For most players, winning a $2,000 seat via qualifier to a tourney like the Players Championship would be cause for celebration. When it happened three-and-a-half weeks ago to Matthew Bickey, however, he was pissed off.

“This is actually a pretty funny story,” the 53-year-old from Beckley, W.V., chuckled.

Bickey, the operator of an industrial battery supply company and also a warehouse and office leasing company, leans heavily on Betmix handicapping software and data while coming up with his selections.

“I realized about 10 years ago that data is smarter than I am, and at that point, I just accepted it and came to trust it,” he said.

Anyway…prior to participating in last month’s NHC, Bickey pored over the Betmix data and meticulously mapped out his plays for the first two days of the Vegas competition. Then, for some reason, he kept getting off his Betmix horses to play others that didn’t fare nearly as well.

“I kept trying to come up with longshots at Oaklawn and Fair Grounds instead of sticking with my original plays,” he said. “I calculated that had I stayed with my initial plan, I’d have made the final table. I’ve been lamenting the NHC for the past three weeks.”

As horseplayers, we’ve all heard plenty of woulda/coulda/shoulda stories before, but this one carries credibility. Why? Because on Friday, March 15—the first day of the NHC—Bickey did play those original, Betmix-driven selections here at HorseTourneys in Pick & Pray qualifiers to the Monmouth Pick Your Prize tournament and the Players Championship. Bickey won seats to both.

“It was sort of my consolation prize for the day,” he laughed.

He didn’t know it at the time, but that consolation prize is now worth $149,310—the amount that Bickey received for capturing last weekend’s two-day Players Championship.

To the outside observer, Bickey had a plenty-solid Day 1 of the Players Championship. With his lone entry, he finished Saturday in 22nd place among the 237 overall entries. 

In first place after Day 1 was Brian O’Kane, who spent much of Saturday alternating on the lead with Christian Orscher before prevailing late.

How was Bickey feeling after his 22nd-place effort on Saturday? Encouraged? Hopeful?

“I was pretty pissed at myself,” he said.

Sound familiar? Bickey, in many respects, repeated his mistake out in Vegas by straying from his pre-planned picks. 

“I could have done a lot better on Saturday, but a lot of the horses I liked originally were running early in the day, and I couldn’t shake the habit of wanting to save bullets for the end—which doesn’t make much sense on the first day of a tournament like this one. So instead of hitting a 7-1 winner early in the day, I’d play a higher-priced horse later in the day that would lose and that I didn’t like nearly as much.”

Perhaps aided by a night’s sleep, Bickey was able to ward off the previous day’s frustrations as play began on Sunday. He vowed to stay true to his handicapping and see where it would take him. 

“The leader was about $70 ahead of me. I said to myself, ‘Well, it’s reachable.’ I didn’t know that I could win this, but at least there were no bombs on Saturday, and the biggest price that did come in was a horse [Reasoned Analysis] that I had.”

Bickey started fast on Sunday with a 7-1 winner at Keeneland in the first available contest race. Then he made a couple of double-digit place collections on runners up. Suddenly he was all the way up into 5th place behind Christian Orscher, who had wrested the lead away from Brian O’Kane.

Then came race 3 at Santa Anita and 16-1 Grazen in the Sun.

“This was probably my easiest pick of the day,” Bickey said. “I like to focus a lot on trainer-jockey-pedigree analysis, and the program really pointed this horse out. It was the kind of horse that, had I been playing two entries, I would have used on both.”

After Grazen in the Sun won and paid $35.40 to win and $15.20 to place, Bickey was now in the lead…

…but only by 96 cents.

Orscher had battled hard all tourney long, though, and he wasn’t about to stop now. With just one race to go, he had bulled his way back into the lead—$10.64 ahead of Bickey.

The top 10 in the standings all had a selection remaining for the final race—a Maiden Special with 11 3-year-olds going a mile on the grass. So the question now was…who would everyone pick?

When the gates for the 11th at Santa Anita sprang open, and the HorseTourneys leaderboard was refreshed, this was the “big reveal” on the selections:

Ahead by that $10.64, Orscher eschewed the 6-5 favorite Ngannou and opted for 5-1 American Story—which served to block Peter Rogers in 3rd and Frank Polk in 8th. 

A surprising number of players—half of the top 10, including Bickey—landed on 21-1 outsider British Isles, #4, trained by Richard Baltas and ridden by Drayden Van Dyke.

“The four horse was my first thought at 4:00 pm when I handicapped the race, and I decided to stick with ‘first thought/best thought’,” Bickey said. “I was a little worried, though, that the horse was 10-1 on the morning line and that, at Santa Anita, he might get dropped in the last flash.”

That didn’t happen, though. British Isles was sent off at 21-1. And after spending most of the race in 3rd, chasing eventual wire-to-wire winner Ngannou, British Isles managed to wear down  20-1 Fast Chaz and grab second. Even with the favorite on top, the place price on British Isles came to $12.00. Bickey was the winner.

“It was a wonderful moment,” he said. My wife and daughter were watching that last race with me. We had some champagne in the house so we celebrated with that—and then my phone started blowing up.”

For Bickey, the $149,310 in winnings was his biggest score ever by a good amount. It will come in handy too. His daughter is a high school senior soon to enter college. Another child is in college, while Matthew’s eldest son is about to head off to graduate school.

“Yeah,” he laughed, “a major portion of this will be going to tuition.”

A little over $2,000 of it, though, will be invested in a second Monmouth Pick Your Prize entry and a trip to New Jersey for Matthew and his wife. Remember…he still has one Monmouth entry coming his way from that debacle of a performance on NHC weekend.

For the Bickey family, it’s a debacle that is looking better and better every day.