We contest players can sometimes be hard to buy for. Ties or socks or sweaters or jewelry are nice, but what we really love is the excitement that, often, only a lucrative handicapping tournament can provide. So why not ease the burden for your family members and buy for yourself…by winning what you really want right here this weekend?

With 33 featured tourneys this past week, we were busier than Joe Namath and Jimmie “J.J.” Walker during the last few days of Medicare Part C enrollment. We weren’t able to award any free rides to medical appointments, but we did hand out lots of cash and important contest seats to a number of skillful players. 

With six featured tourneys on Friday, nine on Saturday and 10 more on Sunday, things are going to be hopping here this weekend with upwards of 20 important contest seats and $82,500 in guaranteed cash at stake.

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.