We put a lot of effort into determining which races go into each day’s featured schedule. A lot of times the best 10 or 12 races from the tracks available to us sort of jump off the page—especially on weekends when stakes races and larger fields are more plentiful.
Hot weather was an issue throughout much of the nation last weekend. Fortunately, it only knocked out one race card and none of our featured tourneys—and that allowed for plenty of winners, including a few double grand-prize victors despite the fact that most of our featured events were run in live format.
The calendar flips from June to July during a HorseTourneys weekend that again offers a robust menu of 17 featured events, plus feeders to two special tourneys the following weekend. It all gets rolling on Friday.
The first feeders to the second annual Pegasus World Cup Betting Championship are now posted on HorseTourneys, and the first direct qualifier to the ultra-high-end, live-bankroll tourney is slated for Sunday, July 8.
It has been quite a June for Peter Deys. That statement would have been true even if he had just rested on his laurels after June 8. That’s the day (Belmont Stakes day) that he triumphed in both a Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge qualifier and in our $75,000 event, earning total cash and prizes of $43,750.
Not only can you compete for contest seats this weekend in all of your favorite events like the NHC, BCBC, The BIG One, Saratoga Del Mar and Keeneland, this week we have three newcomers to the proceedings—the Woodbine Mile Horseplayers Tournament, the Stars of Texas Betting Challenge and the Hawthorne OTBs Summer NHC Qualifier—and all have direct qualifiers this weekend at HorseTourneys.
Recently, our support@horsetourneys.com customer service email account has gotten a few queries from players eager to get a quick start on their handicapping and on their contest selections. They knew that entries for a given day had already been drawn and were wondering why the tourneys they had signed up for weren’t yet open to accept selections or to offer PPs. We went into that topic in a fair amount of depth on March 7 of last year, so here is that blog again for those who are curious about these sorts of timelines:
One of the slightly odd things about being a tournament player is that our frame of reference for big days can be completely different from that of the rest of the racing world. For 99.9% of racing fans, Justify will be the horse they remember from this past weekend and rightly so. That other tiny slice, though, might remember it more for the horses that helped propel them to victory in a big tournament—horses like Still Having Fun, Spring Quality, He’s Like Violence and Candid Desire. We salute Justify because he was outstanding and historic last weekend—and at the same time we know, in our little world, those other horses were the ones we really needed.
Congratulations to Karen Carey, winner of the 2018 Belmont Stakes Challenge. Carey keeps her final bankroll total of $36,571.50 plus she earned a bonus of $60,000 for finishing first, an entry into the 2019 Belmont Stakes Challenge, plus her choice of an entry to the Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge or the NHC.
HorseTourneys.com Blog 