Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, I am back from vacation and ready to recap the week’s featured events (at least those that have been made official at press time). 

It’s Breeders’ Cup prep season as Santa Anita gets set to open, and that means plenty of exciting racing action will serve as the backdrop for another vast array of lucrative tourneys this weekend.

Ken Seeman, winner of $74,000 and a Pegasus World Cup seat in the 2021 renewal, will attempt to become the first two-time champ of “The High Expectation Tourney” when he does battle with no more than 56 others (all playing just one entry) in The BIG One this Saturday and Sunday at HorseTourneys.

This Thursday, Canterbury Park (and Xpressbet) host the Canterbury Big 10 BCBC contest. On Saturday and Sunday, we here at HorseTourneys offer The BIG One. There are at least two common denominators in play here.

It’s a “Big” Weekend coming up—in more ways than one.

During an extended holiday week, we hosted 30 featured tourneys and awarded 35 grand prizes across those 30 events. Nevertheless, not a single person garnered top honors more than once. The 35 prizes went to 35 different people.

On the racetrack, Labor Day weekend includes Pacific Classic Day at Del Mar, closing weekend at Saratoga and opening weekend at Kentucky Downs. Those three things, by themselves, should make for a pretty terrific few days of racing action. Here at HorseTourneys (and HorsePlayers too), we’ll try to make things just that much more exciting with a vast assortment of games on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, plus one of our most robust Labor Day slates ever. 

Due to some vacation time last week, the normal “Weekly Recap” will be a “Weekend Recap” this week. To last week’s Wednesday and Thursday featured-tourney winners, we apologize for missing your exploits…but we also say, “Congratulations!”

All the great racing during the month of August seems to bring out the best in some players. One enjoying incredible success of late is Gary Brous.

Exotics specialists will again have their day…or weekend…here at HorseTourneys on  December 3-4. Those are the dates of the second annual Exacta Extravaganza. A $50,000 Guaranteed event, the “EE” requires contestants to make a preset number of three-horse exacta box picks from among 25 or 30 available contest races each day. Likely contest tracks those days include Aqueduct, Gulfstream and Del Mar. Our first qualifier to the Extravaganza is offered this Saturday.

Even though most of last week’s featured tourneys were Pick & Prays, we didn’t see very much domination by any one player. Part of that was because there really weren’t any “Have it or die” bombs”…and also…the competition was just really tough.

That’s not to say that there weren’t some individual stars during the week.