It’s hard to enjoy a better one-two punch than Gary Brous experienced last weekend. Or was it a one-five punch?

Brous picked 3 out of the first 4 winners on Saturday and went on to finish with 6 wins and 2 places en route to a triumph worth $14,830 in the day’s HT Tour game, $25,000 Guaranteed tourney, which closed with a pot of $32,956. Brous’s second entry came in fifth, earning him another $1,647. Grand total for Brous: $16,477.

For an encore, Brous came back 24 hours later and won Sunday’s HT Tour event too.

Forever Dixie ($15.60, $8.00) in the 8th at Gulfstream was among Brous’s 4 firsts and 5 seconds on Sunday. Here, Brous picked up a winner’s share of $12,600 in a $20,000 Guaranteed tourney, that wound up paying out an even $28,000.

Embarassingly, Brous was only able to place one of his entries in the money of this Sunday game. But he made up for that unforgivable gaffe by making some more money elsewhere.

Brous deposited another $2,035 into his HorseTourneys account for finishing second to last year’s Flo-Cal Faceoff champ David Wolff in Sunday’s $10,177 Big Bucks tourney. That finish elevated Brous’s two-day cash haul to $31,112. Impressive!

But let’s not overlook Mr. Wolff. For the Big Bucks victory, the New Jersey attorney billed HorseTourneys for $7,124. Sharp-eyed readers may have already noticed, though, that Wolff also came in second behind Brous in the $28,000 game—which meant $5,240 for Wolff, making it a $12,364 day for him. (And for the novelty value of it, we’ll note that Brous and Wolff completed the quinella in both the $28,000 cash feature and the $10,177 Big Bucks game on Sunday.)

But wait…there’s more. Really sharp-eyed readers may have detected that Wolff earned $823 for an 8th-place performance in Saturday’s $32,956 cash tourney. 

It’s also plenty newsworthy that Wolff’s Big Bucks victory on Sunday was his second in as many days.

Wolff (4 wins, 1 place) didn’t misread many races last weekend, and certainly not the one that Misread ($15.48, $7.60) won in the first contest race of the day, race 6 at Keeneland. This Big Bucks tally brought Wolff another $9,973.

So Brous swept the HT Tour events on Saturday and Sunday while Wolff captured both Big Bucks games. They also picked up a smaller cash on Saturday, and on Sunday, their toughest foe was each other. For the record, Wolff’s total cash winnings on Saturday-Sunday amounted to $23,160. 

And Wolff’s overall winnings those two days came to $25,160, because he also checked in first in Sunday’s Monmouth Pick Your Prize qualifier.

Drew Keaton (5 wins, 1 place) and G.T. Nixon (5W, 2P) filled out the place and show spots behind Wolff, and they received $2,000 Monmouth seats as well.

The featured-tourney week began on Wednesday when Eric Beyea delivered a 6-win effort in the day’s $5,000 Guaranteed tourney.

Auger ($23.40, $10.80) in the 8th at Tampa gave Beyea’s opponents their biggest headache. That was one of four straight winning “Beyea figures” in mid-tourney on his way to a $3,950 payday. The game closed with a prize pool of $8,778.

On Thursday, Eldon Stivers (3 firsts, 1 second) used a 51-1 winner to capture the day’s $6,000 Guaranteed Pick & Pray.

Awesome Treat ($105.78, $29.74) came through in the 7th at Keeneland for Stivers, who earned $4,603 in a game that ultimately paid out $10,230.

Another Awesome Treat fan was Suresh Bomman (4 wins, 1 place).

Bomman rode the Keeneland bomb to an NHC seat in Thursday’s special $125 qualifier at HorsePlayers.

On Friday, Vineet “Please don’t squeeze the” Sharma finished first in a pair of featured events.

Three of Sharma’s four winners paid double digits, and he got the top prize of $9,875 in Friday’s HT Tour game, our $15,000 Gtd. Pick & Pray, which closed with a final pot of $21,945.

Those same “Sharma selections” also brought him a berth in the 3rd leg of the 2024 HorseTourneys Grand Slam, the $400,000 Gtd, Spa & Surf Showdown.

Stephen Mason (4 wins, 1 place) and Dr. Ron Tang (6W, 2P) finished closest to Sharma and also exited with Spa & Surf Showdown seats in their pocket. Each of the top three finishers connected with Fortune’s Nephew ($22.00, $8.50) in race 7 at Aqueduct.

Ron Tang (2 wins, 2 places) also won a seat on Friday to  Monmouth Pick Your Prize tournament.

Tang topped all but Gregory Lewis (5W, 1P) here. Lewis and Tang both had Fortune’s Nephew. In all, there were enough entries to award four Monmouth seats and the other two went to David Wolff (who was just getting warmed up for his upcoming Big Bucks rampage) and Gwyn Houston, who finished strong with the final three contest-race winners to give him a total of five on the day.

Tang made it a three-contest-seat day in Friday’s Kentucky Derby Challenge qualifier.

Tang left less to chance here…by finishing first. Joining him in the Kentucky Derby Challenge starting game will be runner up Neal Metzger (3 wins, 2 places) and Stephen Burnite (2W, 2P). They all had Fortune’s Nephew on the way to their $3,000 entries.

Mark Richards (6 wins, 1 place), Robert Matthews (4W, 2P) and Bryan Grace (4W, 2P) got the Vegas berths in Friday’s $75 NHC qualifier at HorsePlayers.

Grace got the third and final seat by 8 cents over Christopher Dewey, and one could argue that the difference was simply a function of Kentucky’s penny-breakage policy. Grace made collections in two Keeneland races and his final score contained exactly 40 cents more than it would have under the old dime-breakage policy. Dewey, meanwhile, only got an extra 12 cents from his Keeneland collections.

The Saturday NHC qualifying opportunity took place at HorseTourneys in the form of a $165, Live-format two-seater.

Saturday was sort of a fun day in that the day’s top win price among 12 races was $15.48 but, at the same time, there were 6 double-digit winners. Mike Sutton had four of them—and 5 wins and 3 places overall— to claim the top spot. Also punching his ticket to the 2025 event was Jerome Linderman (5W, 1P), who hit 4 of the final 5 races to get up for second.

Like Mike Sutton, Michael “Copa” Kavana (6 wins, 2 places) and 2016 NHC Tour champ Cheryl McIntyre (5W, 0P) each hit 4 double-digit winners on Saturday.

Kavana and Sutton got the $2,000 spots in Saturday’s play-in to the June 1 Monmouth Pick Your Prize contest.

Kirk Rockwell and the first—and best—of the Saturday prices with Misread ($15.48, $7.60) in the 6th at Keeneland.

Rockwell, thus, led at the beginning…and also at the end…of Saturday’s Kentucky Derby Challenge qualifier.

Peter Rogers (4 wins, 3 places) and Neal “Mad Bomber” Lamonica (4W, 2P) got the coveted $2,000 berths in Saturday’s qualifier to the $400,000 Gtd. Spa & Surf Showdown here on August 3-4.

They both had All I Want is You ($13.88, $5.24) in race 10 at Keeneland.

The Saturday feature at HorsePlayers was a $179 qualifier to the Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge.

David Mullin (5 firsts, 1 second) came away with the $10,000 seat in this one. He got off to a quick start thanks to Misread.

We mentioned earlier that Bryan Grace got an NHC seat on Friday due, in great part, to penny breakage. Herb Oster lost an NHC seat on Sunday due to an old fashioned brutal beat.

The four seats in Sunday’s free 15-race qualifier at HorsePlayers went to Harold Stewart (7 wins, 3 places), Chrissy Bialek (6W, 4P), Michael Karalis (8W, 0P) and Dennis “3D” Scott (7W, 1P). As is typically the case in these crowded free play-ins, scores were tight at the top. 

Second-place finisher Bialek got an $11.60 win mutuel in the final contest race with Quantum Innergy—who was 5 1/2 lengths behind at the eighth-pole stretch call, and somehow managed to get up by half a nostril.

That was a bitter pill to swallow for 6th-place finisher Herb Oster, who had the runner up Runamileinmyshoes, and who would have finished 3rd had his horse held on for a $6.20 win payoff…which would have accordingly subtracted $11.60 (and an NHC seat) from Bialek’s ledger.

Mike Castagnoli (6 wins, 3 places) and Timothy Jacobs (4W, 2P) both profited from the performance of Girl Named Charlie ($14.12, $7.66) in race 7 at Keeneland. 

Castagnoli and Jacobs will both be in action a week from Saturday with paid-up entries in the Kentucky Derby Challenge.

Clint Littlejohn (5 wins, 4 places) and Geoffrey Schutt (4W, 2P) added their names on Sunday to the roster of participants for the $400,000 Gtd. Spa & Surf Showdown.

Littlejohn made collections in each of the first 8 contest races to set the tone. He and Schutt both saw their top return come from Forever Dixie ($15.60, $8.00) in the 8th at Gulfstream.

This coming weekend will be the final one in which to qualify for the Kentucky Derby Challenge. We’ll also have more featured cash games plus qualifiers to the NHC, BCBC and Spa & Surf Showdown. And we’ll try again with a Del Mar Summer Challenge play-in.

In the meantime, thanks to all who played this past week. We truly appreciate your business.