With the first Spa & Surf Showdown now in the books, it’s time to get back to normal here at HorseTourneys. Though an August weekend never exactly qualifies as “normal.” We have 18 featured events during the upcoming Friday-Saturday-Sunday period. They offer a plethora of brick-and-mortar contest seats plus a good amount of cash. The fun begins on Friday.
“This is the most I’ve ever won.”
Those words can carry vastly different meanings depending on who is speaking them. When they’re uttered by famed tournament player Paul Shurman, it is a significant statement, indeed.
He’s considered one of the greatest $2 win/place tournament players ever, so perhaps it’s appropriate that NHC Hall of Famer Paul Shurman was the first-ever winner of the Spa & Surf Showdown. The 64-year-old Dix Hills, N.Y., attorney earned $109,032 out of a total purse of $272,000.
After months of qualifying, the big days are now upon us. It’s time for the first annual Spa & Surf Showdown.
We normally proceed in chronological order with our weekly recaps, but to start anywhere other than Sunday would be an injustice to George Chute.
The final weekend of July brings with it a predominantly live-format weekend containing 19 featured tourneys. Among the qualifiers is a new one…to the August 24 Monmouth Super NHC/BCBC Qualifier. The multi-track-tourney fun starts on Friday.
Summer is the new Winter when it comes to racetrack cancellations. February’s snow and ice has nothing, it seems, on July’s heat and humidity. Fortunately, many of the weekend’s cancellations came with advance notice, so there was minimal damage suffered to our little tournament ecosystem here at HorseTourneys. Plus, everything was well-predicted in advance, so most of what went on was fairly easy to anticipate—Monmouth’s Saturday card notwithstanding.
With Del Mar now joining Saratoga on the daily race menus, it now officially feels like racing’s “Summer Season.” We start things off with a Pick & Pray weekend in which 14 of our 20 featured events will allow you to enter your picks and then do other things during the day if you wish. The freedom—and action—begins on Friday.
It always seems like a special weekend when Saratoga joins the HorseTourneys mix. The prizes are equally valuable, but tourney wins seem just a little bit sweeter when they require some success at the Spa, which is never an easy meet. Last weekend, James Lisowski was certainly up to the task.
The Fourth of July was an extra special day at HorseTourneys thanks to our $6,000 Charity Event. It was designed to do two things at once. First, to benefit three excellent horse racing-related charities: The Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund (PDJF), the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance (TAA) and the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation. It was also designed to reward our players via free feeders that offered anyone who had played more than $250 over the past year a chance to get into the $5,000 cash tourney at no cost.
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