What Happens When a Kentucky Derby Horse Is Scratched

Great White never ran in the 2026 Kentucky Derby. He reared and fell backward while being loaded into the starting gate, and he was scratched right there. He was the last of five horses to come out of that race between the Wednesday before the Derby and post time. This page shows you, one bet type at a time, what happens to a ticket that includes a scratched horse, and checking your own tickets on Derby morning takes about five minutes. One thing matters before you start. The track's published rules decide what happens, and the betting app only carries them out.

1. Confirm that the scratch is official. Scratches arrive over several days, not all at once. In 2026, Silent Tactic came out on Wednesday, April 29, with a bruised foot. Fulleffort came out on Thursday with a problem in his left hind leg. Right to Party was scratched just before Friday's deadline, after regulatory veterinarians found clinical signs that could predispose him to injury. The Puma came out on race morning, and Great White at the gate. What you should see: the horse marked as scratched in your app.

2. Check your win, place and show bets. A straight bet on a scratched horse is refunded in full, and the refund is applied automatically, according to MyWinners' help center. What you should see: your stake credited back to your balance, with nothing for you to do.

3. Split your exotic tickets into their combinations. An exacta, trifecta or superfecta is not refunded as a whole ticket. Each combination that contains the scratched horse is refunded, and every other combination stays live, as Bovada's scratch rules describe. Suppose you bought a $1 exacta box on three horses, which is six combinations. If one of those horses scratches, the four combinations that include it come back as $4, and the other two still run. What you should see: a partial refund, with the surviving combinations still listed on the ticket.

4. Find out which leg the scratch hit on any multi-race ticket. This is the step that surprises people. Churchill Downs' policy, as reported by KTVB, is that if a scratch occurs before the first leg is made official, every bet containing that scratch is refunded. After the first leg, most US tracks use a different rule. For the Pick 3, Pick 4 and Pick 5, most tracks swap in the post-time favorite, meaning the horse with the most money bet to win, and do not give a refund. Bovada lists the Pick 4 as using substitution everywhere, and it lists Churchill's Pick 3 as void and refunded when the scratch is in the first leg. What you should see: either a refund, or the favorite's number now printed in that leg of your ticket.

5. Set your futures tickets aside as a separate case. A Derby Future Wager is its own pool, bet months before the field is set, and the rules above do not tell you what happens to it. The future wager explainer covers how that pool works. Fixed-odds bets are also different. At least one offshore racebook counts a scratch on an "odds to win" bet placed through its sportsbook as a loss, even though the same horse bet through its racing interface would have been refunded.

At this point you can look at any ticket on Derby morning and say what is refunded, what is still live and what has been handed to the favorite. The refunded money is yours to bet again, and the beginner's Derby betting primer walks through building a new ticket from it. The people holding tickets on Great White in 2026 got their stakes back. The ones who had him in the second leg of a Pick 4 found they were riding the favorite without having chosen it.