Last year, the Spa & Surf Showdown set what is believed to be a record for an online horse racing handicapping contest by offering a final purse of over $644,000. That mark could be in jeopardy this Saturday and Sunday when many of the nation’s finest contest players square off in the third annual Showdown, which features two days of full-card selections on every race from each day’s Saratoga and Del Mar cards.

Obviously the purse is the main attraction for this weekend’s 3rd annual Spa & Surf Showdown. Last year, Scott Fiedler of Babylon, N.Y. won $248,000 from a record online purse of over $644,000. This year’s purse has already exceeded the $342,000 mark with a few days of qualifying and the lion’s share of buy-ins (at $2,500 each) still to come.

However, the lucrative, all-cash purse is not the only draw for the two-day, full-card, Saratoga and Del Mar competition this Saturday and Sunday.

It was like the storm before the storm.

On the weekend prior to the Spa & Surf Showdown, several players served notice that they were at the top of their games heading into the big all-cash game whose guaranteed purse is now up to $336,000 (and counting).

The $300,000 Guaranteed Spa & Surf Showdown gets underway a week from Saturday. A $1 million bonus is on the line for previous Tourney Triple series winners Alan Levitt (Flo-Cal Faceoff) and Dan Wilde (Players Championship). And seats to the Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge, 2022 NHC and 2021 The BIG One are at stake for the top three finishers on the Tourney Triple points leaderboard which is currently headed by Anthony Mattera. Meanwhile about 70 people are within range of a top-three “Triple Tourney” finish should they turn in a big performance in the Showdown.

Talk about not wasting any time.

When we announced the HorseTourneys Tour a couple of weeks ago and mentioned the provision whereby players who recorded a second day-of-the-week-specific featured-cash-game victory would receive a $500 bonus, we figured it would take at least a month or so for anyone to actually do it.

Nope. Apparently Alan “The Muscle” Baze is on a schedule all his own.

What do Alan Baze, Giuseppe Petrella and Scott Mauer have in common? They each won a featured cash tourney last weekend (on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, respectively), and as per the rules of the new 2021 HorseTourneys Tour, it means that they are immediately eligible for a $500 bonus should they win another such cash feature on that particular day of the week. And should they be skillful enough to earn that $500 bonus, we kick the premium up to $1,000 for each subsequent triumph on that day.

Which do you find more impressive? The fact that Brian “BC” Chenvert finished first in five featured tourneys last week? Or that he accumulated a total of eight grand prizes (though really nine as you’ll learn later) for the five triumphs plus three other close calls?

I respectfully suggest that the right answer is “None of the above” and instead offer up the possibility that his most impressive feat was racking up the above tallies over three different—and consecutive—days, showing a level of both excellence and consistency that is seldom seen, especially during this highly-competitive time of year.

In case you missed the news yesterday, we now have a Tour tied to each weekend’s Friday, Saturday and Sunday featured cash tourneys. It begins this weekend.

The past week had a lot—the much anticipated openings of Saratoga and Del Mar, lots of close contest finishes and a few players who won multiple tourneys. What it didn’t have from Wednesday through Sunday was a single cap horse. (The closest we came was a $38.60 winner at Del Mar on Friday.) And that trend was taken to extremes on Sunday when the biggest price that came in was 6-1.

It’s one of the most anticipated weekends of the year—the first Friday, Saturday and Sunday at both Saratoga and Del Mar. On top of that, it’s Haskell Weekend at Monmouth. To help make a big weekend that much bigger, we have 31 featured tourneys scheduled over the three days.