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. 

On Sunday night, the drinks were on Tory Cameron. 

The 49-year-old bartender from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., put together the third-best score on Saturday’s Day 1 and the sixth-highest on Sunday’s Day 2 to earn the $117,115 grand prize in the 7th annual Flo-Cal Faceoff — a $200,000 Guaranteed tournament at HorseTourneys that required participants to make mythical $2 win-and-place selections for every race of the Gulfstream Park and Santa Anita Park cards on Saturday, January 31 and Sunday, February 1. The final, all-cash prize pool for event settled at $325,499.

On a Pegasus World Cup Day replete with good-priced winners, Michael Caposio put two of them together—plus another winner and a small place collection—and made quite a day for himself.

Goofus wins one NHC seat in a day and brags that you can’t do any better than that. Raymond Gallant Jr. wins two NHC seats in one day.