There are so many great tournaments on the annual calendar. In less than a month, one of the most popular will be held—the Monmouth Pick Your Prize Challenge. Of course, the granddaddy of them all is the NHC. And we at HorseTourneys are particularly proud of the upcoming, all-Pick & Pray New York New York Challenge here over Belmont Stakes weekend.

Stephen Thompson didn’t finish first in any featured tourneys last week. However, the Lebanon, Pa., funeral home owner and supervisor still managed to bring home seats to three important contests—and he did so on three different days.

It was another good weekend around here for NHC Hall of Famers. Two of them—Brett Wiener and 2016 NHC Tour champ Cheryl McIntyre—did a whole lot of winning here on Friday and Saturday.

NHC champions…NHC Hall of Famers…HorseTourneys “major” winners…you’ll find all of them on the leaderboards in any given week here—and they certainly had plenty of great moments here last week. The player who outdid them all, however, was Jose Giron.

In 2023, New Jersey attorney David Wolff enjoyed the biggest score of his life, winning $187,425 in that year’s Flo-Cal Faceoff. Last week, Wolff added to his career HorseTourneys earnings…twice.

It has been quite a run of late for Dave “Gambling Actuary” Nichols. In 2025, he won the HorseTourneys Tour and also the far-less-challenging NHC Tour. (I’m kidding about the far-less-challenging part.) Last week, the Pennsylvania resident was up to his old tricks.

If the story of Derek Isenberg’s $125,423 triumph in the $334,464 Players Championship were made into a movie, it would probably be a cross between Let it Ride and National Lampoon’s Vacation. That’s because while Isenberg and 191 others were entering their selections for Day 1 of the two-day competition, he and his wife Raluca were simultaneously loading themselves and their three children—ages 14, 13 and 6—into the family car (truckster?) for a long driving trip from their suburban Philadelphia home in Haddon Heights, N.J. to Tennessee, where the final stop would be Memphis.

In third place—trailing by nearly $28.00 with just two races to go and only one pick remaining—Derek Isenberg of Haddon Heights, N.J. fired his last bullet on 18-1 Spirited Boss in the six-horse Monrovia Stakes at Santa Anita. When the turning-back-in-distance filly got up late to win the down-the-hill turf sprint by three-quarters of a length—and when the 2-5 race favorite could do no better than third—Isenberg received $38.00 to win and a robust $19.80 to place, boosting him into first place of the two-day Players Championship with $281.38.

Arguably, the two top items on most contest players’ annual to-do lists are to earn places in the NHC and the Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge. It’s pretty neat to be able to knock both of those off in just one day. Our 2023 Players Championship winner Lucas Van Zandt and the 2018 The BIG One champ Joe Pettit each turned that trick last week.

Eddie Olczyk will happily be pulling double duty again at this year’s Breeders’ Cup. 

The NBC hockey and horse racing analyst got the gold medal in Saturday’s $179 Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge qualifier at HorsePlayers. That means that Olczyk will be playing his BCBC entry while live on national TV, Friday and Saturday, October 30-31 from Keeneland.