It is useful to have a barn full of dark bays with no white markings. No one watching knows which horse is which.
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Worth noting is that most horses don’t get claimed. In NY there might be 7 races of a 9 race card that involve claiming options and no claims are made at all.
Worth noting is that maiden claimers are typically not claimed. As @LaurieB, mentioned at better tracks you might see some nice horses in a maiden claiming race. Tracks like Saratoga or Keeneland have VERY strong maiden races, especially for 2yos. They are filled with offspring of the elite stallions from the top farms and connections. If you have a nice but not elite caliber horse and don’t want to butt heads with $1m babies etc. you might be able to find a maiden claimer for $75k horses. Most of the entries are not worth $75k but the owners don’t know that yet. Thus, most of the claiming trainers don’t pay much mind to them, unless they have some inside line on a nice horse dropped in to avoid the elites.
Most horses who break their maiden for a “tag” will have to drop to a lower claiming price to be competitive against winners as most maiden claimers are overvalued. Thus they rarely get claimed.
There is a tendency for rivalries to develop and you might see a pattern of trainers claiming of certain others. It used to be that by tradition, if trainers shared barns space, they didn’t claim off each other. It was also a tradition not to claim off the 1 or 2 horse “Mom and Pop” type outfits.
A few years ago there was 6 horse claiming race at Belmont and 4 of the horses changed hands, I heard that 3 of the horses that were claimed involved a “shake.” Two horses exchanged stalls, meaning Trainer A entered horse 1 and claimed horse 2. Trainer B entered horse 2 and claimed horse 1. Apparently each of those trainers had heard that the other was thinking of taking his horse so they each did the same thing and dropped a slip for spite.
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I’m learning a lot here!
Who wants to explain claiming “jail”? 
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Oh another good question! Much like every other thing we have discussed it depends upon jurisdiction but basically they all tack some sort of restrictions on the jail period following a claim. Most common is they require you to race the horse for a higher amount for 30 days or so. Others prohibit how long until you can take the horse elsewhere to race as well. It can range from 30 days to an entire meet.
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So basically the horse either has to be moved up or wait somewhere near 30 days before racing in the same claiming tier? Is that to be sure that a horse isn’t claimed and then dumped right away if they’re not sound?
No. Again, claiming races are attempt to provide evenly matched horses, so let’s look at a real world example. One can claim a horse in NY for $16,000, then drop it into the next $8,000 claimer which has a winner’s share of over $13,000. The horse will have a great chance of winning and being claimed, but combined the owner will still walk away with a small profit on the transactions. If he backs his new horse at the windows, that’s a bonus albeit probably a short price. Meanwhile the owner has also helped create a very poor betting race which some players may pass on altogether. Jail time helps prevent this and does indeed also provide a measure of protection to the horse and the integrity of a track’s horse population.
Btw after the 2012 fiasco at Aqueduct, horses with a precipitous drop, especially off of a claim, are to be viewed with extra scrutiny by the examining vets in NY.
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Some tracks have eased “jail” rules in order to fill races. An issue at some of the bigger tracks is that the nicer claiming horses would be stakes/allowance horses at lesser venues that are not far away. Years ago there was a who raced in NY but kept some horses near his home in Maryland. He’d claim horses in NY and nominate them to stakes in MD or W.VA and he often did well.
NY then instituted a rule (not sure if it still applies) by which the horse had to run his next race at a NYRA track, or stay on the grounds for a certain # of days. They also restricted transferring claimed horses to other trainers or owners for 30 days. This is to insure that the owner and trainer making the claim are in fact the true connections. Sometimes Trainer A claims a horse who suddenly appears in Trainer B’s barn. If trainer B wasn’t eligible to claim for some reason, this is a bit of chicanery, not that such things would ever happen but there you are.
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Ahhhh. That makes a lot of sense, @On the Farm, I didn’t even consider the purse money.
@Linny That makes sense too, it keeps the intentions of the claimant a little more honest.
I have to admit through the decades I’ve followed the triple crown, breeder’s cup, and some of the big horses and like to look at Canter and the like, but don’t know all that much about the rest of the races. Thank you to everyone that’s taken the time to explain.
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For years I did racing seminars geared toward beginners on the betting side. I try to make it simple but it’s a complex game. For insiders it can be hard to remember not go get over the heads of the audience.
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I do simple, small bets a few times a year locally when I can go watch live, and once in a while I decide to bet on the triple crown races. I actually made about $900 last year. Thank you Maximum Security for being disqualified, lol.
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Rather that open another topic since there was, at least for me, much useful information in this topic.
Today, Aqueduct 3, a claiming race, one of the horses ‘suffered an injury to RF leg’ and was vanned off. I looked and someone had dropped a tag on this filly.
According to NYRA’s claiming rules
(3) a claim is voidable at the discretion of the new owner, for a period of one hour after the race is made official, for any horse that is vanned off the track after the race.
Since I am pretty much clueless about the backstretch, would it be the norm for a decision to euthanize or not be made within an hour of the race being official? It sounds like the horse doesn’t actually have to be euthanized and I assume that a race official is party to why the new owner wants the claim to be voided? The race notes show the horse being claimed and the new owner but doesn’t indicate that the claim was voided (but usually the notes are uploaded before the next race and the next race could easily run in less than the one hour provided for by the voided claim).
Is an hour enough time for the new owner to make the appropriate decision to request a void?
I would think one hour would be plenty of time to know if the horse was injured more than grabbing a quarter or some other minor thing that could cause a horse to need to be canned off. My understanding is these injuries don’t even need to be catastrophic to qualify for voiding a claim but not sure exactly what the criteria is since every jurisdiction has their owns rules.
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According to the NYS Gaming Commission website, the runner in question was euthanized due to the injury. Realize that this unfortunate horse had immediate and experienced veterinary attention, so decisions in regard to catastrophic level injuries can be very timely.
Thank you for the update (and based on what I saw, I am not surprised).
More, since being totally unfamiliar with particularly a larger track backside, saw that there is one hour after the race goes official to void the claim, didn’t know if one hour was a reasonable amount of time for some level of diagnostics or if most trainers, once the horse was vanned off, would more than likely void the claim anyway.
Thank you both for answering. NYS Gaming Commission appears to be a bit quicker than some of the other jurisdictions in terms of releasing information about a horse that was vanned off.
