This Saturday is the Tampa Bay Downs High Rollers Tournament Presented by HorseTourneys. That means that McKay Smith and I will be down at the picturesque Oldsmar, Fla., track to mingle with players, hand out a few goodies and perhaps help support the local parimutuel handle a bit. 

It also means that we have the wherewithal, in this instance, to offer qualifiers to this on-track contest right up until the day before. So a Last Chance Tampa play-in is a prominent part of this Friday’s featured schedule.

During a holiday weekend dominated by Pick & Pray tourneys, it may not have been surprising to see so many multiple winners. By our unofficial count, there were 15 such players this past week. What did seem surprising, however, was how many of these prolific victors did so not via same-day multi-tabling, but, rather, just consistently terrific handicapping. 

With the $250,000 Guaranteed Flo-Cal Faceoff less than three weeks away—and the new year less than three days away—we will be increasing the ways players can earn their way into the first leg of the 2022 Tourney Triple series.

The HorseTourneys Tour will be bigger, better—and longer—in 2022.

In 2021, the HT Tour began in July and ran through the end of the year. In 2022, it really IS a year-long Tour—one that begins on January 1st and concludes on, you guessed it, December 31st. Even better, HT Tour prizes in 2023 are expected to reach a total of $100,000. Here’s how it all works:

It’s hard to have a better day than Jose Giron did on Christmas Eve. Not only did Giron pick six winners (and one runner up) out of 10 races, his six tallies included the three highest-priced horses of the day.

There won’t be a creature stirring here on Saturday—not even a mouse—but we’ll have plenty of featured tourney action on Christmas Eve and on Sunday which, as many of you know, is opening day at Santa Anita. 

One of HorseTourneys’ most popular innovations in 2021, the Tourney Triple bonus series, is back for 2022.

It has seldom been harder to determine whom to include in the headline of a Monday recap than this week because, by my unofficial count, 10 players collected more than grand prize this past week. 

Saturday seemed like an especially unlikely day for multiple winners. First off, six of the nine featured events were contested in Live format. Perhaps more importantly, no horse paid more than $22.60 to win, yet eight of the 12 winners paid at least $10.80 so there were countless paths to victory. And still…two players accounted for four of the day’s nine first-place finishes. One of them had an especially lucrative day.

Not to dampen the holiday mood, but Christmas falls on a Saturday this year—which means there will be no tracks open on Saturday, the 25th and only a couple (Gulfstream and Tampa) racing on Friday, the 24th. So, in essence, if you want to hunker down and fire away for cash or important contest seats, this is your last full weekend in 2021 to do that.

It’s always a noteworthy feat when a player has the skill and the courage of conviction to win multiple tourneys in a single day. It’s a far rarer occurrence when someone manages to pull such a thing off twice in one week.

But that’s what Steve Arrison did.