A Quick Rundown on Preakness Stakes Betting

May is just around the corner, and you know what that means to horse racing fanatics? It’s time for this year’s annual Preakness Stakes betting event. But for horse racing noobs, how is this different from the other horse racing events? We’ll give a quick rundown on Preakness Stakes betting to give you an idea on what it really is.

The Preakness Stakes is an annual racing event of flat, three-year-old Thoroughbred horses held on the third Saturday in May at the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, Maryland. It’s a Grade I horse racing event ran on dirt with a distance of 9.5 furlongs or 2,090 yards. In the US Triple Crown series of horse racing events, it is the second leg right after the Kentucky Derby and before the Belmont Stakes. In this series, the horse must win all three races to win the crown.

The Preakness Stakes is also called “The Run for the Black-Eyed Susans” due to the fact that the race winner is traditionally awarded with a blanket of Black-Eyed Susans, which is the state flower of Maryland, placed around its neck. Attendance in this event places second to the Kentucky Derby in the U.S., and it often exceeds all the other stake races including the Kentucky Oaks, the Breeder’s Cup, and the Belmont Stakes.

A couple of years before the first Kentucky Derby, Pimlico announced the Preakness as a new stakes race for three-year-olds during its first spring race event in 1873. The former governor of the state of Maryland, Oden Bowie, named what was then a mile and a half long race in honor of the colt Preakness from the Milton Holbrook Sanford’s Preakness Stables in Preakness, Wayne Township, New Jersey, who won the Dinner Party Stakes the day Pimlico opened in October of 1870. The origin of the New Jersey name was said to have come from the Native American name “Pra-qua-les,” meaning “Quail Woods” for the area. After Preakness won the Dinner Party Stakes race, the horse’s jockey, Billy Hayward, untied a silk bag of gold coins that was hung on a wire which stretched across the racetrack from the judges’ stand. This was supposedly the way the wire at the finish line was introduced, and how the awarding of the purse money originated.

The first-ever Preakeness race that was held on May 27, 1873 had seven starters. John Chamberlain’s Survivor collected the USD2,050 purse by galloping through the finish line easily by ten lengths. This was the biggest win margin until 2004, when Smarty Jones won by 11.5 lengths.