretch, and still ran third five wide in her debut — off the fastest four-furlong drill on the grounds. Second start.

Strike It Solo (7th, second at 8-1) I faded on trainer statistics, and he chased three-to-four wide and finished like a horse who'll win one.

Cheever (4th, third beaten a length and a half) has the fastest figure of anyone and is now zero-for-six with three thirds. Use him underneath. Never on top. I keep learning this one.

The honest summary: my read of the races has never been sharper than it was Sunday, and my tickets have rarely been worse. That's a fixable problem, which is the good news. It's also the same fixable problem as last week, which is the bad news.

Next card, the check happens before I hit publish.

Payoffs from official DMTC charts. Trip notes from the chart comments. This is a record of my own play, not advice — bet within your means, and if it stops being fun, stop.