You don’t need me to tell you that there will be action galore this weekend, with the running of the Breeders’ Cup this Friday and Saturday at Santa Anita. Let’s take a look at how the action shapes up from a tournament perspective here at HorseTourneys.

There’s a lot of ground to cover, but from a top-line perspective, here are our biggest tourneys each day:

Friday — $12,500 Guaranteed Live event

Saturday — $25,000 Guaranteed Live event
$5,000 All-Optional Pick & Pray (Pick 7 out of 12 races)
$4,000 High-Stakes Pick & Pray
$1,500 Guaranteed Exacta Box tourney
Twin Spires Championships qualifier (live)
Horse Player World Series qualifier (live)

Sunday – Two-Seat Guaranteed NHC Qualfier (live) with up to 4 seats
Last Chance qualifier to the Del Mar Fall Classic (live)
Hawthorne Fall NHC Super Q qualifier (live)

The Friday and Saturday tourneys will be based on the full cards at Santa Anita each day. The races in Sunday’s tourneys are yet to be determined. As always – included as part of their entry fee — tournament contestants will receive free Brisnet PPs for all the races in their contest.

Now let’s take a deeper dive into the three days.

Friday’s headliner is the $12,500 Guaranteed live-format tourney with $6,250 up top for the winner and prizes down to 6th. Entry fee is $195.

There will also be a slew of supporting tourneys focusing on the Breeders’ Cup Friday card. We’ll have $1,500 tourneys at price points of both $69 and $12. There will be $500 tourneys in both live and Pick & Pray formats with entry fees of just $12, plus a $500 exacta box tournament for $55 limited to 10 entries total. And we’ll have a $500 Survivor tourney that you can enter for only $7.

Also offered are winner-take-all tourneys paying out $250, $500 and $1,500 – each in both live and Pick & Pray formats. Even better, the $500 and $1,500 winner-take-alls will pay all participating players 4.5% rebates.

Last but not least, Friday will also offer feeders to virtually all of the major Saturday and Sunday tourneys.

If you think Friday is big, have a look at Saturday.

We, of course, have that $25,000 guaranteed game on Saturday for $260 with $12,500 to the winner and prizes down to 8th place. We’ve also got a creative $5,000 All-Optional tourney where you pay an $85 entry fee and play seven of the 12 Santa Anita races on Saturday. So you can cherry pick your best plays or skip the first five and save all of your bullets for the end.

There’s also a $4,000 high stakes game where entries, at $317 each, are capped at 14. And $1,500 tourneys at both the $12 and $69 entry fee levels.

Or how about a $500 tourney for just $12 with prizes down to 4th? We’ll have these in both live and Pick & Pray formats.

Specialists will enjoy our $5 Survivor game with the winner(s) sharing $500. But there’s a lot more where that came from.

Plus there are $1,500 and $500 exacta box tourneys. The $1,500 one is guaranteed, so be alert for an overlay there.

There will be five-person, All-Optional tourneys (again picking 7 of 12 races) with 4% rebates offering winner-take-all prizes of $500 with just five players allowed. Plus live and Pick & Pray winner-take-all games encompassing all 12 races at the $250, $500 and $1,500 prize levels.

For seat hunters, there are two big direct qualifiers Saturday – one for the Horse Player World Series ($87, one winner per 20) and one for the Twin Spires Online Championships ($58, one per 15).

And here are some tourneys you should take special note of now in case you get a bit harried during the afternoon on Saturday and forget…

These are are “Last 6 races” tourneys on Saturday. They are fun tourneys in and of themselves, of course, on some of the year’s very best races. But they have added utility. If you happen to get off to a slow start on Saturday, they are a chance for a fresh start on Santa Anita races 7-12. Or, if you are doing well in your existing tourneys, this could be an opportunity to hedge your main tournament plays. Fittingly, there will be six “Last 6” tourneys. Five are cash games at prize levels between $250 and $500. One will be a feeder to the following day’s NHC qualifier.

You will also find several feeders on Saturday for the major Sunday tourneys…which are…

A smart tournament player once told me that the day after Breeders’ Cup is his favorite day of the year because so many of the other strong tournament players aren’t in action that day either due to travel or fatigue.

Based on that logic, you’ll definitely want to play in Sunday’s NHC qualifier (live format) for $160. Two NHC spots are guaranteed, and we’ll hand out four if we get 280 entries.

Another excellent opportunity on Sunday is our Last Chance qualifier for the Nov. 12-13 Del Mar Fall Classic. At stake are lucrative $4,500 packages including entry and travel. What a great follow-up to Breeders’ Cup weekend that would be. Entries are $212

Finally, there is a direct qualifier on Sunday to the Nov. 25-26 Hawthorne Fall NHC Super Qualifier. Winners (one per 15 entrants) will receive two-day entry fees ($700 value) plus $500 for travel expenses.

We wish all of you a memorable and profitable Breeders’ Cup. And we send out extra special wishes to Dan Flanigan, Larry Burns, Tony Zhou, Michael Caposio, Gary Johnson, Kevin McIntyre, Pete Acocella and Eric Moomey. These eight outstanding tournament players were our top eight finishers at The BIG One and will be representing HorseTourneys at this weekend’s Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge. Bring home the big money, guys. And again, good luck to all!

As wonderful a handicapping extravaganza as the Breeders’ Cup is, it was is and probably always will be a strange, dichotomous event. With multi-race wagers and tourneys now representing such an important piece of the average player’s puzzle, one often finds himself bouncing back and forth between races in which he is familiar with the entire field, and others in which several runners exist solely as past performance lines on the printed page. For every California Chrome or Beholder or Syndergaard — horses for which we can almost close our eyes and picture with great accuracy the events before, during and subsequent to each of their races — there are horses like Home of the Brave, Intricately and Queen’s Trust for whom a closing of the eyes will show us little more than the inside of our eyelids.

And yet it is how we perform on these races with Europeans that will, in many cases, determine how we do in our tournament play and cash wagers this Friday and Saturday. The problem for me isn’t that I can’t handicap a European past performance line, it’s that those PP lines have no context to me. I don’t know instinctively who the conditions favored on a certain day, who was using the race as a prep for something else, etc.

The good news is that many Americans betting the Breeders’ Cup are in the same position. And that can lead to opportunity if you can smoke out a nugget here or there that can help you zero in on an overlaid horse that others will only use defensively (perhaps a spread of all the Europeans in a given race, for example) if at all.

There are two sources I have found particularly helpful thus far in trying to size up this year’s European contingent.

One is the commentary of British racing expert Nick Luck, who will again be part of the NBC telecast. But time is precious on TV, and it’s hard for anyone to go to far in depth on that medium. Here, though, is an hour-long interview that Steve Byk did with Luck last week:

http://stevebyk.com/broadcast/hour-2-nick-luck/

I listened to it a couple of times just to sort of let everything sink in. I want it as “internal background” in my head as I go about tackling the actual PPs once post positions are drawn.  And I believe Byk will be having another sit-down with Luck this week. I’ll certainly be tuned in to that as well.

Another person whose work I have found interesting (and I confess to not having heard of her before) is Kellie Reilly, whose horse-by-horse profiles of the international runners are now starting to appear on the Twin Spires blog page. She does a very nice job of taking you step-by-step through a horse’s 2016 campaign to date, plus there is plenty of high-quality embedded video of key races along with an occasional workout. I’m planning to read all of her available features before I handicap, and then re-read those of horses I am at least somewhat interested in after my first pass-through of the PPs. Her profiles are available through the Twin Spires twitter feed (@TwinSpires) and also on this page:

http://www.twinspires.com/blog

As tough as the Breeders’ Cup is to handicap with so many horses in each race “having a shot”, one race really can make your weekend. I hope you find some of the above helpful in your BC preparations. Happy Handicapping.

Good news/bad news: The bad news is that after Saturday, we’ll have to wait until April to play Keeneland again. The good news is that we’ll have plenty of great Keeneland Tourneys (multi-track and solo) through Saturday. Plus another exciting NHC qualifier this Sunday.

Things get rolling in earnest on Friday with our $5,000 guaranteed game. It will be a Pick & Pray, as will most of our big tourneys this weekend. As we have warned in recent weeks, these Friday games with Keeneland included are very popular, so enter early. Contest races have already been determined: Belmont’s 6th through 9th; Keeneland’s 7th through 10th; and Laurel’s 10th and 11th (11 races in all). As a guaranteed game, full prizes will be paid down to 4th place regardless of participation, and the winner gets $2,500. Entry fee is $185.

Our most lucrative tournament of the weekend takes place on Saturday when we host our low-takeout $25,000 guaranteed contest. This Pick & Pray event pays down to 8th place with $12,500 up top for the winner. Entries are $260 each and capped at 107. This would be a great way to give some serious padding to your Breeders’ Cup bankroll. Of course, full prizes will be paid out regardless of headcount. (Last Sunday, our $7,500 game paid out at a healthy overlay to players!)

We also have an entry-only Horse Player World Series qualifier on Saturday for $87. We’ll award one entry ($1,500 value) per every 20 contestants. There will also be a direct qualifier to the November 26 Twin Spires Online Championships with one winner per 15 entries (at $58 each) moving on to the “cyberfinal”. These Twin Spires qualifiers have been popular with three or four winners each weekend. So you certainly don’t need to “sweep the card” to do well here. Here’s a visual of our big Saturday games:

On to Sunday…

Sunday’s featured event is again a 2-package-guaranteed NHC direct qualifier that could offer up to four NHC packages depending on participation. We will give away one package per every 70 entries but at least two no matter what. Only five more opportunities remain (including this Sunday) to qualify for the 2017 NHC at HorseTourneys. (After that, you’re on your own!) Entries this week are once again just $160. Last Sunday’s NHC qualifier was extremely exciting with Roger Cettina placing two entries in the top three (only the second time someone has done that in an NHC qualifier at HorseTourneys). Roger was only able to lay claim to one of the three available NHC packages because a) NHC rules only allow for one person to win one package per qualifier plus b) Roger had already qualified for the NHC once this year, so the one package gave him his maximum complement of two. As a result, the third NHC package awarded last Sunday dropped to our 4th-place finisher. And you just may see more of this in our subsequent five NHC qualifiers. As players max out on NHC entries, most still play to amass more NHC Tour points. When you see one of these players ahead of you (and we do our best to denote this in our real-time standings), you have the comfort of knowing they are playing for Tour points only. So that is one fewer player for you to worry about in terms of winning an NHC seat.

Sunday will also offer another chance to qualify for the November 25-26 Hawthorne Fall NHC Super Qualifier. Hawthorne will run two separate single-day tourneys costing $350 each day. A win in a HorseTourneys direct qualifier gets you entry fees for both days ($700 total) plus another $500 in travel. Entry is $93 with one of every 15 moving on to Chicagoland for Thanksgiving weekend.

Also scheduled for Sunday is a qualifier for the Del Mar Fall Classic (a whopping $4,500 value) for $212 and our $7,500 guaranteed cash game where you could earn $3,750 for a $190 entry fee. Again, this tourney went off at a healthy overlay last week. And perhaps it could do so again, especially if some of our normal Sunday players suffer from a Keeneland hangover!

Last but not least we’ll mention our Sunday $1,500 guaranteed exacta box game. If you’re not familiar with these, try one. We’ll be having one on Breeders’ Cup Saturday, so this would be a great way to sharpen your exacta box tourney skills ahead of the big weekend at Santa Anita.

Here’s an at-a-glance look at Sunday’s featured action:

And here’s hoping your Breeders’ Cup “preps” this weekend are winning ones. Good luck!

It’s a big weekend ahead of mainly live-format competitions this weekend at HorseTourneys. So let’s start off with an exception to the general rule!

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Our NHC direct qualifier last Saturday generated a fair degree of buzz on social media for how the competition concluded.

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It was an active weekend in the tournament world — both onsite and online. HorseTourneys sends hearty congratulations out to Brent Sumja, who won the three-day Orleans Fall Classic this past Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Las Vegas. And also to Ryan Steigmeier, who scored a resounding victory in Sunday’s Keeneland NHC-BCBC Challenge. (We spoke to Ryan earlier today, and you can read more about his terrific win in our separate blog post about the Keeneland tournament.)

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Ryan Steigmeier never really considered himself a serious tournament player. That may be changing, though, following the 38-year-old Title Insurance executive’s win in Sunday’s Keeneland NHC-BCBC Challenge, which earned the North Royalton, Ohio resident a total of $26,370 in cash, an NHC seat and a Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge seat.

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Before we take a look at this weekend’s action, we want to send out special good luck wishes to the 17 HorseTourneys qualfiers who will be competing this weekend at the Keeneland NHC/BCBC Challenge and the 21 HorseTourneys winners who will do battle at the Orleans Fall Classic. Nothing would make us happier than to see HorseTourneys graduates take first place in both events.

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From NTRA Press Release

NHC Q&A: Dan Flanigan

Dan Flanigan of Medina, Minn., bested a field of 51 players to win The BIG One last month at Laurel Park, taking home first-place money of $35,200 on top of his $5,850 bankroll. He also earned spots in the $2.8 million (estimated) Daily Racing Form/NTRA National Handicapping Championship (NHC) presented by Racetrack Television Network and Treasure Island Las Vegas, and the Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge (BCBC).

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It’s not just a great weekend of Breeders’ Cup prep races. Opening Day at Keeneland is Friday and we’re ready for it here at HorseTourneys. We’ll be hosting 24 full-card, Keeneland-only tourneys on Friday (including three guaranteed cash games) with prices ranging from $5-$110 so that you can jump right in to what is always an exciting meet each fall. Here are just a handful of them:

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