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.

There were a lot of very large parimutuel payoffs in our contests last week—particularly on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. Had it been a Pick & Pray weekend, you might have seen several people win a whole bunch of tourneys on Saturday and Sunday. Almost all of the Saturday and Sunday features, however, were conducted in Live format—and the only player to win as many as two grand prizes all week long was Scott Pulcini, who made a twin killing on Saturday.

The goaltending and the checking skill were such that you weren’t going to see any hat tricks in the men’s or women’s U.S.-Canada gold medal Olympic hockey finals…but there were a couple on display last week here at HorseTourneys.

A couple of weeks ago, John Fasola channeled his inner Vince Lombardi (“What the HELL are you doing?”) in helping to will Tory Cameron across the finish line first in the Flo-Cal Faceoff. Since then, it has been Fasola’s turn to hoist trophies.

Unlike most people, Lucas Van Zandt found that the truly super day last week was Saturday. 

It wasn’t a terrific day for scoring. The total for Van Zandt, our 2023 Players Championship winner, was $68.20. He did have the day’s biggest price in Neshume ($18.20, $7.20), who took the 8th at Tampa, but he was not the day’s top scorer. Nevertheless, the day turned into a potential “year-maker” for him.

It had already been a good week for Tory Cameron. Six days earlier, he finished up work and went home to cheer on his lifelong-favorite football team, the Seattle Seahawks, as they advanced to the Super Bowl. Now, it was time for the the 49-year-old bartender to indulge in one of his other loves—handicapping.