The players came out in force over the extended Thanksgiving weekend. None of the 28 featured tourneys failed to fill, and all of the marquee cash games comfortably exceeded their purse guarantees. And yet, perhaps the best performance of all came in the very first featured tourney of the week.

Many people rate Thanksgiving as their favorite holiday of the year. We assume that it gets the nod over Christmas because of the many competitions available at HorseTourneys on Turkey Day—including our $15,000 Guaranteed Pick & Pray.

Two of this past week’s hottest players wasted no time in making their identities known. As a result, we are able to present this particular Monday recap in essentially straight, chronological order.

On January 8th of next year, HorseTourneys will present the Tampa Bay Downs First Chance/Last Chance NHC qualifier. It’s an on-site event taking place at the Oldsmar, Fla., oval—a proverbial stone’s throw from HorseTourneys headquarters in Saint Petersburg. 

It was a very good week for James Lisowsky. It got started for him on Thursday with three quick winners out of the gate in the day’s featured $5,000 Guaranteed Pick & Pray…followed by two winners and a place later on.

With the 2021 Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge now in the history books, we can now—at least for the time being—narrow our focus to seats for NHC, the $250,000 Guaranteed Flo-Cal Faceoff, the Thanksgiving Weekend contests at Hawthorne and, of course, the always popular prize of…cash.

Sometimes we’re trained to think that to prevail in a big-day tourney, you almost have to sweep the card. That’s almost never the case, of course, and in our richest event of Breeders’ Cup Weekend, it wasn’t the case at all.

We have so many cash tourneys on Breeders’ Cup Friday and Saturday—between two-day games, single-day full-card events and early/late card competitions—that you can really tailor your play to which races you like the most. 

We’d call Brian Chenvert’s Saturday a year-maker, but that would be pretty unfair to him because the Minnesotan seems to have these days every couple of weeks.

The Breeders’ Cup—and, therefore, the Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge—begins a week from tomorrow at Del Mar. As some handicappers begin studying the pre-entries released yesterday, others are poring over the PPs of Belmont, Keeneland, Woodbine and Santa Anita. Why? Because those are the tracks that will supply the featured-tourney races this weekend for the seven separate direct qualifiers on offer this Friday, Saturday and Sunday at HorsePlayers.