We expected Travers Weekend to be exciting. What we didn’t expect—on a predominantly live-format weekend—was to see multiple winners like we did…or to have the controversial finishes like we had.
As the Saratoga meeting reaches its apex with the Travers (and shockingly with no rain in the upstate New York forecast), HorseTourneys celebrates the Mid-Summer Derby (and the good weather) with a special $50,000 Guaranteed cash tourney on Saturday. That’s one of just many reasons you’ll want to spend part of the last weekend in August right here with us.
Qualifiers begin this week at HorseTourneys for one of the mileposts of every contest year, the Horse Player World Series. The first direct qualifier comes this Saturday, Travers Day. It’s an entry-only qualifier for $90.
Always more steak than sizzle, the Horse Player World Series seems like it goes in and out of fashion more often than skinny ties.
Jeffrey Harryman turned a starting bankroll of $200 into $2,214.50 to win the Laurel Champions Tournament at Laurel Park on Saturday, August 18. Harryman won a $10,000 Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge entry, a cash bonus of $2,790, plus his final bankroll total was his to keep. His total return: cash and prizes worth $15,004.50.
Scores were generally tight during a Pick & Pray weekend that saw many tourneys won with late-contest winners. The first such example of this came in our first featured event of the weekend, Friday’s $5,000 Guaranteed Pick & Pray.
By Najja Thompson, NYRA
On Friday, August 10 and Saturday, August 11, the New York Racing Association hosted the Saratoga Challenge and the Fourstardave Challenge live money handicapping tournaments, offering a total of over $225,000 in cash prizes as well as two qualifying seats to the 2019 Belmont Stakes Challenge and 8 seats to the 2019 National Horseplayers Championships in Las Vegas.
As the summer racing schedule moves on to Alabama-Pacific Classic weekend, HorseTourneys is ready with 14 featured tournaments that—with just one exception—are all Pick & Pray competitions. So if you like the “set-it-and-forget-it” nature of Pick & Prays, this is a great weekend for you.
It was a live-format weekend for the most part at HorseTourneys and HorsePlayers. That often serves as an impediment to players winning multiple tourneys—but not this week.
Live-format tourneys are the order of the day this coming weekend that will see no fewer than 18 featured tourneys contested. With Saratoga and Del Mar in full swing, it should be another exciting—not to mention, lucrative—three days.
Stephen Curtin loves playing tournaments, but between his job as a grocery industry consultant and taking his 12- and 9-year-old boys to baseball and hockey games almost every weekend, the Quincy, Mass., resident really doesn’t have time to travel to onsite handicapping contests. So the 51-year-old largely sticks to cash games at HorseTourneys.
