Not only can you compete for contest seats this weekend in all of your favorite events like the NHC, BCBC, The BIG One, Saratoga Del Mar and Keeneland, this week we have three newcomers to the proceedings—the Woodbine Mile Horseplayers Tournament, the Stars of Texas Betting Challenge and the Hawthorne OTBs Summer NHC Qualifier—and all have direct qualifiers this weekend at HorseTourneys.
Recently, our support@horsetourneys.com customer service email account has gotten a few queries from players eager to get a quick start on their handicapping and on their contest selections. They knew that entries for a given day had already been drawn and were wondering why the tourneys they had signed up for weren’t yet open to accept selections or to offer PPs. We went into that topic in a fair amount of depth on March 7 of last year, so here is that blog again for those who are curious about these sorts of timelines:
One of the slightly odd things about being a tournament player is that our frame of reference for big days can be completely different from that of the rest of the racing world. For 99.9% of racing fans, Justify will be the horse they remember from this past weekend and rightly so. That other tiny slice, though, might remember it more for the horses that helped propel them to victory in a big tournament—horses like Still Having Fun, Spring Quality, He’s Like Violence and Candid Desire. We salute Justify because he was outstanding and historic last weekend—and at the same time we know, in our little world, those other horses were the ones we really needed.
Congratulations to Karen Carey, winner of the 2018 Belmont Stakes Challenge. Carey keeps her final bankroll total of $36,571.50 plus she earned a bonus of $60,000 for finishing first, an entry into the 2019 Belmont Stakes Challenge, plus her choice of an entry to the Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge or the NHC.
There are so many reasons to look forward to the upcoming weekend of racing—and HorseTourneys gives you one more: a 14-race, $75,000 Guaranteed live-format event on Belmont Stakes Day in which $75,000 represents the bare minimum of what the purse will be worth. If enough people enter, it could be worth $100,000, $125,000 or more. You will decide ultimately what the pot will be, but it will be worth $75,000 even if all our players decide to mow their lawns instead. But this big-money game is just one of 15 featured events with significant cash prizes or seats to some of the most anticipated onsite tournament events.
I’ve been to a whole bunch of Kentucky Derbys and Breeders’ Cups plus a Super Bowl and a World Series game. They’re all great spectacles but, for me, none of them come close to matching the excitement of the Belmont Stakes—when there is a Triple Crown on the line.
On Memorial Day, Gary Machiz won both our $12,600 Pick & Pray and our NHC Lower Ratio qualifier. Little did we know he was just getting warmed up.
Bill Rendino, a 62-year-old retired New York City fire chief, turned his starting bankroll of $1,000 into a final total of $10,375 to finish first among 205 entries in the June 2 Monmouth Park Pick Your Prize Tournament.
We’re very excited about our $75,000 Guaranteed, No-Limit tourney on Belmont Stakes Day, June 9. There’s a lot of lucrative action between now and then, however, including this upcoming weekend when we’ll see two new events join the HorseTourneys 2018 roster of qualifiers, and we’ll also be offering a last-chance play-in game for the big money Belmont Stakes Handicapping Challenge.
