It’s always a thrill to do well in a multi-player tournament – whether onsite or online. To succeed, your handicapping insights must be keen, and you probably need a fair dose of luck at one or more points in the competition. Sometimes you get one without the other and you wind up with nothing. You need it to be “your day”.
The problem is, it’s near impossible to know in advance when it’s going to be “your day”.
The title tells it. This weekend is your first chance to qualify for the 2017 The BIG One, scheduled for Sept. 23-24 at Laurel Park. Last year’s event awarded prizes worth some $376,000 (including 28 seats to major tourneys) to a field that numbered just 51. The big (excuse the pun) first qualifier is on Sunday, January 8. But this event (a Pick & Pray as are most of this weekend’s featured contests) is just one of many important – and new – tourneys taking place this weekend.
Congratulations to all of the Surfside winners! (Top two non-double-qualified players each day won NHC seats.)
In terms of volume, we didn’t run THAT many tourneys last weekend, and yet each day brought us something special or unique that served to make several high-quality games even more memorable.
BRIS Past Performances for the 2-day Flo-Cal Faceoff may be accessed via Google Docs here:
The year ends with a bang on Saturday as HorseTourneys hosts a 15-race, $50,000 Guaranteed event on New Year’s Eve. But it’s just one tourney amid many excellent ones this weekend. Let’s begin our look with Friday’s action.
I’ve seen players enter the same set of picks in two different tourneys and win both contests, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen what Bill Shurman did last Friday.
With Christmas Eve and Christmas Day falling on the weekend this year, we’ve re-jiggered our normal schedule to still give you a weekend’s worth of exciting action – but on Friday and Monday, instead of Saturday and Sunday. And, other than Exacta Box and Survivor games, almost everything will be run in Pick & Pray format so you don’t need to be chained to your computer to play.
Shortly after the turn of the year, HorseTourneys will be starting direct qualifiers for four of the biggest brick-and-mortar tournaments of 2017. They are:
If George Chute were an NBA player, he’d probably be one of those (increasingly rare) guys with a very good mid-range jumper.
