Parting is such sweet sorrow, especially where Saratoga and Del Mar are concerned. We’ll try to keep the accent on the sweet—and not so much on the sorrowful—during a Labor Day Weekend that offers a rare HT Tour event on a Monday plus daily qualifiers to The BIG One and the Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge.

The eyes of the contest world will rightly be focused on this coming weekend’s NHC. But this Thursday’s Bally’s NHC First Chance/Last Chance tournament is a pretty big event in its own right. Thirty-five $500 entries to the traditional NHC Eve preamble flew out the door last week—including five on Wednesday.

With the record-breaking Spa & Surf Showdown now in the books and the ink barely dry on Randy Miller’s first-place check of $235,764, it’s time to redouble our focus on our next major event—the September 18-19 The BIG One, played once again in 2021 right here at HorseTourneys.

Most of the time Randy Miller, 67, is kept busy by his still-flourishing, one-man law practice in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, which is not far from Lancaster. Some of the time, he is busy with one of his favorite avocations—singing gospel music. And a little bit of the time, Miller indulges his longtime love of playing the races.

“Hey, Randy,” one of his horseplaying buddies quipped to him not long ago, “you need to get your priorities straight!”

Seeking the value in a six-horse grass race at Del Mar, Randall Miller zeroed in on Pulpit Rider in the Southern California track’s 7th race on Sunday, and when the daughter of Lucky Pulpit prevailed at odds of 7-1, Miller leapfrogged from fourth-place to first. The attorney from Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, held on from there over the final two races and captured the grand-prize of $235,764 in last weekend’s Spa & Surf Showdown at HorseTourneys.

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.