Dave “Gambling Actuary” Nichols killed it on Sunday. His final score of $172.80—built on five double-digit winners (during a day in which there were seven such victors hiding out there)—was $46.50 higher than anyone else’s and $78.50 more than anyone he played against. 

And yet…Nichols wasn’t the only person to have a really big day on Sunday. Thanks in part to aggressiveness, Andy Asaro did too.

Nichols and Asaro (4 consecutive winners) ran one-two in Sunday’s qualifier to the Del Mar Fall Challenge. And since this was a “three seater,” they each emerged with $3,000 entries for November 30…as did Stephen “Chile con” Caso (3 wins, 0 places), who came in third.

Despite the $78.50 gap in their scores, Nichols and Asaro also completed the exacta in Sunday’s Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge Low Ratio qualifier at HorsePlayers.

Nichols, thus, became the very first person to nail down a spot in the 2025 BCBC. Asaro wasn’t quite as fortunate, but he was half as fortunate. He got a $5,000 partial entry for being the runner up.

It was an excellent day for Nichols, whose big horse on the day was Last Glory ($118.00, $37.00) in the 9th at Aqueduct. He got two seats (one for this month, one 11 1/2 months from now!), which amounted to $13,000 in entry fees. 

For Asaro, however, the Sunday good times kept rolling.

Asaro finished 3rd behind Nick Kochanski (3 wins, 1 place) in Sunday’s two-seat, $165 NHC qualifier at HorsePlayers. But since 2nd-place finisher G.T. Nixon was already double-qualified, the second available seat fell to Asaro. 

The NHC takes place next March, of course. Just 12 days away, though, is the inaugural edition of the $300,000 Pick & Pray Classic. Asaro will be in that field too.

Asaro bested all except G.T. Nixon (3 wins, 4 places), who was fully eligible for all prizes in this one. Equally eligible were Joe Petrella (2W, 1P) and Bruce Dagostini (2W, 4P), who also received $2,000 Pick & Pray Classic entries for finishing 3rd and 4th, respectively. Dagostini got up for 4th by 20 cents over 2022 Spa & Surf Showdown champ Tim Hughes…thanks to a small but just-big-enough $3.40 place collection in the final contest race.

As for Asaro, his Sunday netted him an NHC seat plus another $10,000 worth of entry fees (Pick & Pray Classic, Del Mar Fall Challenge and half of a BCBC seat). Time will tell how much Asaro can parlay this into. At a bare minimum, he will have a very exciting last couple of weeks of November.

One of Asaro’s opponents in the Pick & Pray Classic (fourth and final leg of the 2024 HorseTourneys Grand Slam) will be Mark “Santana” Tabakman.

There were four winners on the 10-race Wednesday contest slate that paid $20.00 or more and Tabakman smoked out three of them. (They returned $21.40, $22.20 and $25.40.) That’s how Tabakman secured his place in the $300,000 Guaranteed event here on November 23-24.

Barbara Small had the $20.00+ winner that Tabakman missed.

That one was Night Time Ruler ($25.00, $9.80) in the first contest race, the 6th at Mahoning Valley. Small (2 firsts, 4 seconds) used that longshot as a springboard to the $2,500 grand prize in Wednesday’s $5,000 Guaranteed cash game, which went off with a takeout to players of 4.1%.

Thursday’s cash feature, our $6,000 Gtd. Pick & Pray, went to Marc LeBlanc.

This LeBlanc’s friends were three horses that won for him…most notably Vegas Weekend ($27.10, $12.40) in the first contest race, the 6th at Aqueduct. His winner’s share came to $3,017 in a tourney that was ultimately worth a total of $6,705.

James Lisowsky scooped up the $2,000 berth in Thursday’s play-in to the Pick & Pray Classic.

After a couple of smallish place collections, Lisowsky reeled off three straight winners in the second half of the competition, starting with Blue Lily ($23.00, $10.60) in race 5 at Horseshoe Indianapolis.

There were two winners of $2,000 seats in Friday’s Pick & Pray Classic qualifier.

Congratulations to 2020 Spa & Surf Showdown champion Scott Fiedler (brother of former QB Jay) and Matthew Weisenburger (no relation that we are aware of to any NFL players). Fiedler put up 3 wins and a place, while Weisenburger recorded 2 wins and 2 places. Fiedler and Weisenburger were much the best in here. They were the only players to score in the 80s—or the 70s or 60s, for that matter. Common to their scorecards was No Mo Candy ($38.40, $9.60), winner of race 8 at Aqueduct, the Pebbles Stakes.

Another No Mo Candy fan was Michael Pallidine (3 firsts, 1 second).

Pallidine got Friday’s biggest prize—the up-top money of $7,855 in Friday’s HT Tour battle, our $15,000 Gtd. Pick & Pray, which closed with a final pot of $17,456.

The only two players to reach or exceed the century mark were the two to exit with NHC seats at the conclusion of Friday’s $75 NHC qualifier at HorsePlayers.

The two skillful combatants—the day’s top two scorers—were Lawrence Kahlden and Jack Schwartz. They each posted 5 winners (including No Mo Candy) and neither one bothered with any runners up.

In Saturday’s featured events, three players accounted for six of the available grand prizes. One of them was Vineet Sharma.

Birds in the bush are always nice, but Sharma clearly prefers birds in the hand. In the final contest race (the 7th at Del Mar), he connected with Baltic Fire ($33.80, $13.00). That gave Sharma three winners on the day and a victory worth $11,919 in our richest tourney of the week, our $25,000 Gtd. Pick & Pray (an HT Tour event), which closed with a final prize pool of $26,482.

Sharma also used the same selections in Saturday’s $7,124 Big Bucks Pick & Pray. Not surprisingly, he took that one as well.

Here, Sharma added another $4,986 to his coffers, giving him a total for the day of $16,905. That’s a nice day playing the ponies!

John “Super” Gencius also had a very nice Saturday.

Gencius was wily with his choice of Baltic Fire at the end. Before that, he had stockpiled 3 wins and 2 places, and he led the way in our first qualifier to the Hawthorne Thanksgiving Contests. Gencius gets $1,000 in entry fees/bankroll money…enough to cover him for both days of the November 30-December 1 competitions. Also getting a $1,000 Chicagoland scholarship was runner up Josh Thorpe (6W,1P), who was $30.10 clear in second place. Those aren’t boos you’re hearing. Thorpe’s big horse was Lou ($25.40, $8.60) in the 6th at Gulfstream.

Employing identical picks, Gencius also finished first in Saturday’s Pick & Pray Classic qualifier, which awarded four $2,000 places in the November 23-24 extravaganza right here at HorseTourneys.

The other three “Classic” berths went to current HT Tour leader Eric “B Connected” Boyd (3 wins, 1 place), Dennis Daugherty (2W, 4P) and, by 30 cents, Laura Arth ($77.10). Boyd and Arth thought Lou was sweet. Daugherty hit Baltic Fire in the finale.

There was also a full-card, Aqueduct-only Pick & Pray Classic qualifier on Saturday. In that one, Eric Boyd picked up his second such seat of the day.

Lou wasn’t part of this tourney since he was a Gulfstream horse. So here, Boyd (3 firsts, 1 second) leaned on Works for Me ($20.40, $21.20), one of the two dead-heat winners in race 8 at Aqueduct.

Over at HorsePlayers, there was a $210 NHC qualifier on Saturday that doled out two seats to Vegas.

Last year’s Spa & Surf Showdown champ Anthony Spinazzola finished strongly, nailing the last 3 winners and finishing with 5 on the day. Like Spinazzola, runner up Cal “Frontier” Jestice (4 places followed by 3 winners) also scored with 15-1 Baltic Fire at the end. 

On Sunday, there were actually a couple of featured tourneys that didn’t involve Andy Asaro or Dave Nichols.

One of those matchups was Sunday’s HT Tour test, our $20,000 Gtd. Pick & Pray, which eventually paid out a total of $22,968. It saw the winner’s share of $10,335 go to Kevin Engelhard, who swept the first three races en route to a 4-win, 3-place afternoon. Engelhard’s best return came courtesy of New York Panther ($24.80, $10.60) in race 8 at Laurel. 

(In similar-sounding Sunday news, the Carolina Panthers defeated the New York Giants that morning in Germany. Fortunately for Engelhard, he wins way more often than either the Panthers or the Giants.)

Well-known poker player Phil Hellmuth is reported to have once said something along the lines of, “If not for luck, I’d win every time.” 

On Sunday, Rick Vasquez and David Nelson might have said to themselves, “If not for If Not for Luck, I wouldn’t have won the Lone Star December Betting Challenge qualifier.”

Vasquez (5 wins, 1 place) and Nelson (2W, 5P) both had If Not for Luck ($22.80, $9.20) in the 8th at Gulfstream, and now each will be deep in the heart of Texas on December 7 with their $1,000 entries fully paid for.

Thanks to all of you for keeping the Breeders’ Cup hangover to a minimum around here last weekend. Next weekend will be the final one in which to qualify for the $300,000 Gtd. Pick & Pray Classic. After that two-day competition, maybe we’ll have another hangover to worry about, but we’ll worry about that later. In the meantime, good luck. Because if not for luck…