Horse Racing : A Former Bridge Player Makes a Grand Slam as a Handicapper

Richard Schwartz’s game used to be bridge. Now it’s playing the horses.

A wise guy might suggest that Schwartz has gone from bridge to bridge-jumping--the race track expression for bettors who load up on odds-on favorites that subsequently finish up the track.

Last Sunday at Santa Anita, the 43-year-old Schwartz was anything but. He was the only horseplayer in a crowd of 33,000 who had a winning ticket on the Pick Six and collected $211,000, minus the 20% that the track must deduct for federal taxes.

Schwartz is a Michigan State graduate who arrived in California to watch his alma mater win the Rose Bowl and he plans to remain here through the Santa Anita meeting, which ends April 25.

Twenty years ago, Schwartz said, he was considered one of the top tournament bridge players in the country. He left the corporate sector--as a mathematician and program analyst--several years ago to become a full-time horseplayer.

Schwartz bet $1,500 on Pick Six tickets last Sunday. There were 77 tickets sold to fans who had five winners, but Schwartz was the lone bettor to have all six, only two of which were favorites. The longest shot of the six was No Commitment, who won the California Breeders’ Champion Stakes and paid $27.

In the last Pick Six race, Schwartz had four horses on his eventual winning ticket, none of them the 2-1 favorite, Tamtulia, who ran third. Three of Schwartz’ picks did no better than fifth, but his fourth horse, Romantic Jet, closed in the stretch and won by a neck at 6-1.

Schwartz subscribes to Thoro-Graph, a betting service that gives its customers patterned graphs of horses based on their speed ratings. In making his selections, Schwartz said, he also studies the performances of trainers and analyzes horses’ fractional times.

The California Horse Racing Board is concerned that buprenorphine, a powerful and illegal stimulant, might be available to trainers at Santa Anita, but the board’s chief chemist, Bob Vessiny, said this week that 150 postrace urine samples from races at the track have tested negative for the drug.

Most of the testing was done at an Illinois state racing laboratory, which has more sophisticated equipment than California.

Responding to a comment this week by an anonymous Santa Anita trainer that the California laboratory “covered up” positive tests if they came from horses in the care of prominent trainers, Vessiny said:

“That’s quite impossible. When the samples come to us from the track, they’re only identified by number. We have no idea what horse or what race is involved when we run the tests.”

Trainer Tommy Bell tells a story about Howard (Buddy) Jacobson, the former national training champion now serving 25 years to life for murder in an Attica (N.Y.) prison:

“Buddy had 30 stalls assigned to him at the track one year but needed many more because he had so many horses.

“The track wouldn’t give him the extra space, so one day Buddy called in a carpenter and had him build a partition in each of his 30 stalls. That gave him room for 60 horses.”

Horse Racing Notes An appeal hearing was held for two days this week regarding the ban on harness drivers Gene Vallandingham and Rick Plano from Los Alamitos. An administrative law judge conducted the hearing on behalf of the California Horse Racing Board and will submit her opinion to the board at its meeting next Friday in Arcadia. Vallandingham and Plano received lengthy suspensions last year for allegedly violating regulations designed to prevent race fixing. Plano’s suspension was rescinded by the racing board.

The first deadline for nominating horses for this year’s Triple Crown races was Friday. It cost $600 to nominate a 3-year-old, the fee increasing to $3,000 by the final deadline March 17. A horse sweeping the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes would earn $5 million. . . . Cherokee Colony’s win in the Flamingo lowered his future-book odds to 20-1 at the Frontier in Las Vegas. The favorites are Forty Niner at 6-1, Tejano at 8-1 and Purdue King and Regal Classic, both 12-1.

A Santa Anita publicist points out that Sacahuista, the champion 3-year-old filly in 1987, suffered a training injury at Hollywood Park, not Santa Anita. . . . Pimlico has added the $500,000 Pimlico Handicap to its schedule. The 1 3/16-mile race will be run May 14, the Saturday between the Kentucky Derby and Pimlico’s Preakness, and the winner will receive a $100,000 bonus if he had been a nominee to the Triple Crown.