Our featured-tourney schedule stays largely consistent from week to week, so we tend to begin these previews with what’s special relative to last week or next week. This week, that means we need to focus on the Pegasus World Cup Betting Championship and the NHC.

The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday—along with qualifiers galore for the Pegasus World Cup and Players Championship—made for a long and lucrative week around here. There are 31 featured tourneys to recap…the first two of which took place on Wednesday.

The ink is barely dry on Alan Levitt’s $206,000 Flo-Cal Faceoff winner’s check, but it’s time to look forward to the next leg of the 2021 Tourney Triple—the April 2-3 Players Championship.

Though much of the $570,373 Flo-Cal Faceoff seemed dominated by short prices, there were a couple of cap horses out there during the two-day competition, and Alan Levitt of Baltimore capitalized on both of them—including 29-1 Five Pics Please in the final contest race—to score an improbable, come-from-behind victory worth a total of $206,443.

The Flo-Cal Faceoff is finally upon us.

Already we know that the purse for this year’s event will exceed last year’s—by a lot. In 2020, Thomas Blosser won $87,000 from a final purse of $225,000. As of Thursday afternoon—with over a full day of qualifying plus buy-ins still to go—the pot sits at $338,512. 

Good news. Thanks to your support, HorseTourneys is able — effective immediately — to increase the minimum purse guarantee on four of our most popular weekly featured cash games.

The field for Saturday and Sunday’s Flo-Cal Faceoff now numbers 231 as 17 qualifiers last week added 51 to the roster of participants. That means that the purse for the two-day, Gulfstream and Santa Anita full-card extravaganza now sits at $306,652, and there are still three solid days (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday) of qualifying—and five solid days of buying in—still ahead.

At $238,950, the purse for the January 9-10 Flo-Cal Faceoff has already exceeded the level of the 2020 event ($225,000) when Thomas Blosser won and took home $87,000.The next few days represent the final weekend of qualifying for the Faceoff, and we’ll be offering no fewer than 13 direct qualifiers that figure to drive the pot considerably higher. 

Nine people qualified for the NHC across two tourneys on Saturday and Sunday at HorsePlayers. Among the nine names, one stood out quite prominently.