It’s always a heady feeling to hit a 50-1 winner. Can you imaging hitting two in one day…over the course of just 12 plays? 

Andy Asaro can.

While many of our very best players—including Dan Piazza, who earned both of his NHC entries right here at HorseTourneys—were out in Vegas doing their thing, Eric “Skeet” Boyd was doing HIS thing…playing in and winning our featured cash games.

Perhaps unfortunately for the other 600 or so competitors in this weekend’s NHC, Dave “Gambling Actuary” Nichols is coming in hot to Vegas.

Jay Johns, the 2022 NHC Tour champion, had an excellent start to the featured-tourney week. The recently retired president of IHOP also had a rooty tooty fresh n’ fruity finish to it.

I’m not sure when the last time was that we saw so many players reel off grand-prize heists on consecutive days. At the top of this list last weekend was David Nelson.

Saturday seemed like one of those days where you just needed to remain patient—because if you missed the longshot that just came in, another one was going to hit shortly.

Five of the day’s 12 contest winners paid $20.00 or more in the win hole—and since this was a Pick & Pray weekend around here, it meant that if you were hot, you could have an extra nice day. Just ask Thomas McClenin.

It’s obviously very early still in 2025, but key pushes in the HorseTourneys Tour standings can absolutely come at any point in the year. Take, for example, the exploits this past week of Darryl Lacy.

Last year, Eric “Skeet” Boyd set a HorseTourneys record by capturing nine featured weekend cash tourneys. The remarkable showing of excellence and consistency led to him being crowned 2024 HorseTourneys Tour Champion.

Last weekend, though, Boyd enjoyed his biggest victory yet, taking home a total of $144,519 for topping a field of 286 entrants in the two-day Flo-Cal Faceoff—an event that required contestants to make mythical $2.00 win and place selections on each race of the Saturday and Sunday cards from Gulfstream Park and Santa Anita Park.

Last year, HorseTourneys unveiled a four-race series of its top events, the Flo-Cal Faceoff in January, the Players Championship in April, the Spa & Surf Showdown in August and the brand new Pick & Pray® Classic in November. Known as the HorseTourneys Grand Slam, the series awarded bonuses to those who, based on a points formula, performed best throughout the four marquee tourneys.

This year, there’s another addition.

HorseTourneys is introducing a fifth competition to the series: the $250,000 Guaranteed New York, New York Challenge. The resulting five-contest sequence will be known, collectively, as the HorseTourneys Champions Series.

Dave “Gambling Actuary” Nichols picked 4 winners and 1 runner up across the 12-race featured schedule on Sunday. One of his victors was a whopper—Go Jocelyn Go ($52.00, $26.80) in the 9th at Tampa Bay Downs. The final scoring total for Nichols was $101.20.

That total wasn’t the highest of the day. A small handful of players did better. But no one accomplished more with what they had, thanks to Nichols’s aggressive multi-tabling.