With the ink barely dry on Dan Wilde’s $213,000 Players Championship check, it’s time to turn our attention to—and begin trying to qualify for—the third and final leg of the 2021 Tourney Triple, the $300,000 Guaranteed Spa & Surf Showdown here on August 14-15.

When Dan Wilde woke up on Saturday morning, he knew he had a long road ahead.

Things weren’t looking too good for Dan Wilde when Day 1 of the $555,346 Players Championship concluded. After 15 plays in Friday, the 58-year-old electrical engineer from Cedar Park, Tex., was mired in 137th place with a score of $37.60—$99.20 less than the leader Chris Bertolucci.

Alan Levitt has a whole lot to play for this Friday and Saturday.

After capturing January’s Flo-Cal Faceoff, the Baltimore doctor not only won $205,000, he earned a shot at at a $1 million bonus should he win either this Friday and Saturday’s Players Championship or August’s Spa & Surf Showdown with his designated entry. A clean sweep of these three Tourney Triple races would mean total bonuses of $2 million. No wonder this man is smiling.

It’s not uncommon to see players win multiple tourneys on a given day. What was unusual last week was how many captured grand prizes on multiple days.

We’re raising the stakes on Saturday, Florida Derby Day. Instead of a $25,000 Guaranteed featured cash tourney, we’re upping the guarantee of this live-format event to $45,000—and tossing in a $10,000 Guaranteed Pick & Pray as well. 

That’s not all. For the first time, we’ll be hosting tourneys on the Dubai World Cup card from Meydan. And with the Players Championship (current purse up to $279,660 and counting) set for Friday and Saturday, April 2-3, it means that this weekend is your final one in which to qualify for the all-cash middle leg of the 2021 Tourney Triple. 

It was some kind of Friday for Floridian Brett Wiener.

Not too long ago, if we had 14 featured tourneys during a weekend, that was a pretty solid Friday, Saturday and Sunday for us. This weekend we have 14—on Sunday, alone. Plus 10 on Friday and nine on Saturday. The total of 33 is the most we’ve ever had for a three-day weekend. 

The featured-tourney days last week seemed to take on one of two distinct patterns. Either there weren’t many longshots to be had (Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday) or there were so many (Friday, Sunday) that one bomb alone wouldn’t get you where you needed to be.

It’s another busy weekend at HorseTourneys and HorsePlayers as Gulfstream, Aqueduct and Santa Anita serve as the backdrop for a wide array of marquee games offering significant cash prizes and lots of seats to important tournaments held around the country (and in cyberspace). 

As always, weekends around here are considered to begin on Friday.