BET PIMLICO RACE COURSE

BETTING PIMLICO

To help you prepare for Pimlico's short 2025 meet, NYRA Bets handicapper Matthew DeSantis provides some handicapping angles, historical trends, and recent developments that will help you have a leg up on the competition.

Myth-busting Pimlico’s Tight Turns

For years horse racing fans had to hear about the supposedly tight turns at Pimlico. For context, this was often brought up in comparison to the oval configuration at Churchill Downs with the implied assumption that the tighter turns at Pimlico were tighter, and therefore biased against certain running styles. While it is fun to talk about the tight turns of Pimlico, it is also just flat-out untrue. The configuration of the two tracks is nearly identical and nearly a decade ago one of the track maintenance people at Pimlico posited the theory that this urban myth got popular because the track gets narrower, which gave an optical illusion of having tighter turns.

People using the “tight turns” handicapping angle will often point out that the track favors horses on the front end of the race since the tighter turns makes it more difficult for horses coming from the back to gather momentum and get underway with their bid until the top of the stretch when they can more fully accelerate. The problem is that Pimlico’s speed favoring history has very little to do with the turns and much more to do with the track surface, but even that can be exaggerated.