It’s another busy weekend at HorseTourneys and HorsePlayers as Gulfstream, Aqueduct and Santa Anita serve as the backdrop for a wide array of marquee games offering significant cash prizes and lots of seats to important tournaments held around the country (and in cyberspace). 

As always, weekends around here are considered to begin on Friday.

History repeated itself on Friday—and not just because Raymond Riley won the day’s featured cash tourney for a second consecutive week.

Religious handicappers should have an edge this weekend with the majority of our featured events taking place in Pick & Pray format. (New converts to the prayerful life are always welcome at our house of worship.) By far, the most popular service will take place on Saturday, when there will be five chosen ones in the NHC qualifier at HorsePlayers. Even better, no collection basket will be circulated. That’s one reason the pews will be crowded that day. Of course, our weekend featured-tourney offerings are plentiful enough to accommodate any schedule. They begin on Friday. So without any further ado, let us pray.

Dr. Ronald Tang has a lot going on in his life these days. The 39-year-old South Pasadena, Calif, resident maintains a busy schedule as an oncologist and hematologist. And he and his wife Winnie welcomed their first child, Siena, into the world just four weeks ago. Tang still makes time to play the races, however. In fact, he does so on a pretty darned regular basis.

With the bulk of the Saturday and Sunday featured events run in Live format, multiple winners were in shorter supply this week. We still had a couple of them, however, and as we all know by now, surprisingly good performances can pop up just about anywhere. 

A great example is what Raymond Riley accomplished on Friday.

We challenge you to come up with a word that the handicapping contest world likes more than “challenge”. It seems to be kind of a go-to word when christening a tournament…or contest…and not without some reason, given that putting up a four-figure entry fee is sometimes a challenge in itself. 

There’s a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone called “A Most Unusual Camera” in which three thieves come into possession of a camera that takes and immediately prints out pictures that are five minutes into the future. So where do they go with it? Where else? To the track!

Contest Players have their first opportunity on Sunday to qualify for Memorial Day’s Lone Star Million Betting Challenge—which caps off three consecutive days of NHC qualifiers down in the Dallas Metroplex. (Things should have warmed up down there by then, we hope.) That qualifier is just one of 25 marquee games on tap this weekend. 

Two weekends ago, a preponderance of Pick & Prays prompted a plethora of multiple winners. Still, no one had a day then like Michael “The Coach” Goodrich had this past Saturday.

Presidents Day means four days of featured-tourney weekend action rather than the usual three. Sprinkled into the mix are two new offerings on Saturday and one on Sunday. 

We kick things off, though, on Friday—and, relatively speaking, it’s a pretty loaded schedule.