The counter-intuitive open 3 yo allowance

I've now seen two allowances in the past two weeks open to all 3-year-olds, without restrictions. These are essentially stakes without the entry fee (a wrinkle which should actually encourage runners),without the nice purse, and without the black type. I know, it seems not much else is left of a stake after those excisions, but theopen allowances do accomodate horses who would not qualify for the standard nw1x allowance. Yet in spite of the theoretical superiority of an open allowance to a conditional allowance, both open allowances drew disappointing fields, and indeed fields that I would rate as inferior to typical nw1x allowances.

 At first blush, the culprit in the 4/15 allowance at Santa Anita seemed to be people avoiding Baffert's entry of Contested and Tiz the Tide, but the presence of those horses was not a function of the conditons of the race: both were eligible for a nw1x. Yet Baffert seemed to know that they would tower over the opposition, as indeed Contested did both on the toteboard and the track after Tiz the Tide was scratched. My point is Contested's being in the race does not indicate that open allowances are inherently uneven. Anyway, this Santa Anita allowance drew just three other runnerd besides Contested, and from my memory looked much more like claimers than stakes horses.

The open 3-year-old  allowance at Keeneland had a couple of stakes winners in it, including the victorious Icon Ike, but the race could really have used a Contested. You basically had limited horses in the race, not potential stars. The bottom quality at Keeneland is always weaker than at NYRA, say, so I think that was partly to blame. And 5 1/2 furlong turf races are also fringe races of a kind that aren't really going anywhere, races that tend to be about today and not tomorrow.

But from these two races, the open allowance idea, while refreshing, isn't creating better racing. I think there might be a psychological aspect to this, that despite the opportunity that the races present, they just don't grab trainers and make them want to run. The trainers of nw1x-eligible horses may be scared away, and the trainers of the horses who have graduated nw1x want anything but another allowance. The lower quality is one of those counter-intuitive realites that can perhaps be exploited for good purse value by those in the know (or who read this blog).